August 31, 2016 — JUST BEFORE sunrise in one of the last fishing villages on the Outer Banks, a widow stands at her back window and watches the lights from crab boats head into the bay, one by one. By this hour, she figures, her daughter must be about 150 miles west of here, on her way to Raleigh and Charlotte and Asheville with a load of cobia and Spanish mackerel and soft-shell crabs. Less than a mile away from the widow’s house— or, put another way, clear across the island—a woman wearing a mudstained Endurance Seafood T-shirt dives her hands into her family’s decades-old live boxes to see if any crabs shed their shells overnight. Nearby, her 82-year-old father pulls on his fluorescent yellow slicker.
When you step into the morning darkness on Colington Island, you can’t fake being from here or not from here. It’s evident in your accent, your look, your last name. On this Friday morning in May, in the middle of soft-shell crab season in the soft-shell crab capital of North Carolina, an outsider opens the door to his Chevy Suburban and slips into the leather seats. It’s 5:51 a.m., but the promise of a good day for his business hits him as he turns the key.
“Ah, yeah,” he says, “there’s that familiar smell.”
Two and a half years ago, Sean Schussler quit a six-figure job as vice president of sales for a printing company to start a seafood market. Catch On Seafood is a small shop in Plaza Midwood, a trendy Charlotte neighborhood where people drive eco-friendly cars with bumper stickers that read “Eat Local.”