commercial fishing. It happened the day 

 a neighbor gave her 20 old crab pots. 



"They were just falling apart," she 

 says. "Nobody else would have tried to 

 use them. But I rigged them up 

 somehow, painted my buoys, and threw 

 them out in the sound. The first day, I 

 got one box of crabs and sold them for 

 twenty dollars. At that time, I was mak- 

 ing about fifteen dollars a day working 

 in the general store. So I said, 'Man, I'm 

 going to quit this store and get me a hun- 

 dred crab pots.'" 



And that's just what she did. Word 

 drifted around to Wanchese and Man- 

 teo and Stumpy Point about a young 

 woman with a little 13-ft. boat and a few 

 rag-tag crab pots. In some of the stories, 

 she was known as "Crab-Pot Carol." In 

 others, she was ' 'Crazy Carol . " It took a 

 while for word to get around that she was 

 just Carol, the commercial fisherman. 



Her first year crabbing, she shared the 

 work with a friend who helped her learn 

 where to set the pots, and when not to 

 take a chance on the weather. 



"I wasn't very smart about the 

 weather," she says, "not the way they 

 are in Hatteras. They've grown up with 

 it; they can read the signs. I would just 

 go out, and if I didn't see any other 

 boats, then I started getting nervous." 



Her second year, she had more pots 

 and did the crabbing alone. She became 

 a student of fishing. She questioned the 

 old pros. She experimented. 



"That year, the crabs moved on the 

 backside of the reef, into deeper water. 

 I'd never worked that kind of place 

 before. I'd listen to everybody and then 

 I'd make my own decision. To me, it was 

 constantly trying to figure out how to 

 catch more crabs — trying to get little 

 bits of information each time I went 

 out." 



Some of her experiments tickled the 

 Hatteras funnybone. 



"When I first put those twenty pots 

 out, they laughed out loud," she recalls. 

 "But when I set out a hundred pots, they 

 saw I was serious. When I came in with 

 my first thousand-pound day, they were 

 real proud of me. My little boat was full. 

 There were crabs everywhere." 



After that, Carol Teague was a 

 respectable advanced beginner in the 

 Hatteras school of practical experience. 

 She had some good instructors there, she 

 says. 



"I really don't think the fishermen 

 treat me special because I'm a woman," 

 she says. "The thing down on the docks 

 at Hatteras is that everybody helps 



Photo by Jane Oden 



I i 



Carol Teague 



everybody else out. I've had people 

 come looking for me, when I ' ve been out 

 in the boat alone in rough weather, just 

 to see if I'm all right. But they didn't do 

 that because I'm a woman. They do just 

 the same for any fisherman." 



Few fishermen live out of their crab 

 pots year-round, and Teague's boat has 

 spent a lot of time tied up in Hatteras 

 while she has been off drop-netting in 

 the ocean, gill-netting in the sound, or 

 hunting king mackerel on fall days 

 offshore. 



hook man." (Longlines are reeled 

 aboard as the crew attaches or detaches 

 buoys and hooks.) "Talk about excite- 

 ment," she says, "it's pretty exciting to 

 gaff a live swordfish and see him hauled 

 aboard." She developed a knack for 

 dressing billfish: "I'm a perfectionist 

 about it," she says. "I like to see them 

 cleaned and iced just right." 



She's less enthused as she describes 

 her bout with pound-netting, which, she 

 says, demands more physical power 

 than she can muster to handle the huge 



"Every time I do go out, I learn something, and it doesn't matter if I'm 

 crabbing or working a trawl boat. I learn. I learn about the wind and the 

 water, and I learn where the fish might be." 



— Carol Teague 



She likes to talk big boats and long 

 trips. Scalloping off New England three 

 summers ago was "wonderful," she 

 says. "We were out to sea fourteen days 

 at a time." 



When she goes longlining for 

 swordfish, Teague and two men take 

 turns cooking and working the deck. 



"I was the buoy man, when I was on 

 deck," she says. "The other guy was the 



stakes and heavy nets. But when it 

 comes to sheer endurance, she says, she 

 holds her own. 



"Trawl-boating is very, very, very 

 hard work," she says. "But if you put 

 your mind to it, you can do it. One trip, 

 we got seven hundred boxes of fish. We'd 

 work for twenty hours straight, 

 sometimes, and there would be times 

 when I'd say, T can't make it.' Then one 



