RALEIGH, N.C. — All was still on the New River near the Davis Seafood fish house. But when 83-year-old William “Buddy” Davis walked out of his home and pulled on tall rubber boots, it signaled the work was about to begin.

Not far from tourist-filled beaches of Topsail Island, the Davis family began preparing for the homecoming of the 58-foot Capt. Davis and more than 10,000 pounds of shrimp it harvested from the South and Neuse rivers.

Jody Davis, co-owner of the Sneads Ferry fish house, hosed down the concrete floor and filled a metal vat with water. Using a skid-steer loader, he scooped buckets of ice into large bins.

Soon Capt. Billy Davis, one of Jody’s older brothers, was docking his boat between two others with the help of his crew — both kin.

Then the unloading began. Tons of brown shrimp were washed, counted, weighed and packed with ice into boxes ready to be sold or shipped. Everyone, including Jody’s father-in-law, who’s allergic to shrimp, pitched in.

As the packing continued, Billy Davis stepped ashore to get a closer look.

“I love shrimping,” he said. “It gives me that competitive thing that I need, where sports used to give it to me. Now I try to catch as many shrimp as I can.”

But how long he can continue is not clear. Families like his are fighting to preserve a job — and a way of life — that has supported them and their ancestors for generations.

Some challenges have been around for years. Recreational fishing advocates and conservationists accuse shrimpers of killing fish and damaging coastal habitats. Required to protect fisheries, state regulators limit where, when and how they can trawl.

Often cheaper shrimp imported from Ecuador, Indonesia and Vietnam have flooded the U.S. market, making it harder for North Carolina shrimpers to sell their catches for a decent price.

In a surprise move last month, state legislators almost banned shrimpers from trawling state waters including the Pamlico Sound and the Neuse River.

Members of the Davis family were among those who rushed to Raleigh to help defeat the ban. For now, they are back shrimping.

“It’s just not what it used to be, but it’s really the only thing we know,” Jody Davis said. “So we’re going to do it as long as we can.”

The shrimpers of Sneads Ferry

When Jody Davis said fishing is “all we’ve ever done,” he wasn’t exaggerating.

Hundreds of years ago, his Welsh ancestors settled in Carteret County, sustaining themselves by fishing and farming. They remained in an area later named Davis until the early 1800s. At that point, some of the family set sail to find where they would have more fishing success .

They found it in Onslow County, where they’ve been ever since.

Jody Davis’ grandfather in 1949 purchased land on the banks of the New River in Sneads Ferry, a town where an annual shrimp festival has run for 53 years.

While the fish house has changed, it’s still run by the Davis family — namely Jody, his wife, Vickie, and their daughter, Hannah. Their son, Daniel, has his own boat.

Just down the road is another local institution, B.F. Millis & Sons Seafood. Ben Millis started the company in the 1940s. His son Tim Millis took over in the 1960s.

Now in his early 90s, Tim still shows up to the office. When B.F. Millis and Davis Seafood have too much shrimp to sell locally, he arranges transportation to a processor, which peels and deveins shrimp before selling it to restaurants and markets.

His daughter, Nancy Edens, oversees the business. She completes trip tickets that document details about each fishing outing for the Division of Marine Fisheries, and lets customers know when to pick up seafood orders from the retail room near their dock.

Commercial fishing supports Edens’ sons and her brother. She also married a commercial fisherman, who has fished in waters from Virginia to Alabama.

“I wouldn’t take anything for it. No matter where you go, the commercial fishing family is a family,” Edens said.

Struggles, hope and attack

Despite the long history of commercial fishing along this state’s coast, the industry is smaller than it once was. It doesn’t have the political clout of bigger-dollar economic sectors.

There were fewer than 300 full-time commercial shrimpers in North Carolina in 2023, according to a 2024 report from the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries. That’s down from 517 in 2016.

Early this year, things looked brighter for shrimpers. Some made headlines in April because they welcomed President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported shrimp, which they said would make prices of their wild-caught shrimp more competitive.

But two months later, on June 16, the news turned dark. Republican state Sen. Bobby Hanig, who represents 10 coastal counties, alerted his Facebook followers to an amendment to House Bill 442.

Passed in the House months earlier with bipartisan support, the bill was titled “An Act to Restore Recreational Fishing for Summer Flounder and Red Snapper in North Carolina through the Creation of a Four-Year Pilot Program.” It did not mention shrimping.

The amendment, however — introduced by Sen. David Craven, a Republican from inland Randolph County — would ban trawling in waters including sounds, rivers and in the Atlantic Ocean within a half-mile of the coast.

Making those areas off limits would result in a 75% decrease in the annual shrimp harvest, according to Thomas Newman, a full-time fisherman who works with the North Carolina Fisheries Association, which represents commercial fishermen.

“This is an industry killer,” said Glenn Skinner, a commercial fisherman from Carteret County and executive director of the North Carolina Fisheries Association.

The North Carolina Wildlife Federation — which represents conservationists, wildlife enthusiasts, hunters and anglers — and the Coastal Conservation Association North Carolina, which represents recreational fishermen and conservationists, supported the ban.

Both have a history of pushing for restrictions on trawling, which they say kills too many fish and turtles, bycatch caught in trawling nets. They also say shrimpers’ equipment damages the bottom of rivers and sounds, which shrimpers dispute.

A day after Hanig sounded his Facebook alert, shrimpers and commercial fishermen raced to Raleigh to oppose the ban, but senators from both parties approved it with overwhelming support.

The bill was sent back to the House, giving commercial fishermen a chance to organize.

On June 24, tractor-trailers plastered with “no trawl ban” signs cruised around downtown Raleigh for hours. Hundreds of commercial fishermen and their families, many wearing matching white T-shirts and carrying posters amplifying their message, gathered on the sidewalks of Jones Street and inside the Legislative Building, handing out fresh shrimp and informational fliers.

The next day, House Republicans announced they would not take up the bill, and the mood shifted. Commercial fishermen briefly celebrated together in Raleigh, returned home and got back to work.

NC shrimpers have economic links to many

There are fewer fish houses and boats in Sneads Ferry than there used to be, Jody Davis said. Some fishermen have died, others have aged out. Younger members of some commercial fishing families have chosen other work.

At the same time, tourism keeps growing at the coast, and helicopters from Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune provide a constant reminder of military life.

Still, commercial fishermen whose families have carried on for generations continue to play a meaningful economic role, Davis said.

If the trawling ban had passed, more than they would have felt the blow.

When the ban was proposed, Ryan Speckman, a co-founder of Locals Seafood, said he called everyone he knows in the seafood industry. They were terrified, he said.

“The heart and the backbone would be blue crab and the shrimp industry,” Speckman said of this state’s local seafood industry. “If you rip those out, it’s done.”

Many North Carolina shrimpers don’t have boats large enough to fish in ocean waters a half-mile beyond the coast, which would have been permitted, Speckman said. So vendors that provide supplies required for shrimping, including nets, boats and fuel, would have likely had losses.

Fish houses such as Davis Seafood, B.F. Millis & Sons Seafood and Beaufort Inlet Seafood, which buy catch from the boats, would have had less shrimp to sell to wholesalers, processors, markets and restaurants.

Washington Crab, based in Beaufort County, has been around since the 1970s. It sells and ships seafood, including blue crab, shrimp, oysters and many types of fish in and out of state.

Not all of its seafood is harvested in North Carolina waters, said owner Jason Hall, but some is. And the close to 60 people it employs invest their wages back into North Carolina communities.

“It becomes kind of a closed loop, and it builds the wealth of our state, instead of sending our wealth out of state,” said Hall, who also sits on the board of NC Catch, which promotes North Carolina seafood.

Transportation companies could have been hit too, if fewer shrimp were harvested.

Sometimes, a boat’s catch is too big for a fish house’s trucks to transport, so tractor-trailers are hired. That was the case on July 16 in Sneads Ferry, where the Davis and Millis families hired an 18-wheeler to ship shrimp to a processing plant in Alabama.

People who like to belly up to plates of fried shrimp at Calabash restaurants or take home a couple of pounds of fresh shrimp from one of Locals Seafood’s Triangle markets would have lost out as well, Speckman said.

Shrimp is the only North Carolina seafood the company sells year-round, and most of it is from the Pamlico Sound.

“Everybody likes shrimp,” Speckman said. “That’s the one thing everybody’s familiar with. They know how to cook it. They know how to peel it.”

Will shrimping survive?

On a sunny Thursday in July, second-generation shrimper Thomas Smith docked his 50-foot Della John at Beaufort Inlet Seafood, a fish house in Carteret County. It was filled with 3,100 pounds of brown and greentail shrimp, harvested from the Neuse River.

Among the crew was his 12-year-old son, Cameron. He had been on boats since before he could walk, but this was his first time helping during a multi-day trawling trip, his mother said.

The Della John crew caught too much shrimp to sell at the Smith family’s Miss Gina’s Fresh Shrimp roadside stand off Highway 70, so they sold their harvest to Beaufort Inlet Seafood.

As fish house workers packed their catch into cardboard boxes designed to hold ice and fresh seafood, Cameron climbed atop the cabin, sat in his throne — a portable lawn chair — and sipped a red Gatorade as he watched a ritual with an uncertain future.

Just weeks earlier, his parents, who own Miss Gina’s Fresh Shrimp, drove to Raleigh to tell state lawmakers that banning trawling in waters including the Pamlico and Core sounds would have greatly harmed the livelihoods of hundreds of coastal families.

But no one involved assumes that more threats, even fatal threats, aren’t in their future.

Last month, the North Carolina Collaboratory released a long-awaited study that, while silent on trawling, says the state’s fisheries and habitats are “under pressure from fishing, coastal and inland development, climate variability, and other human activities.”

That report was just a summary; researchers’ approximately 400-page Policy Implementation Report, with data analysis and policy evaluation, is expected later this year.

“We have a wonderful boat. We have this wonderful business,” said Cameron’s mother, Monica Smith. “Is there even going to be a shrimping industry when my 12-year-old turns 18 or 20, or gets out of college? I don’t know. I really don’t.”

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