How one NC fish house ships fresh catch to seafood markets across US

WANCHESE, N.C. - On a late March morning, barrels full of slippery bluefish straight off the boat glistened in the sun at O'Neal's Sea Harvest in Wanchese. Within hours, the fresh catch would be shipped to seafood markets stretching from Canada to Louisiana.

"You try to get it in and out as quick as you can because it's perishable," said Ashley O'Neal. "They go on a truck today, and they'll be wherever they are going by 2 or 3 o'clock tomorrow," he said.

O'Neal's Sea Harvest is one of several competitive fish houses on the southern tip of Roanoke Island on North Carolina's Outer Banks. The family-owned company also operates a seafood market and restaurant in front of its fish process center in Wanchese Seafood Industrial Park.

Benny and Linda O'Neal started the business in 1995. Today, their three children, Nicole Harper and brothers Colby and Ashley O'Neal, along with their respective wives, Lara and Abby, operate it.

Depending on the season, there are as many as 70 fishermen who sell weekly to O'Neal's, which processes, packages and ships the products usually within the same day up and down the east coast.

Pointing to four individual 1,200-pound pallets soon to be loaded onto a truck, Ashley said, "That's going to Philadelphia. … And a pile of crabs to New York."

Every day commercial fishermen pull up to O'Neal's docks or back up their truck beds to unload grouper, tuna, perch, sea bass, croakers, mullet, shad, trout, grouper, tilefish and shrimp. The fresh catch varies by season and quantities are often limited by state and federal regulations.

Colby and Ashley manage the wholesale side of the business, spending the bulk of their time sensing customer demand and trying to get the best price for the fish.

"Get the sale pretty much," Ashley said.

Nicole runs the office and keeps her brothers on speed dial.

"It's a very competitive market," she said. "It's as if they're always on call because they have to have the current information at that moment to find out what's coming in and what's going."

On a busy day, the O'Neals could purchase up to 15,000 pounds of fish caught by local anglers in the ocean. Last fall, they bought almost a million pounds of blue crabs, captured in the brackish water of the Roanoke Sound or tidal creeks. Most of the product is shipped to other states, but some of it is reserved for sale behind the counter in the family fish market or served on a sandwich for lunch at O'Neal's popular restaurant.

Soft-shell season gets underway in Wanchese around the third week of April. Roanoke Island is an ideal spot to catch crabs before they molt because it's flanked by two narrow straits of the Pamlico and the Albemarle sounds where the creatures travel north during the spring.

"There are a lot of pots in the water, as opposed to being a big spread-out area," Ashley said.

Crabbers set pots and bait them with large male crabs called jimmies to attract female crabs looking to mate.

"They put the stud in there," Ashley said.

Before the peelers molt, the crabbers remove them. A crab with a red line on its swimming legs will shed the quickest. At O'Neal's, they're placed in sloughing tanks, where the "peelers" are checked every four to six hours.

"A soft crab will actually start getting harder and harder and turn back into a hard crab if you don't get it out at the right time," Ashley said. "The timing of the month, if it's a full moon, they're going to shed and pop quicker."

Soft-shell crabs are considered a culinary delicacy and are renowned for their delicate texture and sweet flavor.

But the length of the soft-shell season has dipped off in recent years, possibly due to changes in the salinity of area waters, Ashley said. Local crabbers can make more money during the three months of fall when hardened blue crabs are abundant than in the two or three weeks of spring during soft-shell season.

Bruce Midgett, 69, of Rodanthe, has sold a variety of fish to O'Neals nearly every day for 20 years.

"They're just good people to deal with," he said.

In the spring, Midgett fishes by boat in the sound at night using gill nets, which can yield about 800 pounds of product on an average day. One morning this spring, he came to O'Neal's with a truck full of spiny dog sharks, hickory shad and bluefish.

North Carolina's strict fishing regulations have affected fishermen's bottom line as well as the Outer Banks' fish houses. Flounder, for example, can only be caught during a short window of time in the fall.

"That's a staple item that's not available as much," Ashley said.

But on the upside, other sought-after fish are bringing in higher prices these days. Tuna rose from a few bucks a pound to as much as $10 a pound in recent years, he said.

No matter the ups and downs of the business, Ashley and his family are in it for the long haul.

"I enjoy the challenge to do the best for our fisherman and getting the best dollar for their product," he said.

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This story was originally published July 8, 2026 at 5:37 AM.