"I normally would have been shrimping for a month, but I can't catch enough to pay for the fuel," Daniels, owner of William Smith Seafood in Beaufort, said last week. "I haven't gone at all."

The soaring prices are crimping North Carolina's $82 million commercial fishing industry. Unlike recreational fishing captains, who can pass on a fuel surcharge to clients, many commercial fishermen are being squeezed by low dockside prices for catches and mounting fuel bills.

As of Tuesday, the statewide average price of a gallon of diesel was $4.73, according to AAA. That's up from $2.87 a year ago. Gasoline was selling for an average of $4.01 a gallon statewide, up from $2.88 a year ago.

Fishermen are getting more for some catches, but most prices haven't kept pace with the spiraling cost of fuel. Because of imports, rates for the state's biggest catches, crabs and shrimp, have been held down. Many shrimpers, crabbers and gill netters are staying ashore. They'll go out when it's prime season for a particular species -- mid-July for shrimp, for example -- but exploratory runs are out.

Some are hanging up their oilies for good.

"From Florida to Maine, I'm hearing 20 to 40 percent of the boats are tied to the dock every day," said Sean McKeon, president of the N.C. Fisheries Association. "Nobody can go out and look for fish right now; it's having an enormous impact on us."

McKeon estimated fuel costs have increased commercial fishermen's costs by 10 percent. Trucking costs for getting the catch to market also have soared, raising seafood prices in restaurants and retail fish markets. Retail prices likely will go higher, but nobody knows when the increases will make it worth leaving the dock.

George Earp, a partner in Earp's Seafood Market in Raleigh, said prices for most fish are up 30 percent to 40 percent from the beginning of the year.

"All fish has gone up -- flounder, croaker, trout -- it had to," Earp said. "But it hasn't gone up enough to offset their fuel costs."

Some retail increases weren't related to fuel prices. Whiting filets have gone up 60 percent in five months because the fish is imported from Argentina and the dollar has fallen on currency exchanges, he said. But as more N.C. boats stay docked, there's less supply -- which pushes retail prices even higher.

Jay Howard Robinson, owner of Beacon One Seafood in Varnamtown on the southern North Carolina coast, estimated 40 or 50 trawlers in the Oak Island area that normally would be shrimping are at the dock.

"Just about everybody is tied up," Robinson said. "I've never seen it this bad."

On the northern coast in Wanchese, Mikey Daniels isn't sending two 90-foot trawlers to Massachusetts to fish for cod, haddock and black bass off the Georges Bank.

"It would take 1,500 gallons of diesel to get there," said Daniels, owner of Wanchese Fish Co. "For $15,000 [in fuel costs] you've got to catch a lot of fish."

Sneads Ferry waterman Larry Bolton sold his 50-foot steel shrimping trawler, the Miss Joanie, last year to avoid more expensive fill-ups.

"I lost $40,000 just to get rid of it," said the fisherman, adding that captains of five nearby shrimp boats aren't leaving the dock because they can't afford fuel.

The vanishing crabber

Bolton still fishes for crabs and runs a wholesale operation that buys softshell and hard crabs from other fishermen. A year ago, nine crabbers supplied Bolton. Now, it's down to one.

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