The Fleet

Buoys, Nets & Trawlers · Shem Creek, Mt. Pleasant

You can read the creek by its silhouette. Tall outriggers folded up like wings at the dock, a tangle of hung nets, and a wall of salt-bleached floats stacked in jumbled color — orange, faded red, green gone chalky in the sun. These are the shrimp boats of Shem Creek, and the gear on their decks has worked this water, hand to hand, since 1930.

Find the Creek

The Story

A Wall of Color, Hung to Dry

The colorful jumble on a shrimp boat’s deck isn’t decoration, and it isn’t the red-and-green channel markers out in the creek. It is the working tackle of an otter trawl — net floats, corks, and buoys that ride along the top of the net to hold its mouth open and shaped as the boat tows it across the bottom. Paint fades, salt bleaches, and floats get swapped out a few at a time, so what piles up on the decks and along the docks reads like a quilt of every season the boat has worked. Tall outriggers fold up like wings in port and swing down at sea so a single trawler can pull a net off each side at once. Pelicans and dolphins learn the schedule and shadow the boats for the bycatch tossed overboard. Over it all hangs the creek’s own perfume — pluff mud, diesel, and the clean smell of fresh shrimp.

The Gear

The particulars

The boats: Wooden-and-steel trawlers, 17 to 85 feet
The wings: Outriggers — booms that swing down to drag the nets
The doors: Otter boards that spread the net's mouth open
The color: Net floats, corks & buoys that shape and lift the trawl
The grid: TEDs — turtle excluder devices, required by federal law
Where they fish: The ocean, mostly within three or four miles of the beach

What it carries

A Vanishing Silhouette

At its heyday, around seventy trawlers worked off these docks. By 2011 the harbor was down to about ten, and only a handful still call Shem Creek their home port today — the count rises and falls with the season and the price of fuel. So every boat still hung with nets carries more than its catch; it carries a way of life that the Magwood family alone has worked here for more than a century. Each spring the community answers the only way that fits: the boats dress up and parade under the Ravenel Bridge for the Blessing of the Fleet, a ceremony of thanks for a fleet that is still here — for now.

At its heyday

~70 boats

Trawlers working off the Shem Creek docks; about ten remained by 2011.

The seasons

Roe · Brown · White

Three trawling seasons, roughly May into December, set each year by SCDNR.

Every spring

Blessing of the Fleet

Begun in 1988; the boats parade under the Ravenel Bridge for a blessing.