‘It ain’t supposed to be good’: Northern Outer Banks fishermen wait with a wary eye
Austin Rollinson grabbed a rope from the captain of a fishing boat, tied it to a pole on a dock and looked off in the distance, east toward the ocean. Like a lot of people here around the Northern Outer Banks on Thursday morning, he was waiting on the arrival of Hurricane Dorian.
“I don’t know how bad it’s gonna be,” Rollinson said with a drawl as thick as the humidity, “but it ain’t supposed to be good.”
Rollinson, 25, was one of about a dozen men who gathered on Thursday morning at a marina in Wanchese, a small fishing town just west of Nags Head, between the Roanoke Sound and Croatan Sound. Most of the men wore white hair and red-tinted tans. They’d come to prepare their fishing boats in anticipation of the storm.
“It’s a fishing community,” Rollinson, a Wanchese native, said while he stood on the dock. He wore a shirt that said “I love shrimp” on the back.
“Yeah,” said the captain, a man named Will Etheridge, 48. “That’s what made this place. Fishing.”
And so every time a hurricane threatens, the people here go through the familiar ritual of securing the decks of their boats, tying them down and hoping for the best. Etheridge’s boat, one of several where Rollinson offers his services, was named “Miss B Haven.”
Etheridge named it after his daughter, Haven. The men passed ropes back and forth to each other while the same scene played out throughout the marina on boats with names like “Reels of Fortune,” “Sea Wolf” and “Windy Gale.”
For now, on Thursday morning, the water was calm and the wind breezy. The sun shined high and hot and, if not for the oppressive humidity, it might have been difficult to tell that a hurricane was forecast to arrive here sometime Friday morning.
The effects of Dorian’s outer bands created havoc throughout the southern North Carolina coast on Thursday. Around Nags Head, though, there were few signs throughout much of the day that bad weather was on its way.
About the only signs were the emptiness of the streets and beaches, and people preparing. Around the marina, the fishermen, most all of them Wanchese natives, weren’t sure what to expect upon Dorian’s arrival. A lot of it, they said, depended on whether it’d come up through the sound.
“Who knows what the damn thing is gonna do,” Hank Beasley said.
Beasley, 57, had come out to help his friend, Charlie Griffin, secure his boat, “Reels of Fortune.” Griffin, 58, is something of a local celebrity around here, given that he starred for four seasons on the reality television show “Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks.”
On Thursday, though, Griffin was just another man on the docks, preparing.
“It’s getting stronger again,” he said of Dorian, “and it’s gonna come right up. If it doesn’t hit us direct, it’s gonna be so close.”
Griffin made his name on a reality show about catching tuna. Asked what he most often catches these days, he said, “Hell. Hell, mostly.” He was joking, somewhat, but his mood was befitting of many here, where not even hardened locals are comfortable predicting what might happen when Dorian arrives.
Griffin’s friend, Beasley, sat on the dock, near the edge of the boat. The two men talked fishing and traded some jokes, but their tones changed when the conversation shifted to the topic of the hurricane.
“It’s got me scared, I can tell you that,” Beasley said.
This story was originally published September 5, 2019 at 3:17 PM.