Anisa Khalifa: If you’re setting sail from Roanoke Island in North Carolina, the Outer Banks is the last thin stretch of land blocking you from the Atlantic ocean. And if you want to get out on the open sea, you have to cross what many sailors consider hell on water — Oregon Inlet.
Unidentified Speaker: It makes me nervous even thinking about going across Oregon Inlet when the wind’s blowing… it’s enough to keep you up at night thinking about it.
Unidentified Speaker:  Clearly a lot of trauma around passing through this area. And it's completely understandable.  One said Oregon Inlet has a reputation as bad as the Kremlin.
Anisa Khalifa: This narrow gap is infamous among local fishermen for its treacherous waters. It’s caused dozens of shipwrecks along the Carolina coast, helping the region live up to its ominous nickname.
Unidentified Speaker: The Graveyard of the Atlantic.
Anisa Khalifa: I’m Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, North Carolina’s deadliest body of water, and how local fishermen are navigating its risky depths.
Emily Cataneo: I first learned about Oregon Inlet last year and I’m always fascinated by stories that involve the ocean,  so I naturally wanted to learn more about that.
Anisa Khalifa: This is freelance journalist Emily Cataneo. She recently reported a story about one of the most dangerous waterways in the United States for The Assembly, an online news outlet. Earlier this year, Emily set off from Raleigh, North Carolina with one mission: drive as far east as possible.
Emily Cataneo: So if you drive from Raleigh east towards the Outer Banks, you will hit the whalebone, which is the intersection where if you turn left or north you'll head up towards Nags Head and Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills and eventually hit Currituck and such.
Anisa Khalifa: But Emily turned right.
Emily Cataneo: If you turn right, you'll be heading south, onto the part of the Outer Banks that's really just like a narrow strip of sand and you will eventually hit Oregon Inlet.
Anisa Khalifa: And that was her destination — Oregon Inlet. It’s a narrow pocket broaching the coast’s barrier islands that’s menaced communities along the Outer Banks for generations.
Emily Cataneo: The area has had a really bad reputation as a very dangerous area for seafaring basically since first contact, since the beginning of British colonization of North Carolina. And the reason for that is there are constantly shifting shoals around the Outer Banks. You never know if you're going to have a clear passage with your ship or your boat or whether you're going to hit a sandbar and sandbars can be really, really dangerous for seafarers.  
Anisa Khalifa: Emily says the inlet’s shifting shoals have routinely caused boats to get stuck or even capsize — often putting sailors in serious danger.
Emily Cataneo: 27 deaths since 1961 in the inlet. Um, one fisherman I talked to said he knows personally of 12 to 15 boats that were lost there.
Anisa Khalifa: What makes these waters so dangerous? Like, what is actually happening here?
Emily Cataneo: The inlet, originally, it was like, this is great because it's an easy way for the fishermen to get through the barrier islands, um, instead of previously it was all the way from Chesapeake down to Beaufort and Morehead City. There was no way through the outer banks, um, until Oregon Inlet was made.  It was formed in 1846 when a hurricane tore through the Barrier Island and made this inlet,  but the issue is that  there are sands that piles up and nobody, it's ever shifting and it's really hard to tell is this channel going to be 4 feet, is this channel going to be 14 feet. Add in choppy waves, add in dramatic tides, add in winds, and it's really, really difficult to navigate.
Anisa Khalifa: These dangerous conditions have rightly made Oregon Inlet notorious. But it’s only one part of a much deeper legacy. The waters off the Outer Banks are known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. And for good reason.
Molly Trivelpiece: We have over 2,000 shipwrecks off the coast of North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: That’s Molly Trivelpiece. She’s the education curator at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras, North Carolina. She says a whole host of things have helped create this graveyard:
Molly Trivelpiece: Weather is a big one, or the environment really.
Anisa Khalifa: And then there’s the pirates. Way back in piracy’s heyday, swashbucklers — including the famous Blackbeard — used the shallow waters to hit trade ships that passed through the area.
Molly Trivelpiece: And in the faster, smaller ships with a shallower draft so they could get into the shallower waterways that big trade ships cannot get into.
Anisa Khalifa: But it’s not just old wooden ships from the 18th century down there.
Molly Trivelpiece: I don't think a lot of people realize that World War II was hit so close to home over here. We've got a couple of U boats sunk off the coast. They did quite a bit of damage in World War I and World War II actually.
Anisa Khalifa: However, there’s one modern shipwreck in particular that stands out above them all.
Molly Trivelpiece: It's one of my favorites, so, November 2006, what is known as the chip wreck. There was a big container ship, and I think it was a nor'easter, they lost a couple of those containers, and one of those just kind of made its way towards shore, and as it came ashore, it broke open, and it was full of Dorito bags.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS BROADCAST)
Molly Trivelpiece: I think it was like three different flavors or something. And locals came and just scooped them up before the Park Service even knew about it, the local word had spread between all the locals, and they came and just scooped up all as many Dorito bags as they could and, you know, they were still sealed. So they're still good to eat.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, that’s incredible.
Molly Trivelpiece: Yeah, there was a lot of Dorritos for a while down here .
Anisa Khalifa: When Emily Cataneo visited Oregon Inlet, she didn’t find any Dorito bags on the shore. But she did come across a group of local fishermen with years of experience navigating these deadly waters.
Emily Cataneo:  Wanchese is an industrial fishing town, um, on Roanoke Island. And It's a really cool atmosphere. There are, um, different, um, fish houses along the water there and the day that I went, it was a Saturday, there were a lot of guys hanging out in the fish house, they were smoking, they were talking. What kind of fish are those?
Unidentified Speaker: Those are jumping mullets.
Emily Cataneo:   They all had horror stories. Every single one of them had a tale to tell.
Mark Vrablic: You'd smoke a pack of cigarettes going down there. Biting your fingernails, look at my fingernails. Bite your fingernails, it's a habit that you can't get out of…
Emily Cataneo:  I talked to Mark Vrablic, who's the Vice President and General Manager of Etheridge Seafood, and one of my big takeaways from Mark was how entrenched the stories of trauma in the inlet are in this community.
Mark Vrablic: You know, I've seen a lot of boats going out there, 4 boats go anf then the 5th boat goes and a Hawaii-Five-O wave comes and washes their windows out and destroys everything in their boat.
Emily Cataneo:  And just the language that he used in talking about these experiences was really striking. He kept calling it spooky.
Mark Vrablic: If that inlet looks all right, if we can just get to that bridge, I don't care what happens then, I know we're okay. But because we've seen boats upset, we've seen people drown.
Emily Cataneo:  They all had horror stories, Every single one of them had a tale to tell.
Robert Hansen: I have a lot of experience with Oregon Inlet.
Emily Cataneo:   I also talked with Robert Hansen. He's a commercial fisherman who works for Etheridge fish house in Wanchese.
Robert Hansen: I've lost a boat there, I've almost lost my life during that.
Emily Cataneo:  His boat was called the Foxy Lady, and on Thanksgiving in 2001, his boat rolled upside down and he spent 25 minutes in the water, which in November on the Outer Banks is really cold.
Robert Hansen: I’m sweating right now thinking about something that happened 20 years ago. I’m terrified of it, I’m totally terrified of it.
Anisa Khalifa: So why even sail through it if it's this treacherous?
Emily Cataneo:  The fishermen have to get to work. Um. If you're not from Wanchese, you don't have to sail through the inlet and many people don't. They just go to other ports and they don't patronize the fish houses at Wanchese anymore. But if you work there in the industrial part on, um, Roanoke Island, there's kind of no other way to get to your job. It's like if you had to drive on a really dangerous highway to get to work. What else are you going to do?
Anisa Khalifa: When we come back, the story of one man who took that dangerous highway to work and never came home.
So Emily, in your reporting, you spotlight a fisherman named Charlie Griffin. Who is he and what's his story?
Emily Cataneo:  Charlie Griffin was a fisherman who, um, worked out of Wanchese. He had been sailing through Oregon Inlet since he was nine years old, on all sorts of different kinds of boats. And he had some national fame because he had starred in a reality show called Wicked Tuna about, um, bluefin anglers.
(SOUNDBITE FROM WICKED TUNA)
Charlie Griffin: My name is Charlie Griffin, everybody calls me Griff. I started fishing when I was a young boy and and I've spent my entire life on the Outer Banks.
Emily Cataneo:  So, last March, Charlie Griffin and his friend had been hired to deliver a boat, um, from Virginia Beach. And, um, Charlie took the boat through Oregon Inlet and, um, he didn't show up.  He didn't show up in Wanchese.
Jake Griffin: You know, we, we just assumed that everything was fine. You know, he, he's been coming in and out of that since he was 9 years old.
Anisa Khalifa: This is Jake Griffin, Charlie Griffin’s son.
Jake Griffin: Fast boats, slow boats, empty boats, heavy boats, just been in and out of his whole life.
Emily Cataneo: But by 11 o'clock when he hadn't showed up, they started to get worried. Jake texted him and the text bounced back. The next morning he still hadn't shown up and Jake told me that he drove down to the beach on the south side of the inlet to look and see if he could find any sign of his father.
Jake Griffin: Found a boat cushion and a diesel jug. And knew, knew then what it was.
Emily Cataneo: And that's when he knew, OK, the boat wrecked.
Jake Griffin: Once I saw that I couldn't go down the beach anymore, something, something is telling me not to go, not to go down the beach.
Emily Cataneo: And he waited a few more hours, but he kind of already knew, and then the coast guard confirmed that his father had died in the inlet trying to get that boat through there. And he said in winter, which is when I interviewed him, it's even worse because there are so many fewer days when you actually can go out that you make decisions where you're like, well, the conditions aren't ideal, but they'll probably be worse tomorrow, so I'm gonna push it and I'm gonna go out.
Jake Griffin: And, and I, I still had to make a living coming in and out of here and there ain't a trip that I go across the water, I don't think about my dad and it don't break me down, and there ain't a day that I wake up and I don't start my day out thinking about walking across that dune.
Emily Cataneo: It's his job. He's a fisherman and there's no other way to get from Wanchese to the open sea unless you want to go all the way down Pamlico Sound and go out at Morehead City.
Anisa Khalifa: How can you make these waters less dangerous. Have there been any solutions that have been offered?
Emily Cataneo: So the  jetty. The jetty is the solution that has been talked about a lot over the past decades and it is a very controversial solution. Basically a jetty is a man made structure that protrudes from the land out into a body of water. Um, it's usually made of stone or cement. And jetties, um, are typically effective for breaking rough water and holding sand in place. So if there were a jetty or two jetties in Oregon Inlet, it would likely make the sand a lot more stable. There wouldn't be as much shoaling, it would just make everything a lot more predictable.
 But the issue is that environmental and conservation groups tend to be really anti jetty. They say that hardened structures disrupt fish larvae, migration patterns, um, generally hurt key species that the fishermen actually really rely on for their jobs, um, that they cause erosion, that they degrade water quality, just generally lots of bad things for the longevity of our oceans.
Anisa Khalifa:  Did this ever come close to actually becoming a reality, though?Emily Cataneo:  So traveling back in time to the 1970s, um, in 1970 Congress actually authorized the construction of two jetties in the inlet.  in the decades after 1970, there were so many lawsuits, so many environmental studies, economic studies, back and forth…
And we were told back in the 70s that we would maybe get some kind of permanent stabilization in Oregon Inlet, and it's just one environmental study after another.
Emily Cataneo:  And eventually in 2003, after, again, those decades of back and forth and millions of dollars spent, um, the Bush White House announced the plan was dead. That's not to say that there aren't people who still want jetties. All the fishermen in Wanchese still say that they want jetties. One told me a jetty would be better than white bread.
Anisa Khalifa: So in the absence of a Jetty, are there any other, like, workarounds or other potential solutions?
Emily Cataneo: Yeah, so there is one major improvement in the inlet that's happened over the past decade, and that is the dredge. So a dredge is a boat that basically sails around scooping or dragging sand, which helps prevent those shoals that I mentioned earlier that are really dangerous. So the dredge is a boat named Miss Katie, great name, and it arrived in Wanchese in 2022. It was funded by a public-private partnership, and now the state and Dare County pay about 12 million a year for Miss Katie to motor around and basically make sure that the channels stay open and that the shoal doesn't build up.  
Mark Vrablic: It's better than not having a dredge, you know it keeps us going but you never know from one storm to another
Emily Cataneo: It's definitely made things better. The fishermen are happy that they have a dredge. Overall, people said great things about the dredge, but fishermen also described it to me as a Band Aid on the problem. Um, they're happy with it, but they don't think it's enough.
Anisa Khalifa: What’s next for Oregon Inlet and the fishermen who navigate it?
Emily Cataneo:  They go to work, right? They keep sailing through the inlet. Um, they have the dredge. People are still talking about a jetty, but it seems like a pie in the sky dream. There are many reasons why commercial fishermen feel like they are imperiled and their livelihood is imperiled but they say that Oregon Inlet certainly doesn't help. It's a big reason why, um, they feel like Wanchese is not the robust place that it could be or that it used to be, and who knows what the future holds for the industry and Oregon Inlet's a huge part of that.
Mark Vrablic: Anybody that says they don't respect Oregon Inlet, it's because they've never gone across it very much.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was a co-production with The Assembly. If you’d like to read Emily Cataneo’s article about the Oregon Inlet at their website, we’ve dropped a link in the show notes. Charlie Shelton-Ormond is our producer. Jerad Walker is our editor. Our executive producer is Wilson Sayre.
The Broadside is a production of ¼ª²ÊÍøÍøվ–North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR Network. If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! I'm Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.