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Photo/Wild American Shrimp
South Carolina’s fishing industry has suffered a steady decline over the past five years.
By Molly Parker
Haddrell Street in Mount Pleasant, where the smell of fresh seafood fills the nostrils, Wayne Magwood is staring down reality. He can make a decent living shrimping, and selling the day’s catch from the shop he runs, C.A. Magwood & Sons Inc. Fresh Seafood.
But he could make a heck of a lot more if he sold the family’s Shem Creek property. Others in the family pressured him to sell, but Magwood is not ready to let go of the creek from which his family has shrimped for generations, and where he learned to swim as a boy.
Instead, Magwood is investing $1 million into an 80-boat dry stack marina that he will rent for $15 a foot. The fisherman in him detests crowding the creek with more recreational boats; the landowner in him did not see an alternative. The landowner won out.
“I hate it, but I don’t know what else to do,” he said. “I wanted to keep the property. It was either that or condos and I hate condos. This was like the lesser of two evils.”
Fewer than three decades ago, commercial fishing boats were tied up nearly three deep on both sides of Mount Pleasant’s Shem Creek.
Today, there are by far more vehicles parked near the creek than fishing boats within it. Where the commercial fishing industry has suffered a steady decline, the hospitality industry in the form of restaurants and hotels has taken hold as land values around the marsh have skyrocketed.
Neither Magwood nor Shem Creek are alone in battling the sea change that is redefining the state’s traditional working waterfronts.
Amber Von Harten, a fisheries specialist, and April Turner, a coastal communities specialist, both with the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium’s Marine Extension Program in Beaufort, along with Ray Rhodes, a research professor in the Department of Economics and Finance at the College of Charleston, recently spent several months traveling the coastline, speaking with city officials, fishermen, developers and landowners.
They plan to release their research report this fall, but among the findings are:
• In Beaufort County’s Port Royal, one of the state’s largest shrimp docks is in danger of closure. The S.C. State Ports Authority is looking to sell its property after closing the port there about a year ago. The dock sits within that property, and there’s no guarantee the next landowner will keep it operational.
• There are about a dozen snapper and grouper fishermen working from Little River, just north of Myrtle Beach, but the commercial fishing industry is competing for space with two large casino boats that operate from the same waterfront; large chunks of the nearby land have been turned into parking for gamblers. Many of the fishermen working from Little River were displaced from Murrells Inlet.
• Located roughly halfway between Georgetown and Myrtle Beach, the commercial fishing industry in Murrells Inlet suffered the side effects of the town’s popularity. A few boats still tie up there on leased dock space, but most of the supporting infrastructure, such as facilities for ice and fuel, has been replaced by condominiums, homes and restaurants.
• What happened in Murrells Inlet is not unlike what many residents fear will become of Shem Creek. In 2002, the town put together a steering committee to study ways to preserve commercial fishing on the creek, but Mount Pleasant continues to struggle with balancing the rights of developers with the needs of commercial fishermen.
“(Change) is happening so fast that people aren’t realizing it,” Von Harten said. “Pretty soon, they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, where did those shrimp boats go?’ ”
In studying working waterfronts as they pertain to commercial and recreational fishing access, Rhodes and Von Harten aim to ensure local governments, counties and other entities are aware of that change, and are creating plans to keep competing interests in check, Rhodes said.
“We want to ensure that, first, they’re at least picking it up on their radar screen,” he said.
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