Like many Outer Banks natives, Basnight’s family is spread out all over the area, although she and her daughter, 11-year-old Brayden, have always lived in Manteo. “The best place to grow up that you can ever have growing up,” she declares, a trace of the local Hoi Toide accent still dogging her speech, turning “fire” into “far” and “wire” into “war.”

Her parents gave her a little skiff when she was 11, and she’d roam the waters around her parents’ house off Mother Vineyard Road. Like a lot of kids who grow up on the water, she could drive a boat long before she could drive a car. She started crabbing with a friend when she was 20, and soon she was showing up for her part-time job at R.V.’s Restaurant with her arms torn up from building her own crab pots. A board member for the seafood education group NC Catch, she’s one of the few female fishermen along the Outer Banks. She uses the shrimp to fill her freezer and give to local friends going through hard times. It can last anywhere from a week to a month.Įven when it’s not crab season, Basnight is out there every day, fishing or shrimping.

Soft-shell season is a short but busy stretch of spring determined by the moon, global warming, and things that only crabs understand. The Marc Basnight Bridge, completed in 2019. Old Red is a working boat and looks it: Water and seaweed slosh around the bottom, and the windscreen in front of the wheel has been held together with tape since a limb fell on it during a storm. “But she does it.”įor the locals who line up with the tourists at Lone Cedar Café from March to December, there’s a lot of heritage and expectation wrapped up in the name Basnight.īasnight, 54, spends her nights in the kitchen, jumping in on the cooking line and assisting the restaurant’s chef, Susan Peele.īut her life is really outside, on the water in Old Red, a 21-foot Privateer built in Belhaven, N.C., in 1985. Karen Amspacher, director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island and an expert on the Outer Banks’ seafood culture, says Lone Cedar Café is the only restaurant she knows that is “totally, 100 percent, dedicated to local seafood.” Instead of blue marlin and swordfish trophies on the walls, Lone Cedar’s ceilings are covered with fishing poles, nets, crab pots, and fish traps to make the point that it’s all about the people who do the fishing. North Carolina’s beaches are lined with tourist traps where all the seafood is fried, oyster season never ends, and the crab legs are flown in from Alaska.

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