Salty Dogs

Written by John H. Tibbetts
Photography by Donna Huffman

ould you notice if South Carolina’s commercial fishermen disappeared?

Junior Magwood, known among local shrimpers for his feistiness and pungent vocabulary, is retired now, slowed by diabetes and dialysis treatments. But at 72, he still mends nets in a shed behind Magwood Seafood Company on Mt. Pleasant’s Shem Creek, remembering the early 1940s when his cousin owned the only shrimping vessel in that area.

Called “Cap’n” by his friends, Magwood has witnessed extraordinary changes in South Carolina’s fishing industry. When he started apprenticing on his cousin’s boat at age 14, he worked brutal hours and relied on remarkably primitive equipment. In good weather, he left the Shem Creek dock with two other crewmen on a converted freight boat in search of shrimp, dragging the sea bottom with nets that they hauled up without benefit of winches, using just block and tackle—and brute strength. Weighing 120 pounds then, he got injured, severely pulling muscles, until he learned how to lift the nets properly. “You couldn’t do but three drags a day because by then you were wore out. The nets were heavy with water and jellyfish.

Storms battered the ship as the crew struggled with the catch. “When a squall’s coming, you have to get the net up, but the squall hits you, and you can’t see what you’re doing or where you’re going. A lot of times we’d just drift until the squall was over, half-leaning overboard, trying to get the net up.”

At the dock, “you had to ‘head’ all the shrimp,” says Magwood, “and the shrimp acid would get into the quicks of your fingers, down in there, and fester up. Your hands were rubbed raw.” Then it was time to fix the nets, torn by old anchors and sunken boats along the bottom. “You had to patch them the best you knew how.”

His friend Frank Burns, 82, who first went shrimping in 1930 on his father’s boat around Daufuskie Island, remembers how “we started with just a cast net, dragging just a little piece of webbing behind us.”

From such scrappy beginnings, shrimping became a mainstay of the state’s commercial fishing industry. Magwood and Burns are among the last of the men who built up South Carolina’s commercial seafood industry after World War II. Today, it’s a sophisticated high-tech enterprise. Shrimpers hunt down their prey with depth recorders and global positioning systems, dragging large nylon nets across the sea bottom and pulling in catches with hydraulic winches.

Today, many fishermen run diversified businesses, harvesting two and even three kinds of seafood. From October to April, they might pick oysters and clams. From early summer to Christmas, they can trawl for shrimp. And they can work crab traps year-round.

But even the savviest, most diversified fishermen worry about staying afloat, enduring rising fuel prices, tougher environmental regulations, closures of polluted harvesting grounds, public concern about trawling’s effects on sea bottoms and turtles, and massive seafood imports. Under this flurry of pressures, small-scale fishermen could get squeezed out, forced down the path of modern crop farmers. With ever-growing demands for productivity, crop farmers pay for giant combines and tractors and intricate computer programs that analyze which crops to plant and when to apply fertilizer and pesticides. Only the most efficient farmers with the best tools and financing can survive. The same idea goes for fishermen.

In 1980, the average shrimp boat was about 50 feet long, according to Anthony Lettich, 69, who started fishing in Beaufort County in 1947 and owned his first boat in 1953. Today’s average boat, he says, is 65 feet long, and there are growing numbers of 70 to 80 foot steel-hulled boats, which can pull faster, work in rougher waters, and catch more shrimp that can be held in on-board freezers. Many of the larger boats belong to fishermen who live outside of South Carolina and come here for the season, then return home. Over the next decade, there will be fewer local shrimpers, driven out by consolidation, Lettich says. “The day of the small boat is almost over.”

In dozens of coastal towns, glossy condos and restaurants have replaced the weathered waterfronts where fishermen bought fuel and ice, received dealer credit, and sold their catches—essential elements of the commercial fishing infrastructure. “Boats are losing places to go because of development,” says Rutledge Leland, who has run Carolina Seafood in McClellanville since 1971.

Leland’s waterfront property must seem an unpolished diamond to developers. As the metro area sprawls up the coast and McClellanville gets further drawn into its commuting orbit, developers will seek to build along the village’s creeks. Eventually, Leland suggests, someone will make him an offer he can’t refuse. He’s been packing and selling seafood for 30 years, and “it’s hard work,” he says, “with tough hours and inconsistent income.” As men who own dock facilities grow old and retire, “there’s no sign of young blood coming into the business. The next generation, are they going to want to pack seafood? I doubt it. The facility situation is extremely fragile.”

Today, the value of South Carolina’s commercial fishing industry is small, bringing in about $30 million a year, compared to that of the coastal retirement and tourism juggernaut at about $9 billion a year. Although commercial fishermen still wield considerable political clout, they claim that they are steadily losing out to recreational fishing interests and developers. In Beaufort County, the signs are unmistakable, says Charles Gay, who co-owns a waterfront dock where numerous fishermen tie their boats. “It’s hard to say how much longer shrimping will last. It’s fading away.”

But David Smith, seafood specialist with Clemson University, argues that it’s too early to mourn the decline of the coast’s fishing fleet. “Shrimpers and crabbers will say, ‘I love what I’m doing, but I don’t know if I’ll make it another year.’ When they have a good season, they do all right. The people who are doing it now, they find a way to keep going.”

Today, after a South Carolina fishermen carries his catch to dock, a local packer sells it to a national distributor who, in turn, sells it frozen to grocery stores and restaurants. Virtually all shrimp consumed in the United States get funneled through giant distributing companies that handle both wild-harvested and farm-raised crustaceans from around the world.

Taking a breather from the late July heat in his air-conditioned boat cabin, Jimmy Scott rubs his thick red-gray beard and recalls when prices for shrimp plummeted. After building his 68-foot ship Mary Margaret in 1973, he made good money trawling from his base for about a decade, but then imports from South America and Asia drove down prices. “It was about the mid-eighties,” he says, “when it got harder and harder to make a profit from shrimping.”

Only about 20 to 30 percent of shrimp eaten by Americans are caught or raised in United States; the rest are farm-raised overseas. So when you eat those pink morsels in a local restaurant, they’re likelier to hail from South American or Asian wild harvests and farms than harvested from the waters off the South Carolina coast. “The domestic market doesn’t really need us anymore,” says Scott. “It can be supplied by farm-raised imports.”

WHAT’S THE FUTURE?

Over the next few decades, there will be fewer seafood harvesters around the world, experts say. Fishermen will retire and younger people will be reluctant to take up the trade. But, of course, a piece of South Carolina culture would be lost. As global economy brings greater prosperity, it also shatters traditions. Today’s seafood industry is a link to artisanal fishermen who rowed and sailed into the estuaries and coastal ocean with rough hooks and nets. Fishermen represent the continuity between generations, parents teaching their children, passing down crafts and skills. Junior Magwood learned his trade from his cousin. Other fishermen learned from fathers and uncles. Some seafood businesses are still family-run, with brothers and sisters working side by side for decades.

Coastal Heritage is a quarterly publication of the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium—a university-based network supporting research, education, and outreach to conserve coastal resources and enhance economic opportunity for the people of South Carolina.