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Those who study the industry say it has always been cyclical. Fish houses closed when times were hard and reopened in better times. Fishermen docked their boats one year and tried again the next.

This time, there may be nothing to come back to.

"You see a brochure for North Carolina, you see a trawler on it," said Tilman Gray, who owns two fish houses on the Outer Banks. "You don't see a picture of condos cluttering everything thing up. Once we lose this, we've lost our identity."

Less than $60

By 1:30, the sun is blazing, and Bruno's perpetual sunburn has deepened a shade. He is sweaty and muddy and, after shaking out the skittering contents of 300 crab pots, he has collected fewer than four boxes of crabs. He knows before he pulls up to the dock at Carroll Voliva's fish house, where he will sell his crabs for distribution all over the country, that he will will probably net less than $60 for his day's work.

"This is not good," he mutters to himself. "Not good at all."

Bruno can list half a dozen fishermen who have gotten out recently, for jobs in construction, dock-building or deep-sea fishing up north, where there is money to be made for those willing to stay at sea for months at a time.

The fish house is practically deserted when he arrives. Voliva's workers often stand around all day, hornets buzzing in the still summer air, waiting for five or six fishermen to deliver their catch.

The building, which went up in the 1960s at the edge of what locals call Camp Creek, just outside Oriental's town limits, is constructed from a mishmash of rusting metal, cinder block and plywood, its pale blue paint wearing away. Gill nets and crab pots lie in haphazard piles. From the small dock, the view is mostly forested shoreline and a few modest homes.

For Voliva, 57, this is what North Carolina's inland waterfront has always looked like. It was a place where ordinary people lived and worked.

Voliva, like most in the commercial fishing business, bemoans the industry's problems: cheap imports, high fuel costs, declining catches. But the fish business is all he has known. He bought a crabbing boat at 13 and has been hauling fish across the dock virtually ever since.

Despite his complaints, he still makes a good living in this old building. Even so, his fish houses -- he has a second a few miles down the road in Vandemere -- are on borrowed time.

Tom Caroon, who owns the Oriental property where Voliva operates in a leased building, says he will sell as soon as he gets a good offer from the developers who come calling monthly.

And Voliva already has had a handful of offers on the 1 1/2-acre plot he owns in Vandemere, the last for $800,000. Developers come measuring elevations and water depth, checking how many condos could fit on the tracts. Within the next few years, Voliva expects to sell the Vandemere fish house for at least $1.5 million.

It is the land where he grew up, the land he once thought was a worthless mud flat. Even a decade ago, he would have been happy to get $50,000 for it.

The natives of North Carolina's inner coast, Voliva says, are people who know manual labor. People who ate the seafood they caught because in many cases they were too poor to buy anything else.

Voliva says he can't imagine anyone who wouldn't sell for the kind of money people are talking about these days.

"It's time for me to cash in," Voliva said. "This is the fruits of my labor. I'll pay off everything, everybody and, hopefully, live happily ever after."

Development's costs

It's hard to quantify what the surge of development will mean for the economies of old fishing villages.

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