January 11, 2021 — Since July, a four-man crew of local commercial fisherman has switched their catch, resetting their lines on a different kind of haul: marine debris.
Unlike their lifelong trade of harvesting shellfish, the crew has found stocks of marine debris are plentiful. After walking nearly all the marshes from Sneads Ferry to Zeke’s Island, the men have encountered a seemingly endless yield of abandoned marine and construction debris.
Each storm and tide cycle churns up new debris for the crew to collect. With a 24-foot Carolina Skiff and a few homemade sleds assembled for clamming, the men trek through soupy shorelines, hauling about one ton of debris a day out of the waterway.
“We all grew up on the river — all of us did. But from the very first day we started this project, we had no idea the amount of debris out there,” crew supervisor Joe Huie said.
Tapped by the North Carolina Coastal Federation to help carry out a yearlong $2.4 million federal abandoned vessel and marine debris-removal program, the team is happy to have found steady work and put their skills to use. On their first day working the contract, the crew hoped they’d be able to find enough material to satisfy the program. Instead, they’ve found a theoretically neverending job (so long as the contract keeps getting renewed).
“After the first day, I said, ‘We could do this forever.’ I’m not even joking. We all looked at each other and said, ‘We could do this forever.’ Because that’s just how much it was,” Huie said. “We found so much debris we didn’t know if we could do the job. We were just physically exhausted at the end of the day. The first summer we did the contract I lost 27 pounds. It was brutal. It was a hot summer.”