As the doors of Newcastle Fisherman's Co-op opened at 7am on Thursday morning, seafood lovers lined up with their ice-boxes and cooler bags ahead of the Easter long weekend.
Customers were flooding into the shopfront at Wickham to snag a catch for their Good Friday feasts.
Despite pre-ordering stacks of seafood to keep up with demand, retail manager Nathan Evans was anticipating to sell out earlier than normal.
"We've planned for a certain amount of sales but so far it looks they're gonna exceed by a fairly significant margin," he said.
"I'm not really sure why, maybe people are staying home for Easter this year but we've been ridiculously busy compared to previous years, there's been constant customers all day."
For the week leading up to Easter, the Co-op ordered three-and-a-half tonnes of prawns and 1450 dozen oysters.
Best sellers on Thursday were salmon, barramundi, local prawns and oysters.
Adamstown Heights resident Cole Reed purchased a couple of kilos of prawns and was planning to celebrate Good Friday with his signature dish, curry prawns.
"I always get my seafood from here, I really enjoy my prawns," he said.
It was a sale of leatherjackets, seafood marinara and Queensland tiger prawns for Sherynne Smith who was planning to celebrate Easter with her son and "granddog" Sonny the doberman.
"It will be fun because he [Sonny] likes to have a bit of seafood as well," she said.
Ms Smith said while she grew up with seafood on Good Friday as a religious tradition, she chooses to celebrate many occasions with produce from the Co-op.
"It's just a choice, and I love to come to the Co-op here. They're a great team with beautiful food. We always come to the Co-op and we celebrate with seafood and a bottle of wine," she said.
The Co-op is open from 7am to 1pm on Good Friday and Mr Evans was expecting a sell-out day.
"We'll open up and as the day goes on we'll have less and less variety until hopefully there's nothing left," he said.
He also wanted to acknowledge his hard working staff and the respect customers have shown to each other during a chaotic time.
"We have extra staff on, I've got my 13 year-old son and his mate working and the public have been terrific. It's been so busy and crowded in there and we haven't had a murmur of discontent from anybody," he said.
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