At age 51, Hughes is a wiry, plainspoken man with a weathered face. He grew up in Longwood, NC, just over the state line, and learned to fish from his father and other family members when he was a boy. "Oh, I've fished all my life, seems like," he laughs.

Though Hughes worked in construction and nuclear power plants for over 30 years, he never stopped fishing, because he loved it so much. Finally, about five years ago, he made it his full-time job. "I figured I was going to have to work for the rest of my life anyway, so I might as well do something I liked!" he chuckled. On his 16-ft. flat-bottomed Carolina skiff, Hughes fishes, six days a week, for spot, whiting – and blue crab.

His day begins at sunrise and ends at mid-day, before it gets hot, and he works all year 'round, fishing and crabbing along the coastlines of North and South Carolina. Most of his business comes from Berry's Seafood in Little River.

"Now that crabbing has picked up, Walter brings in 1,200-1,500 lbs. per week," says owner Carl Berry. "He's a hard worker and a good friend."

Hughes reports that crabbing has changed a good bit since he first learned his trade. For example, crabbers once threw their backs into the process of extracting their traps from the sea.

"Now it's all gone from hard labor to machinery," Hughes says. "Like the crab pot puller. It's an electric motor with a wheel on it. You put your rope in, and it pulls the pot up out of the water. When I first started, you didn't use them. Now, just about everybody has one!" It's not surprising. A crab pot with an average haul weighs about 20 lbs., and Hughes pulls, empties, and resets as many as 75 pots per day.

This job is not without its own unique perils. The wind, for instance, is an unpredictable foe. "You can't control your boat - it's blowing you into the marsh. Then the water gets rough, and you're rocking and rolling… it's the worst thing in the world!" Hughes says.

Manmade hazards, though less dangerous, tend to make a crabber's job difficult. "Yachters come by too fast and throw a big wake, filling up your boat… I've been there a few times!" Hughes recalls. Additionally, yacht propellers sometimes cut the lines of the buoys that mark the location of each crab pot. Though this is usually accidental, every cut buoy means lost income to a crabber. "I've spent hours and hours dragging hooks, trying to find my pots," he says. "Very seldom do I ever find one, once a buoy's been cut."

Simple theft is also a constant problem for crabbers. "I lost over a hundred crab pots last season," Hughes says. "Each one of those pots cost me about $15.00. That hurts." Most of the time, people simply steal the crabs and leave the pots, but a pot that isn't set won't catch any crabs. Though he knows it's improbable, Hughes wishes that crab thieves would reset the empty traps before tossing them back into the sea.

Expectations of wealth are unrealistic for solo commercial fishermen. "Every year it changes. You make anywhere from $12,000-$40,000 a year, gross, depending on how hard you're willing to work, and you're constantly repairing something," Hughes explains. "You have to look at more than one year to justify it. And you have to love it to do it."

Though he's realistic about the pitfalls of the job, Hughes is reminded every day of the reasons he became a full-time fisherman. "I like the quietness, the serenity of being out in the water… the sound of the ocean. " After a moment's reflection, he adds simply, "It's nice out there."