ORIENTAL - The rising sun is just tinting the clouds pink when Keith Bruno boards his 19-foot crabbing skiff and motors into the deserted Neuse River.

He is barely away from the dock when he passes the cleared land for a new community of estate homes. A little farther along, a new marina has crowded out his crab pots. On the opposite bank, red surveyor's tape is waving in the trees.

Bruno can't help wondering how much longer there will be a place on this river for fishermen in rubber boots and dirty T-shirts, pulling a meager living from muddy water.

"Where it used to be fishermen," Bruno says, "now it's condos."

The development boom transforming North Carolina's inland coast is dismantling the state's seafood industry, which already was collapsing under falling prices, rising fuel costs and shrinking catches. More than 34,000 homes and thousands of private boat slips are planned along the sounds, rivers and estuaries in areas once prized more for their bounty of shrimp, crabs, oysters and flounder than their waterfront views.

Run-down fish houses, which buy seafood straight off the boats and sell it to wholesalers all over the country, are making way for condos that sell for a half-million dollars and up. The workman's docks where fishermen tie up are being replaced by private marinas where pleasure boaters sometimes pay $100,000 for a permanent slip.

In some areas, pollution from development is forcing the state to close creeks to shellfishing. Yields have suffered after years of overfishing. Fishermen are getting out.

In the past five years, the number of commercial fishing licenses in the state has dropped by a quarter, to about 3,900. Commercial fishermen caught just more than 79 million pounds of seafood last year, the lowest catch on record and less than half what fishermen caught a decade ago.

No one keeps track of the number of fish houses in the state, but an informal poll of current owners yielded a list of more than a dozen that have closed in recent years. Many owners who remain say they are simply waiting on a pricey enough offer.

Some are calling it a crisis that could mean the end of North Carolina's fishing business -- and an end to local seafood.

"The public is losing access to the fish," said Barbara Garrity-Blake, an anthropologist and member of the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission. "There's no way they're going to get North Carolina shrimp or crabs or tuna if the commercial fishermen aren't out there."

In the fishing industry, some say the development boom is economic salvation for an industry that is doomed anyway.

Low-priced imports -- from Mexico, Venezuela, China, India and other countries where labor is cheap -- had grabbed 80 percent of the nation's seafood market by 2004, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports. The imports drive down the prices that many American fishermen get for their catch.

Shrimp, until recently a mainstay of the North Carolina seafood industry, now sell so cheaply that many have stopped catching them. Shrimp in restaurants and grocery stores, even at the coast, come largely from Ecuador, Pakistan, Peru and a host of other countries.

Crab processing facilities are closing in droves. There are 14 in the state, down from 24 five years ago and 45 two decades ago. Many closed out of financial necessity, not because developers came knocking.

"Every crab plant we've got in the state is barely holding its head above water," said Wayne Mobley, who oversees inspections of shellfish processors for the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources. "They're not making money."

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.

The new homes will boost the tax base of some of the state's poorest areas. They will bring moneyed residents, restaurants and shops, along with jobs in construction and service. But they might squeeze out locals who can't afford soaring property taxes and home prices -- and might force fishermen to look for work on land.

As the fish houses disappear, so do the free or cut-rate boat slips that many fishermen used -- no small thing when slips sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

Fewer fish houses also mean less competition and lower prices for fishermen -- not to mention a longer haul to sell their catch, adding hours to workdays that, for some, already stretch to 12 hours.

There are options for fishermen who don't have a fish house nearby. Some sell to dealers who work out of a truck or have an operation off the water. Or they can set up a couple of coolers alongside a highway and sell their catch themselves. But all these options take time that could be spent on the water.

As Bruno bounces over the river's surface, heading for home, he is plotting the future.

At 38, he has tried making a living away from the water before, tarring roofs, working construction, remodeling houses. The jobs made him feel trapped and depressed, more menial laborer than hardworking breadwinner.

Four years ago, he packed up his wife and two sons and left Long Island, where his family has lived for generations, for a chance to keep working on the water. The New York lobster industry had dried up. In Oriental, land prices were cheap enough that he could buy a one-acre waterfront lot with a three-bedroom house for $220,000. And developers had yet to start bulldozing the fish houses.

Since then, his property taxes have doubled. The county now values his house at $221,000, up from less than $130,000 when he bought it, and it would be worth more in today's market. Housing developments and marinas have sprouted on the banks of the creeks he fishes. Marinas have encroached on some of his crabbing areas, and more are on the way.

His wife, Marianne, works three jobs -- as a school bus driver, a teacher's aide and a waitress -- to boost their income.

This year, he bought a refrigeration unit and put a sign at the end of his driveway advertising fresh crabs. If he can sell more of his catch to the increasingly affluent locals, he reasons, he won't need the fish house anymore. By cutting out the middlemen, he could catch less and make more.

If that doesn't work, he says, he will try nailing benches along the sides of his crabbing skiff and give creek tours to tourists. He has scouted a bald eagle's nest on Orchard Creek that he could point out to passengers.

And he is thinking of selling his 43-foot lobster boat, which he uses for deep-sea fishing in the winter and for family vacations. He helped build that boat. He has watched his two boys grow up on it. But selling it is the only way he can figure to pay down his mortgage and buy some time.

So the Endurance, most likely, will have to go.

Winds of change

When Bruno came to Oriental in 2002, it was a place, like much of North Carolina's sparsely populated inland coast, where change came slowly.

The same few restaurants served the locals year after year. The same families had owned the cottages downtown for decades. The streets were quiet enough that dogs sometimes sprawled in them.

Now, people sell their family homes after getting offers stuffed in their mailboxes. New restaurants and inns are opening, and their owners come from California, New Jersey and elsewhere.

Oriental still has fewer than 1,000 residents, but that is sure to change. More than 2,500 new homes are planned in Pamlico County, home to Oriental.

A fish processing plant, Garland F Fulcher Seafood Co., is still in the heart of town -- occupying a full city block beside the harbor. Its owner, Sherrill Styron, who is the longtime mayor, says he gets a few offers a month from developers. If he gets one good enough, he says, seeing that plant replaced with condominiums "wouldn't hurt my feelings one bit."

Many residents of Oriental say that the town's working waterfront is part of what makes it a community, rather than an amusement park for tourists and retirees.

"This is why I came here," said Barb Venturi, gesturing to Styron's giant shrimp trawlers docked in the town harbor. She moved to Oriental from New Jersey 22 years ago.

Venturi says that the town is working on plans for a community harbor that fishermen could use. But she has no solutions for the industry's bigger problems: falling seafood prices, disappearing fish houses and rising property tax bills for fishermen.

In truth, not everyone would be sad to see commercial fishing go.

At the Tiki Bar, an outdoor gathering spot for pleasure boaters, mention of commercial fishing draws a host of complaints about crab pots blocking the channel, gill nets tangled in boat motors and fishermen who harvest shellfish beneath their docks and set nets just a few feet from their backyards.

Bruno knows that as more homes appear at the waters' edge, the conflicts will only multiply. He already hears stories of fishermen cursed by homeowners. He worries that sport fishermen will push for a ban on gill nets, already in place in Florida and Louisiana.

But he has bills to pay and little time to ponder. So he rises again before dawn and heads out into the quiet river.