February 21, 2025 — Capt. John Mallette grew up fishing, but didn’t come from a fishing family.
Born and reared around Sneads Ferry and the Topsail area, he said his mother worked in real estate in Wilmington and his father was one of Ocean City’s original developers and bought a home there in 1950.
Ocean City was established on Topsail Island in 1949 and was “the first place where Black people could have oceanfront property” in the state, Mallette recently told Coastal Review.
The motel had a pier, and “I pretty much lived on the pier fishing as a little kid,” he continued.
“There was a lady who had One Stop Bait & Tackle in Surf City — Betty Warren, she’s long passed away now — but she would babysit me, basically, and I would sit there and help sell seafood and head shrimp and filet flounder. And then her husband, Preston, would take me out shrimping in the waterway with him, and that’s how I got started commercial fishing and just never stopped. I just grew into it, and started running boats.”
From there, he became a captain and spent several years piloting various commercial, private and charter vessels in Central and South America, Australia and Hawaii. While a fishing guide on a private island near Turks and Caicos, he learned his mother was ill and returned to the U.S. in 2008 to take care of her.
These days he co-owns Southern Breeze Seafood Co. on U.S. Highway 258 between Richlands and Jacksonville. He delivers fresh seafood all over the state, including to a handful of universities such as Elon and North Carolina Central.