Blackfish

Between four and five miles off shore at Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, lay the blackfish banks, a worm-encrusted limestone reef projecting several feet off the bottom where the water stands one hundred feet or so deep. During the summer months, this outcrop teams with blackfish. An almond-shaped, large-eyed, and large-scaled resident of the coastal shallows, the blackfish is chubby yet agile, feeding on small crustaceans and fish. Capable of growing in excess of eighteen inches long, the standard size of an adult is a foot with a weight ranging from five to six pounds. Since the colonial period it has been the most abundant food fish available in Carolina markets and made up nine-tenths of the fish harvested by the commercial smacks that plied the coastal waters in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.