Coastal Carolina's ship comes in.

• Position: Special Advertising Section:Wilmington/Brunswick Area - Includes related article

Community leaders in the Wilmington area are confident that if they build a large aquarium, the tourists will come.

But they're equally sure the aquarium, currently under consideration, would also lure new business and industry.

The University of North Carolina at Wilmington recently received a grant to study the feasibility of building a $30 million aquarium in New Hanover County. As envisioned, it would be substantially larger than the state-owned one at Fort Fisher.

"The aquarium, should it come to downtown Wilmington or somewhere in Wilmington, would attract a lot of people," says Wayne Zeigler, executive director of the business-recruiting Committee of 100. "Should they come here, they will experience the beauty and charm of the area and maybe invest in projects down here."

The strategy has worked before.

Charles Agnoff is owner of Interroll Corp., a recent transplant. Since his wife is from Kinston, Eastern North Carolina seemed like the natural place to move Long Island, N.Y.-based Interroll. But the beach was an afterthought.

"We first looked in a radius around Kinston," Agnoff says. "We went to Morehead City, Fayetteville, Clinton. At the end of the road, we came to Wilmington. My wife remembered it as where people went fishing.

"But when we saw it, we said, 'You mean you can actually work where people are on vacation?' That sold us."

The Resources Development Commission in Brunswick County, which is across the Cape Fear River from New Hanover, is blatant in using its beach as bait for industry.

A photograph in one of its fliers shows two men lounging on the beach -- one has a fishing pole in one hand and a cellular phone in the other. Both men are dressed in suits and ties. Instead of an ice chest, there is an open briefcase. The heading reads, "Why not live where you vacation?"

"We tell prospects they can build a company here and they can live on a golf course or the beach and be only 10 minutes away," says Thomas Monks, executive director of the Resources Development Commission. "Why should they wait until they retire?"

The region's most enduring success is as a vacation spot. Despite the recession, tourism was up nearly 14% in the 1990-91 fiscal year, according to the Cape Fear Coast Convention & Visitors Bureau. That falls within the annual growth rate of 10% to 15% recorded during the past five years.

By most accounts, tourism remains the region's largest industry. But the interplay between business and pleasure is hard to miss.

"There are so many things that make us unique to all types of travelers," says Jane Peterson, president of the Cape Fear CVB.

"That's the reason I decided to come to Wilmington, because everything was in place: the historic downtown, the beaches, the port, the USS North Carolina, a growing community with lots to offer," she says. "Business travel also is tremendously big because of the industry here."

Of course, it wasn't the beach as much as a protected harbor along the Cape Fear River that drew the first permanent white settlers to the area in the 1700s. Since then, the region has thrived as a transportation hub -- with two notable exceptions that occurred at about the same time.

In the mid-1950s, Atlantic Coast Line Railroad -- now part of CSX Corp. -- announced it was moving its headquarters from Wilmington to Jacksonville, Fla., signaling the loss of thousands of jobs -- many of them white-collar.

It was also in the mid-'50s that the nation's interstate highways were mapped...