Wanchese, NC: The global mecca for custom sportfish building

How did tiny Wanchese, North Carolina become the global mecca for custom sportfish building? Chris Dixon finds out on an OBX pilgrimage.

On an unseasonably warm winter’s day, I had the occasion to drive up to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to spend some time with master sportfish builder Ricky Scarborough Jr. As a surfer and fisherman, the passage from South Carolina’s Lowcountry to the OBX via either the Cedar Island and Okracoke Ferries or the long drive along Highway 64 through Roanoke Island is a pilgrimage I’ve been happily making for 30 years. And of course, I’m not the only one. The fish-laden, storm-tossed waters that surround this fragile, but remarkably resilient landscape are today an escape for millions. Through the decades, I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Manteo and Cape Hatteras, but the one place I’d never bothered visiting was the venerable, outwardly sleepy little community called Wanchese. Thankfully, a hometown tour with Ricky Jr. changed that.

Yet the day with Ricky—which led to the story “On the Shoulders of Giants” in Power & Motoryacht’s June/July 2024 issue—frankly, left me slackjawed, not only by Scarborough’s operation, but by Wanchese itself. Peppered with century-old houses inhabited by 7^th generation families, this pine-shaded peninsula at the bottom of Roanoke Island is not sleepy at all. It’s not only the home of Scarborough Boatworks, but the operations of John Bayliss, Paul Spencer, Craig Blackwell, Ritchie Howell—and that just scratches the surface of the population of craftspeople, engine smiths, composite experts, metalworkers and charter operators that operate out of Wanchese and its harbor. Despite a population of only around 2,000, the town has somehow managed to become the center of the custom sportfish universe. Dare County’s top economic engine is tourism. In second place? Boatbuilding. This is largely because of Wanchese. The town is also the ancestral home of a cast of characters straight out of an angler’s novel; Omie and Tony Tillett, Sheldon Midgett, Sunny Briggs and Ricky Scarborough Sr. to name a very few. I wanted to know how it came to pass that this tiny town held a fleet of built and in-build boats worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. What emerged is a place defined by eons of fishing, struggle against the elements, hard work, geographical luck and maybe a few unintended consequences.

The very early days

When most folks think of the Outer Banks, they conjure the razor-thin sliver of shifting sand that runs for more than 175 miles from the Virginia border down to North Carolina’s Cape Lookout. That sliver protects a vast realm of sound, island and marsh from the often angry Atlantic. The banks themselves are a living landscape of sand blown and sometimes bulldozed into giant dunes, stabilized by pine forests and sea oats, yet also regularly overwashed by hurricanes and nor’easters. Behind iconic spots like Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore and Buxton lie the Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds. At the demarcation between the sounds sits a 12-mile-long hammock island called Roanoke. Most folks are at least somewhat aware of Roanoke Island because it’s the site of the infamous “Lost Colony”—a tiny English settlement whose immigrants disappeared sometime after landing there in 1587—becoming one of the enduring mysteries of early Anglo-America. But archeological records now indicate that there have been humans along the Outer Banks as far back as 10,000 years.

We know much about the natives who thrived here up to the 1500’s thanks to spots like Wanchese’s Tillett site. Also known today as “Thicket Lump,” it’s named after the land’s owner Gilbert “Moon” Tillett, one of the Outer Banks original charter-boat captains and patriarch of Wanchese’s Moon Tillett Fish Company. Bones, pottery, shell mounds and other artifacts indicate that the site’s Algonquian population made a living by hunting and fishing the salty sound and its creeks from dugout canoes built on literally the same land where modern fishermen build from juniper, foam and epoxy. The ancient shoreline was thick with oysters and waters teemed with drum, blue crabs, shrimp and every other kind of aquatic protein a human could need. Roanoke Island’s last ruling chiefs were Manteo, who lorded over the islands’ northern tribe, and Wanchese, who controlled the south. “The boatbuilding thing and Wanchese especially—it’s always been there,” said master sportfish builder John Bayliss. “It was always really out of necessity. And the chiefs—Wanchese and Manteo—I don’t think they got along all that well. The Wanchese guys have always been the hunter/fishermen types. If you were in a bar fight, you wanted a Wancheser on your side. Manteo was kind of like the county seat. Manteo was more polished. They’d be the attorneys.”

As the Outer Banks native population waned, those who came in their wake had little infrastructure and survived on the same resources that had always sustained life here. Seasoned captain turned historian Charles Perry said that Roanoke Islanders had to be of a hardy, resourceful stock. Perry and co-author Bethany Bradshear just released a fascinating book Big Fish Better Boats: The History of Sportfishing and Boatbuilding on the Outer Banks. Perry, now 77, grew up surfing the Outer Banks waves and fishing under the tutelage of legends that included Wanchese’s Omie Tillett and Manteo’s Warren O’Neal. According to Perry, area fishermen first cast from the beaches and worked sound waters for mullet and shad with hand-woven nets from rowing skiffs and small “moth boat” sailboats (so named for their moth-like sails) that eventually gave way to powerboats. If a spring shad catch was good, a responsible fisherman might fund the family until the following spring. But there was also flounder, drum, red snapper and plenty of shrimp and even caviar-filled sturgeon on the shoulder seasons. You fished when the weather cooperated, Perry said, “and then you either built a boat, built a house or you didn’t do anything. There just weren’t many jobs.”

Post War

Until the days after WWII, Perry said, local fishermen stayed fairly close to shore, not realizing the bounty of gamefish that lay along the boundary where the cold Labrador Current met the warm Gulf Stream. “Weren’t never no Gulf Stream fishing ‘til after the war,” Omie Tillett said during a 2014 fisherman’s roundtable. “1948 to 49 we started going out there.” Heading out to the Gulf Stream required bigger boats. Omie fished from a 50-footer with his father Hiram “Sambo” Tillett while Omie’s friend Gus Saunders worked a 110-foot long WWI-era submarine chaser. “Our boats had one motor,” Tillett added in his Wanchese brogue. “Didn’t have radios or anything. It weren’t easy.”

Both Hatteras and Oregon Inlets were created in 1846 when a massive storm surge turned Ocracoke back into an island and split Hatteras Island from Bodie Island. Plainly visible from the south end of Wanchese and arguably responsible for much of its prevalence in today’s world of boats and fishing, Oregon Inlet has been a blessing and a curse. Today 81 years old, Sunny Briggs started fishing offshore when he was 12. “If you were young and smart, you watched the captain in front of you,” he said of Oregon Inlet. “Well, Omie’s ahead of me. I know he knows what is ahead. We had a bar buoy and stakes that stuck out on the sandbars to mark the channel. But that inlet was a moving thing. Every time we had a nor’easter, we had a different inlet—and everybody who has fished out of Oregon Inlet—if they tell you they haven’t run aground, they didn’t fish it. We navigated with a flashlight and a compass. That’s nothing when the rollers are 10, 12 feet tall—and it’s dark. It was bad news.”

Through the late forties, landings of billfish, tuna, wahoo and mahi led a handful of fishermen to launch Outer Banks sportfishing operations. There was no Oregon Inlet Fishing Center, so boats moored farther up the sound before making the hairball inlet crossing. “Charles Perry’s daddy Charlie and his uncle Herbert were the first two charter boats to ever go into Oregon Inlet to dock there,” recalled Briggs. Then in 1954, Omie’s uncle Toby Tillett was awarded a concession by the National Parks Service to operate the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center—which would become reachable by a paved road instead of sand ruts. The word of the phenomenal fishing offshore was further boosted by the arrival of a photojournalist named Aycock Brown. Brown documented the fishermen, boatbuilders and daily catches (often posed up alongside pretty girls) and sent them to hundreds of newspapers around the country, becoming a tireless Outer Banks advocate. “He did so much for this county,” said Perry. “It’s just amazing.”

The building of the Outer Banks’ first fishing boats wasn’t initially restricted to Wanchese or Manteo. “There was a guy named Taylor who built over in Kill Devil Hills,” Perry recalled. “He built a really nice boat. He had some kind of cancer and passed at an early age. But he built a few boats and they’re still in circulation. Boats were built over in Mann’s Harbor too (think Paul Mann boats)—still are.”

A pair of pioneering captains and builders from the early sportfishing days were Manteo’s Buddy Cannady and Warren O’Neal. The pair worked from what became a local business model. “I think Buddy worked with Capt. Warren, and then Buddy went out on his own,” recalled Perry. “His idea was building one boat a year to have a new boat to fish every summer for his charters. And then he’d sell it at the end of the summer. He didn’t build the prettiest boats—well, his boats had pretty lines. He didn’t do the finish work on the insides and that sort of thing, but his boats were solid— good sea boats. But he learned how to build a boat in a short period of time. And the people that were buying his boat after the season were getting a hell of a deal because he had already fished it for the whole season—he’d worked out all the kinks.”

Perry, Briggs and Wanchese builder John Bayliss all agreed that O’Neal was the first Roanoke Islander to build boats to a true artisan’s level of fit and finish. In 1959, O’Neal built the Pearl II. Considered the first real “Carolina Boat,” she featured a flared bow and deep-V hull for pounding through short and long period swells and shedding the spray those swells generated. “I started putting ‘V’ into the hulls of bigger boats because it just seemed to me like they needed it,” O’Neal once said. “I had been running boats all my life and I know what it takes to make them run.”

“Warren went to Duke University,” said Briggs. “This is before we even had a bridge to Manteo. When he graduated, he went to the Chicago Institute of Design. That’s the other side of the world from Manteo. When he came back, he started putting everything on paper— documenting everything. There was no rock of the eye. Everything was pre-gamed before he actually built it.”

In 1960, Omie Tillett needed a boat. He and O’Neal traveled to Virginia to check out a Rybovich build and came home brimming with ideas. The result was a collaboration between Tillett, O’Neal and Charles Perry’s cousin Lee on a build called Sportsman.“Before, Omie had only just fiddled around with preparing boats and so forth,” said Briggs. “And when he got the idea of building himself a new sportfish, he wanted Warren to build it, because anything Warren did, it was like Rembrandt did it.”

Eventually, O’Neal was commissioned by a wealthy Virginian named John Woods to build the first of a series of beautiful charter boats that would be christened Olivee. “He had the Olivee 1,2,3,4 and 5,” said Briggs. “They were what really changed the mode of boatbuilding in Dare County.”

Tillett continued to work with O’Neal for better than a decade before starting his own Manteo-based line in 1973. Tillett’s Sportsman Boatworks turned out a number of classic sportfishers—including Skylark and Brother’s Pride (a 54-footer recently restored by John Bayliss) before hanging it up thanks to an epoxy allergy. He continued to fish though, and with his positive energy, daily radio blessings of the Oregon Inlet Fleet, Omie came to be the father, son and holy spirit of Outer Banks sportfishing.

The humble but pioneering Tillett, Perry said, was the very representation of Wanchese’s global ascension: “If people really studied the building of sportfishing boats, then they realized that the people that were building the boats here were people that were also fishing the boats. They were finding something—a little tweak somewhere, tweak here, tweak there, that they could make the next better boat. They built that boat, they could see a chance to make it a little bit better the next time by changing the shear line or changing the design in the running bottom … little changes, but it meant a lot over a period of time.”

And then, Perry added, there was the whole commercial side. That was led by the rise of the Wanchese Fish Company—whose huge fleet ran out of the Wanchese Seafood Park and would become one of the largest commercial seafood operations in the United States.

Modern Times, Modern Boats, Modern Issues

As Ricky Scarborough Sr.’s reputation was building, a fairly monumental change also came to pass during the 1980s. Sunny Briggs had married a whipsmart Wanchese girl named Dee Daniels—whose father owned a then much smaller Wanchese Harbor. “My father-in-law, Willie Gert and his brother owned that whole Seafood Park area. And the state took it from ‘em,” said Briggs.

North Carolina used Gert’s land to create the Wanchese Seafood Industrial Park—right outside of Briggs and Davis’ operation. “The Feds say they’re gonna dredge Oregon Inlet,” added Bayliss. “So the state’s dream is to make Wanchese the seafood hub for the East Coast. We’re gonna have deep draft trawlers and long liners, seafood processing, supplies, fish houses, all that.”

But that didn’t really happen. Though promised for decades, a full-scale deepening and stabilization of Oregon Inlet never materialized, which made deep draft boat operation untenable. Additionally, fisheries regulations became increasingly stringent. “Commercial fishing moved north,” said Briggs. “Now New Bedford—that area’s way more fishing-oriented as far as the trawl boats.”

Yet as one door closed, another opened. “The state was becoming more open to builders and other businesses coming in there,” said Bayliss, who opened up shop in 2002. Bayliss recalls his first interactions with the original land-owner, Willie Gert, as somewhat tense. “But, he was a neat guy,” Bayliss said. “I think in the beginning, he was a little standoffish with me because, here we are, on what was their property, that the state gave him, like, $17,000 for. It’s huge, like 30 or 40 acres. It was basically stolen.”

As the 1990s progressed into the 2000s, the land where Ricky Scarborough Jr. used to hunt doves filled up with engine shops, fabricators, suppliers, charter operators and more builders moved into the park. As the builders communicated, collaborated and competed, innovations came with every boat. First it was jigs and cold molding, then a newfangled technology called CNC for cutting jig forms came onto the scene—an innovation sparked by Dee Briggs after she suggested computerized shaping with an engineer at North Carolina’s Applied Concepts. “It’s something that’s never been done,” said Briggs. “It used to take five or six weeks to get a jig freehand. Now you were talking about three weeks.”

Briggs, Ricky Scarborough Sr., John Bayliss, and Paul Spencer would become forces in the sportfisher realm. Spencer was an experienced Oregon Inlet Fishing Center captain and son-in-law to Wanchese’s Sheldon Midgett. When he was 23, Spencer decided he needed a new boat but simply couldn’t afford one. So he and his wife Shelly mortgaged the house and built a twin-engined 58-footer called Sizzler in a tin-roofed shed. “And then I found out my passion was as much building the boats as it was the fish,” he said.

Spencer ultimately outgrew the shed and opened a second facility on the eastern side of Wanchese where he today finishes out his 70 to 80 footers alongside Shelly and five children.

In 2021, Sunny Briggs decided to finally retire—though that’s not really in his vernacular since he’s still hand-building 20-plus-footers behind his Manteo house. Situated right next to Bayliss’ Wanchese operation, Briggs’ waterfront factory was prime waterfront real estate. “We could have sold our business to another person in the area that wanted it bad,” he said. “But then Ricky Jr. approached me on it. Dee and I talked about it. And we just said, you know what? Who better than Jr. to take over the shop? We could have made more money. But we made enough to satisfy ourselves.”

Whether the old-timers like it or not, as time moves forward, everyone seems to agree that the only constant for Wanchese will be change. Safe Harbor has made a substantial investment in Wanchese Harbor. A few months ago, the community’s first “cluster home” development, which would have brought 60 residences to a dense pine thicket—was pushed back over local outcries. In February, the now national Wanchese Seafood Company announced it would no longer operate out of its own hometown. Charles Perry and Wanchese’s builders fret that the same money bringing jobs to Wanchese through its boats is the same money that will drive up real estate prices, making it tougher for the builder’s employees to find nearby housing. Bayliss, though, seems to echo a general shared sense of history—and optimism.

“The one thing that I think is really important is that it all came from fishing,” Bayliss said. “And it was the same for the people before—when they started building shad boats that were sail powered. But even back then, they were competitive with each other. It wasn’t just like, slap some wood together and get from point A to point B and hold as many fish as you could. There was style involved. And I remember distinctly hearing guys like Omie pointing out certain things on certain boats that were really pretty at the time. That inspired builders to keep getting better and keep evolving—and that’s been carried on all this time. It’s really crazy that it started like that—and that it still continues now.”

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

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Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/sportfishing/wanchese-nc-the-global-mecca-for-custom-sportfish-building