The Working Dock

Fuel · Ice · The Day’s Catch

Shem Creek still works for a living. Behind the restaurants and the kayaks, trawlers tie up at weathered pilings with their outriggers folded like wings and nets hung to dry. It smells of salt marsh and diesel. A working dock isn’t pretty — it’s fuel, ice, and a fish house where the catch comes in — and that is exactly the point.

Find the Creek

The Story

Salt, Diesel & the Day’s Catch

Mount Pleasant’s shrimp fishery came to this creek in the 1930s — Captain William Magwood brought the first ocean shrimp into town in 1930, and the Magwood family has worked the water here for more than a century since. At its height, roughly seventy to eighty trawlers crowded these docks. Today fewer than a dozen remain, squeezed by cheap imported shrimp, the cost of fuel and maintenance, and the weight of regulation. But the boats still go out, the nets still come up full, and the creek is still — stubbornly, honestly — a working waterfront.

The Dock

The particulars

Where: Shem Creek, a tidal creek off Charleston Harbor
The fleet: Roughly seventy to eighty boats once; fewer than a dozen now
Before dawn: Fuel and ice loaded for a long day on the water
The catch: Brown shrimp in summer, prized white shrimp in fall
Where they fish: Mostly within three or four miles of the beach
Sold: Headed, weighed, and sold fresh at the fish house

What it takes

Fuel, Ice & a Fish House

A working dock runs on the unglamorous essentials. Before the sun is up, the boats take on fuel and ice — the same ice the creek once made by the ton at Moultrie Fisheries, hauled in blocks and crushed on site, later by machine. When a vendor closed and that ice went away, the loss was real enough that the Town of Mount Pleasant stepped in. In 2019 it bought the old Wando shrimp dock and its processing house for more than four million dollars, keeping the fish house open and the ice flowing so the working fleet would have somewhere to land. That is what it takes to keep a dock alive.

The ice

100 tons a day

What Moultrie Fisheries once made to keep the fleet’s catch cold.

The market

~90% imported

The USDA’s estimate of the shrimp Americans eat — the rest is the fight.

The dock

Bought, 2019

Mount Pleasant paid over $4M for the Wando dock to keep the waterfront working.