About Walter and Ray Davenport

“I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t go on the water. You get out there in the morning in that fresh air and the sun coming up, if you don’t believe there’s a Lord then, you won’t ever believe.” Ray Davenport’s words explain why he and his brother, Walter, have fished the bays, rivers and shores of the Albemarle Sound near their Tyrrell County homes for over fifty years.

When the brothers embarked on their career, they worked alongside experienced fishermen who shared their knowledge of the water, the nets, and the fish. “We’d sit around and talk to them and pick up bits of information. And through trial and error and years of work, you learned what would work and what wouldn’t work,” explains Ray.

Together, Walter and Ray trawled shrimp and caught rockfish, perch and catfish in gill nets, hoop nets and fykes. They trapped crabs and eels. But it was the pound net that became their mainstay. A complex construction requiring yards of net cut and tied to form funnels for trapping fish, the pound net is anchored to the shoreline with black gum stakes and secured with leaded, weighted lines. “It’s an art to it. You just don’t sew webbing together and catch fish. You’ve got to know how to put the webbing together.”

The brothers mastered the art of net making and repairing, but did not stop there. “Of course we build our own pound net boats,” explains Walter. “I’ve never seen a fiberglass boat that would work in a pound net good as a wooden skiff will work. The old-timers years ago designed a wooden boat—I guess they probably had a lot of trial and error, but they built a boat that was really seaworthy.”

The fisherman’s craft depends on more than having the right boat and the right net. It requires a complex knowledge of the seasons, the water, the currents, the geography of the shoreline, the topography of the river and the sound bottoms. It requires reading the feel of the wind and the light of the sky. It requires an intimate knowledge of the lives and habits of the fish. When the fisher’s knowledge of the land, water, sky, and fish are poured into the construction of boat and net, then the art of harvesting the water is complete.

“There’s a lot of better ways to make a living than fishing,” says Ray, “but you don’t have as much freedom. I reckon it’s a sense of freedom. I love to go. You’re always looking for a big catch. Like a kid on Christmas morning: ‘What am I going to get?’”