Little Shrimp Boat in a Ditch: Ed Cross of Vandemere on Pamlico Packing

Reprinted and edited from Tradewinds Magazine, 2019, B. Garrity-Blake. Photo by B. Garrity-Blake

“Do you know what kind of man Ed Cross is?” asked Hal Potter, a longtime employee of Pamlico Packing. “If he sees a problem, he jumps in and helps.” 

Ed Cross, owner of Pamlico Packing, started his fishing career in the mid 1970s. He bought the fish house, located in the sleepy village of Vandemere on the banks of the Bay River, in 1976 from Earl Holton.  

“When I came here years ago, Ed had a little trawler,” Hal Potter continued. “One day he had a feller helping him set the trawl doors on her. Somebody asked, ‘Why you want to change ‘em? You’re doing as good as everybody else!’ Ed said, ‘I don’t want to do as good as everybody else. I want to do better.’”

Ed Cross is clearly well-respected across North Carolina’s commercial fishing community. Just mentioning his name evokes smiles and head nods. Folks recall how hard he fought for the industry while serving on the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission in the 1980s alongside Jerry Gaskill, Billy Smith, and Jule Wheatly. He also served on the federal Mid-Atlantic Council with Kenny Daniels. 

Cross is also one of the longest, if not the longest, living member of the North Carolina Fisheries Association, the state’s largest trade organization for the seafood industry. He’s served on the board and was chairman as well. 

“Years ago, in 1987, I was sitting in my office and Jerry Schill comes in,” Cross recalled. “He was working some political project and was looking for a donation. He was such a good talker. We hired Jerry that day. That’s how the Fisheries Association really took off.”

Given that the fishing industry in North Carolina is known as a family trade passed down throughout the generations, it might come as a surprise that Ed Cross is a “Raleigh transplant” who didn’t start his seafood business until he was forty years old. 

“I actually grew up in Cary, moved to Raleigh and had a very lucrative tile and glass business.” He’d escape to his little vacation house on Dawson Creek in Pamlico County when he could, and mess around in a small trawler. But most of his time was spent managing 52 employees at Ford Cross Tile and Glass, and landing huge contracts in the Triangle region like Crabtree Valley Mall and the Sheraton.

“That’s what got me. We were out there at Crabtree Valley, doing every piece of glass between the hand rails of winding staircases. Each piece was tempered and had to be measured. Some of it was curved. We worked day and night. I was doing the stairwells one night and kept thinking about that little shrimp boat I had sitting in the ditch. I said to myself, You know what? The money just ain’t worth it. I’m going to give fishing a try!” 

Ed Cross’s co-workers thought he was crazy to walk away from a booming business in favor of rural life in the marshes and creeks of Pamlico County. He sold his tile and glass company to a nephew and bought two trawlers built in Bayou La Batre. He fished one and Larry Potter fished the other. He packed out with Earl Holton, and after two years bought Pamlico Packing from him. 

“I did okay, I did well. I got to know the top producers, the good captains out there.” Cross had begun buying shrimp to supply Singleton Seafood, the largest dealer in the southeast based in Tampa, Florida. 

“I needed the product. So I called all them captains in here one night. Said ‘Tell you what I’ll do. Go find a boat you want, or we’ll build a boat. I’m going to the bank, and I’ll make the down payment on the boat. You’re going to pay for the boat. All the money stays in the boat account, insurance, payments, whatever. When you get the boat paid for it’s yours.’”

Four captains accepted his offer, and had their own boats paid for within five years.  

“They did well. I got a lot of product from them. That was the deal. After they paid their boats off they kept selling here. That’s how it worked.”

Pamlico Packing grew. Ed Cross built a crab picking house and a fish cutting house. “We had twenty ladies cutting and filleting flounder,” Cross recalled. “We could do 250-300 boxes a day, 25, 30 thousand pounds of whole fish a day. I sold off some – we couldn’t cut it all!” Cross started off with 40 women picking crabs, and at the height of crabbing employed 100 pickers. 

“You couldn’t imagine the stuff that come across this dock seven days a week,” he said, shaking his head. “We stayed busy from daylight into the night, after midnight, Sunday mornings, picking crabs, opening oysters and shucking scallops, cutting fish. Built a bunk room with a shower. Me and my sons Don and Doug would hit the bunk and start right back up in the morning.” 

When Bosch Manufacturing opened in New Bern, some of the African American crab pickers and fish cutters left Pamlico Packing in favor of full-time employment with benefits, while others simply aged out of the labor-intensive work.

“So we turned to Mexican help through the H2B Visa program, all legal. Without them, we’d have to shut our doors.” Today Pamlico Packing employs just under 40 guest workers from Mexico to head, peel, de-vein, and pack shrimp and other products. Some have returned each year for several years. 

“They’re hard workers, never late, never miss a day of work,” said Cross. “We’d have to shut the door without them, pure and simple.” 

Nowadays, Pamlico Packing primarily processes shrimp. Croaker, spot, and flounder, according to Cross, have migrated north due to warming waters. The ban on flynet fishing south of Cape Hatteras impacted Pamlico Packing as well. The abundance and availability of blue crabs began declining in the early 2000s. Ed Cross believes crabs were a victim of too many pots in the water, and too few trawlers providing them with food. 

“Ever see a crab chase down a swimming fish? They're scavengers. Crabs eat the bycatch that goes overboard, so they lost their food source when these areas were closed to trawling.” 

In order to increase the value of a shrinking amount of product, Ed Cross began calling restaurants for direct sales, and established a seafood distribution route that today stretches from the coast to the mountains of North Carolina. He and his sons built a processing facility off the water in Grantsboro in 1995, and today a fleet of trucks take their branded “Carolina’s Finest” Individually Quick Frozen (IQF) shrimp and other value-added products throughout the southeast United States. They also deal in some imported products such as flounder from Argentina.

“My son Doug manages accounts and shipping,” Cross explained. “Don runs the processing part.”

The Cross family decided to close the Vandemere fish house after it got “torn to pieces” in Hurricane Irene. However, they could not get enough North Carolina shrimp to satisfy demand, so they restored and re-opened the fish house five years later, in time for the unprecedented boom of fall and winter shrimp. 

“White shrimp in the last four years have been a blessing,” Cross emphasized. “When we re-opened our Vandemere fish house, people asked, where you going to get the boats? I knew they’d come. First year we had eight or nine. Last season, we packed out 21 boats.” White shrimp, also known as green tails, may be more abundant due to warming waters, and some theorize that shrimp caught off Nags Head are coming from the Chesapeake Bay. “We had a really big winter shrimping from the Virginia line to Cape Hatteras in the ocean,” Cross added.   

Although Ed Cross “unofficially” retired in 1996, and he and his wife head for Florida each winter, the octogenarian can still be found working and troubleshooting at the Vandemere fish house. 

“I just live up the street,” Ed Cross shrugged. “I say I run things down here, but only until Doug shows up. This is my thing, right here.” 

Three years ago, the Cross family began growing oysters on a lease in the Bay River. 

“We got into oyster aquaculture not because we think it’s a big money maker, but because we can’t have dead hours,” Ed’s son Doug explained. “When you have people on weed eaters and mops and brooms, sweeping the same spot on the floor 20 times, that’s bad – now they can work the lease when nothing else is going on.”

Back in the day Ed Cross owned a little store and meat market, as well as a grill, next to the fish house that his wife Patsy managed. They supplied groceries for a couple of dozen vessels. They also ran an ammonia-fueled ice plant that made 300-pound blocks for boats. 

“That was an old ammonia plant. It got so bad you could smell ammonia all over Vandemere, so we that down. We have two ice machines for the boats. We also supply ice to the community after hurricanes.” 

Pamlico Packing’s fish house, rebuilt after Hurricane Irene, took a big hit last fall from Hurricane Florence. 

“It wasn’t so much the wind damage,” Cross explained. “It was all water. We had a surge five and a half, six foot high.” A 50-year old metal building containing five offices was completely destroyed. “Everything was sucked right out – we don’t know where it went.” 

In all the hurricanes he’s experienced, including Isabel and Irene, Cross has never seen a sustained easterly wind blow straight in like it did during Hurricane Florence. 

“All the boats had scattered, and nobody could get back fishing and unload. We lost all our docks and rebuilt them ourselves. Had two ten-thousand-gallon fuel tanks laying in the parking lot. Florence affected us for a good eight weeks.” 

In spite of hurricane damage and fluctuating markets, the Cross family remains determined to roll with the punches and keep on adapting. 

“I can’t say business has gotten better in the last couple of years, but I can say we haven’t backed up,” Ed Cross said. 

“I’m not afraid of hurricanes,” his son Doug added. “I’m afraid of uninformed politicians!” Doug Cross, following in his father’s footsteps, currently sits on the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission. 

“All in all, the seafood business has been great,” Ed Cross said. He expressed no regrets at leaving his glass and tile business in Raleigh to start a new way of life in Pamlico County. “I really enjoy what I do, and I couldn’t have done it without my family. My sons took this business where I couldn’t have took it!”