Shrimp fishing in S.C. | A way of living changes forever

GEORGETOWN -- Little more than a generation ago, miles of Lowcountry beaches were virtually untrampled and miles of the coast were forests and marshes. It looked just about like it did a century before.

When the S.C. Wildlife Department began air patrols in the 1960s, its officers would fly over miles and miles of maritime forest, isolated islands and beaches south of the Grand Strand.

It sounds surreal to anyone nowadays who battles traffic to get to Myrtle Beach.

A bit farther to the north, Joe Brooks began a life on the sea pulling an oar aboard a fish-netting boat with his dad on Sunset Beach, just over the North Carolina border, and hauling in more fish than they could carry.

The Georgetown resident, now in his early 70s, opened this spring's shrimp season by putting his boat up for sale.

He advertised it not as a shrimp boat, but as a fixer-upper house boat.

Why? Because he wanted it to sell, and few small-time shrimpers are left to buy it.

"Just put you up a nice house on it," he said with a tight seller's smile, patting the cabin of the worn old boat.

For generations upon generations in the Lowcountry, the coastal ocean remained the last wilderness.

People made lives and their living taking that adventure.

In the 1990s, the wilderness began to disappear, big time, as more vacation and primary homes, professional and private fishing boats and pleasure craft moved in.

Now, we are reaching the limits of what the South Atlantic Bight - the coastal ocean between Cape Hatteras and Florida - will yield.

And businesses, government and conservation interests have begun to stake out boundaries.

We have begun managing the sea just as we are managing the land.

Brooks will tell you that everything about his way of life has changed.

Spot the ripples

The laughing gulls are above as Brooks walks to his shrimper, the Miss Adrian Dawn. Five shrimp boats are moored at the half-empty dock and at the dock down the waterway in Georgetown.

As recently as a decade ago, boats tied up three abreast all along it.

Brooks wears reflective aviator sunglasses and sports a sea captain scruff of a beard. The boat looks worn down, rusted and ratty.

An old pair of sneakers with the laces still tied lie on the deck alongside a folded-up chair. The door to the cabin is nailed shut because he has been robbed of a generator and rooftop electronics.

At nine-years old, Brooks started pulling a midship oar, dragging as much as 1,200 yards of prized Holstein fishing nets beyond the surf off Sunset Beach. Lookouts on the beach would spot the ripples in the water of runs of fish and yell; Brooks would row.

Some days the boat pulled in so many mullet and spots that they couldn't get them all the way up on shore.

The only way to move gear and fish back and forth to the island was by boat, and on those big netting days when they would haul in more fish than they could carry or sell, they would bury the leftovers in holes in the sand.

His family owned Sunset Beach. They sold it for $52,000 after 1954's Hurricane Hazel left them homeless with little more than the clothes on their backs.

Today, Sunset Beach is a well-heeled vacation destination just across the N.C. state line.

Worked his way back

Brooks has always fished and always tried to make a living from it.

He worked for awhile dredging up and down the coasts of both states. He sold flounder. He ran sturgeon roe to New York, picked up clams on Long Island, 500 gallons of oysters per day in season to shucking pants in Brunswick County.

But he always worked his way back to the water. As recently as 2000, shrimp and fishing boats were tying up in Georgetown from up north and down in Florida, and he was back in.

"They were kind of like the trucking business," he said. "Fuel was cheap enough you could go out and hunt the shrimp."

From another shrimper he bought Miss Adrian Dawn, a 1955 classic, smaller-than-average boat then but comfortable enough to work single-handedly.

He used to be able to "scrap," drag nets for awhile, and if he didn't pull in a catch, just lift the lines and try somewhere else.

Now it costs too much fuel to go.

And imported seafood eats away at the profits.

The price for wild shrimp has plummeted with competition pressure from foreign farmed shrimp. Last year, Brooks said, shrimpers at his dock were getting $1.50-$2 per pound.

This spring is when he put the boat up for sale.

Roped off

The Southeast coast has seen a staggering 58 percent increase in population since 1980. And the fish-rich Gulf Stream has seen an influx of commercial and recreational anglers using an array of gear, global positioning devices, side-scanning sonar and other digital technology that is growing more sophisticated.

More than 100,000 offshore boats are licensed in South Carolina, and commercial boats routinely move from state to state offshore.

Fish and shellfish are being raked from the sea at a rate that has regulators closing down fisheries.

Swaths of the ocean are being roped off by interests as varied as oil drilling and aquaculture, and travelled by everything from container ships to U.S. Navy destroyers and submarines on training maneuvers.

"We've begun managing ocean uses the way we have been managing the coastline," said Rick DeVoe, South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium director.

"It needs massive special planning."