Henry Tindell is a native of Alabama. As a teenager, he went to Eastpoint to visit an aunt and, inspired by his time there, he devised a plan for what to do when he finished high school. But Henry was too eager to get on the water, so in 1963 he moved to Eastpoint and finished his senior year up the road in Carrabelle. Soon after, he began harvesting oysters and crabs and has been working on the bay ever since. In the 1980s, as imports began replacing the local hard crab business, soft-shell crabs became popular, so Henry began cultivating them.

In 1942, the year James Hicks was born, dozens of families lived and worked thirteen miles west of Apalachicola. Their lives revolved around Miller's Fish & Oyster Company on the west end of the Apalachicola Bay, with a clear view of Indian Pass and St. Vincent Island. The Hicks family was one of those families. James's father, Henry Harrison Hicks, worked for the Millers. James followed suit, working on the bay by the time he was twelve years old. He oystered for near thirty-five years before he decided to hang his hat and get a more reliable job.

Jamie White grew up on Sol Legare (pronounced Sol Le-gree) Road in James Island. Sol Legare holds a long history of African American fishing traditions. Jamie grew up with marshes and rivers as his backyard. Going out to pick clams and oysters was a daily part of his life. He learned from his uncles, George and Richard Brown. Jamie moved to Atlanta and sold cars then retail clothing but returned home after the 2008 recession.

Janice Richards was born in Eastpoint in 1945 and has been shucking oysters since 1960. Her mother taught her the trade when she was a girl. Early on she learned to take her time to shuck a clean oyster. Janice married her husband, Johnny Richards, an oysterman, at the age of fourteen. They've worked at a handful of seafood houses over the years, and today they work together at Tommy Ward's oyster house, 13 Mile. Johnny gets the oysters, and Janice shucks his catch. But these years of shucking have taken their toll.

In 1973 Captain Horace Crosby left his job in law enforcement and bought Crosby’s Fish & Shrimp on James Island in Charleston.  The business started as a live bait operation.  His twin daughters, Ellie and Joanie, grew up in the store.  While their father rarely let people go out on the boat with him, he often extended the opportunity to Joanie.  A fire destroyed Crosby’s in 1987, and a year later the sisters – not a pair for sitting behind a desk – rebuilt the business with the help of their father and brother, Timothy.  The next year Hurricane Hugo took it all

Growing up on Silver Hill plantation in McClellanville, South Carolina, Julie McClellan spent her days out on a small wooden batteau accompanying her stepfather, Ellis Dawsey, as he scratched clams on his leases at White Banks and Oyster House and sold the catch to Carolina Seafood. After high school she married and went straight to work in restaurants, building houses, and later operated a deer processing plant with her husband before they divorced. For the past twenty-five years, Julie’s made her full-time living off the water.

With her father in the Air Force, Kimberly Carroll grew up living in all parts of the country: Mississippi, Florida, Alaska, and finally Charleston. In 1992 she was working as a radiologist at Roper Hospital when she met Raul Morales, a crabber and native of Cuba, while hanging out on a shrimp boat in Mount Pleasant. They fell in love, and Kimberly started selling fresh catch for Raul’s seafood business, Raul’s Seafood, which was located at Shem Creek on the Geechee Dock. Kimberly sold to 150 restaurants across the Lowcountry.

When Leroy Duvall refers to himself as one of the younger people, it's despite his 64 years, but it's without a trace of irony. Part of it is that he is the President of the Fleur de Lis Society, a club half the size of what it once was because its membership is slowly passing from old age. And part of it is that, after 30 years of shrimping on the Gulf, his body still feels young. Eventually, the economic repercussions of endangered turtles forced him to retire from shrimping, and when Hurricane Katrina washed away his bakery, he retired from that, too. Mr.

Born and raised in Eastpoint, Lynn Martina grew up in the seafood industry. Her parents, John and Sherrill Carroll, were in the business for almost thirty years. Lynn started shucking at her parents' oyster house at the age of nine. She would get out of school and head straight to the shucking stall. But after Lynn finished school, she got a job in banking. In 1997, though, Lynn's parents were ready to retire. They sold Braxton and Carroll Seafood to their daughter. Lynn changed the name to Lynn's Quality Oysters.

Mark Marhefka is a commercial fisherman originally from Jacksonville, Florida. He owns Abundant Seafood with his wife, Kerry, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. He delivers his fresh catch to more than twenty restaurants in Charleston, and runs a CSF (community-supported fishery) from Shem Creek where he docks his boat, the Amy Marie.