Laten Reaves
Laten Reaves decided as a teenager that he would earn his living from the sea. Reaves grew up in Holden Beach, N.C., where he and his family lived at the shore. “We lived at the beach all our lives, hearing the sea breaking,” he said. He began shrimping at 16 as a deck hand for Junior Fulford, a captain he remembers as a tough task master.
“He’d about kill you,” Reaves said. “He’d work you to death.” But Reaves found that he was making good money, “especially for a kid,” and enjoyed the job so much that he decided to buy his own boat while still in high school.
His father worked for the federal government with the Army Corps of Engineers and had never been out on a boat, but he agreed to help Reaves with the purchase and co-signed a bank note for $9,100 to cover the cost.
While at the bank to sign the papers, the banker took Reaves aside and warned him that if he didn’t make his payments, his father could lose everything. So Reaves made it his mission to keep up with the payments and paid his boat off in 3 years. Then he visited the banker again to pick up the papers.
It was then that the banker let him know that his dad had paid for the boat from the outset, and Reaves’ payments had been going back into his dad’s account. Reaves would later return the favor by buying his own son Craig a boat when he was 16. Reaves worked the Florida Gulf Coast for 14 years and started coming to Beaufort to fish in 1963 as a stop along the way when headed to Florida. He started Reaves Brother’s Seafood in Holden Beach, a fish restaurant and processing plant, in the early 1970s.
His children and grandchildren have followed him into the seafood business. His son Cameron is also a commercial fisherman. In 1992 Reaves and his wife Alice decided to move their family here permanently and helped Craig and his wife Jana start C.J. Seafood, a wholesale operation. The business has expanded to the Sea Eagle Market on Boundary Street, and C.J. Seafood Express on Ribaut Road in Port Royal. You can also find Reaves at the Sea Eagle Market at Village Creek on St. Helena Island.
The Reaves also have a daughter, Becky, a dental hygienist for a local dentist. Despite competition from imported shrimp and higher fuel costs, “shrimping is on the way back,” Reaves said, and it’s possible now to make a good living. He considers a good haul to be 500 to 600 lbs. of shrimp. The most startling thing he ever saw while shrimping was a jewfish or Atlantic goliath grouper he pulled in with a straight net that weighed about 400 lbs. When he pulled the net up he saw the goliath staring back at him with eyes that were about 3 inches in diameter.
Another time he pulled in a human foot still clad in socks and a shoe, that left him wondering where the rest of the body was. Reaves has a reputation as a savvy do-it-yourselfer among other shrimpers, a true “MacGyver.” He’s even been know to diagnose an engine problem over the phone by listening to the noise it’s making. He built the shrimp boat the Captain Craig himself from scratch in 18 months. He remembers a different Beaufort from the 1960s and even into the 1980s that was “so laid back,” he said. “The hustle and bustle is something else,” now that Beaufort has become so commercialized, he said. But he still loves Beaufort for the natural beauty he remembers from his first visit. Visit seaeaglemarket.com for more information.