In this photograph, we see a crew of menhaden fishermen at work in the waters off Morehead City and Beaufort, N.C., in 1947. They have tied their purse boats up against the mother boat after making a set and are beginning to load their catch onto the mother boat.

Though bit dimly, we can see most of the fishermen who make up the crew in one of the purse boats. On the far side of that boat, the fishermen are what are called “seine setters,” who “pull net” but also pull corks aside in the boat so that they’re out of the way.

The “ring setters” at the front of the purse boats pull too, but they also make sure the tom weight goes overboard, closing the catch of menhaden up inside the net. The other men are “bunt pullers.”

We can’t see the other purse boat at all, but we can see one of the fishermen in that boat– or at least the back of his head.

To my inexperienced eye, this looks like a good-sized set. The seine is hanging tight, and the water is churning with fish. A modest catch might be 25 or 30,000 fish; a good haul, far more.

Looking closer at the photograph, we can see that one of the fishermen on the mother boat is using a line to lower the bail net into the water and scoop fish out of the purse seine. On the far right, another fisherman, probably the first mate, is holding a long hickory pole that runs to the bail net.

He will use that pole to guide the bail net over the mother boat’s railing. When ready, another crewman will tug a line that opens the bail net and lets the fish fall into the boat’s hold.

The whole process required experience, skill, and daring, and it was not for the faint of heart. If a line broke, or if the fishermen’s timing was off, it could be very dangerous. But done correctly, with all hands working together in a kind of intricate choreography, it was something to see.

“It was like a rhythm. It was like a ballet,” a veteran menhaden captain, Capt. David Willis, once told me.

In the first years after World War II, the menhaden industry knew good times and bad.

There were years with record-breaking catches, such as 1945. And there were years like 1946 and 1947, when most captains and crews finished the season and went home disappointed.

After the war, a new militancy was also evident among the industry’s menhaden fishermen up and down the East Coast.

As the menhaden barons built bigger mansions along Front Street– and as African American expectations for being given their fair share rose after the Second World War– menhaden fishermen and factory workers began looking for a larger share of the industry’s profits.

Over the next six or seven years, they would lead a resurgence of labor activism and union organizing both in Beaufort and Morehead City.

If you’d like to learn more about that moment in the local menhaden industry’s history, you can take a look at two stories I wrote some years ago: “The Night the Fish Factory Burned,” and “The Menhaden Fishermen’s Strike.”

All in all, the post-war years were still a time of abundance in the local menhaden industry.

Not all fishing seasons were good, but the good ones were really something. According to Steve Goodwin’s Beyond the Crows Nest, a veritable encyclopedia of the menhaden industry in Carteret County,  the local menhaden factories processed more than 157 million menhaden in 1945 alone.

At that time, an astonishing number of people made their livings or a substantial part of their livings from the menhaden industry.

According to Steve’s book, speaking just of 1945, approximately 2,000 men and women either worked on the local menhaden fleet’s boats or in one of the county’s eight menhaden factories.

In those first years after the war, the menhaden industry on the Atlantic and Gulf Coast was the largest commercial fishery in the United States, and the lifeblood of Beaufort and Morehead City.

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This is the 24rd photograph in my photo-essay “Working Lives”– looking at how people made their livings on the North Carolina coast just before, during, and just after the Second World War.

All of the photographs in the photo-essay come from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives in Raleigh.