Home waters

Our word is strange place these days. Technology encourages us to experience as much as possible as quickly as possible.

Exploring areas close to your home might not seem as rewarding as flying half way around the world to climb a famous mountain, but first impressions can be deceiving.

The picture above and to the left is what I consider my home waters. It happens to be about a five minute paddle from my dock. The water is part of the White Oak River, and I spend a fair amount of my time there either in an outboard powered skiff or my kayak.

While the surface looks smooth, what's below that surface is anything but smooth. Large oyster rocks (piles of oyster shells) can be just beneath the surface. The depth of the river can be anything from a few inches to over twenty feet. In the area where I paddle the most, the river is about a mile and one half wide. Ten minutes by power boat from there, the river is less than fifty feet wide. Then minutes in the other direction and the river joins Bogue Sound and not far from there the Atlantic Ocean. Of course there are also tides and winds to confound a boater.

In fact just to safely navigate the White Oak River, it is recommended that you stay in a marked channel. Sometimes the wind can blow much of the water out of the river. Even in the channel there will be places with only three or four feet of water.

Still Exploring the river is a lot of fun. Maybe in a few years, I will grow bored with the White Oak, but right now I am enjoying learning the river in detail.

The river can be a source of great peace. It can also bring storm surges and heavy waves. It can be a quiet as a pond as in my slide show, Mackerel Morning.

There are days that I push the throttle all the way forward and zoom down the White Oak to Bogue Inlet, but there are also times like today when we throw out the anchor less than five minutes from home.

Learning the river and catching its fishes have become dual passions of mine. It is fun exploring, and since there is no guide book, you have to figure it out on your own.

There is a certain amount of satisfaction in doing that. I might just be the person to write up the history of the White Oak.

Searching for new waters

A little adventure never hurts. That would especially be true when you spent Sunday afternoon in a very quiet real estate office.

Before I left for work, my wife and I decided that we had to get outside on such a beautiful day.

I suggested that we ride up the White Oak River which happens to be the river in our back yard.

She quickly agreed once she learned that any fishing would only be done in an emergency which would be defined as they are almost jumping in the boat.

Besides getting out on the water on a beautiful day, I wanted to check to see where people were fishing. Riding around and watching is a great way to find some new waters to fish.

I made it home after work by twenty minutes after five, and it took us about ten minutes to prepare our skiff and drop it in the water from the lift behind our home.

We have actually been up the river a couple of times, but at those times I was still focused on learning how to boat. Now I am comfortable enough with the boat that I can enjoy where I am going without worrying about what to do next.

We slowly went out Raymond's Gut from Bluewater Cove which is located at Hancock Point. I quickly got the boat on plane, and we headed up river.

There are only a few more channel markers after Hancock Point, but I had the advantage of our GPS system which had recorded a few fishing expeditions that I had enjoyed the previous week with my fishing buddies.

Once you are past the last channel markers and headed north on the White Oak River, mostly you are fine in the middle of the river as long as you avoid the crab pots and watch for white PVC poles which mark some oyster reefs. The river is about four feet deep at high tide in most places.

The river going north is much less complex than it is south of Hancock Point where the channel is marked all the way to Swansboro. In the section from Hancock Point to Swansboro, there are many oyster reefs which can do serious damage to your boat if you stray from the channel and do not know what you are doing.

It took less than ten minutes before Hadnot Creek and White Oak Bluffs came into sight. In just a couple more minutes I impressed my wife by going full speed through a narrow opening in the marshes. Of course I had watched others do it and had checked it out with my depth finder earlier in the week.

After that we could see River Oaks Plantation subdivision on the right. Then the White Oak began to narrow and deepen. As I slowed up, my depth finder zoomed from four feet to sixteen feet.

No long after that the river rapidly narrowed to around one hundred feet wide. Considering the White Oak is close to a mile and one half wide at Hancock Point that is big change.

As the river narrowed it also gave up being a straight river and began doubling back upon itself.

We managed to make it to the southern side of what I like to call the Stella "fishtail" which you can see from this Google Map link.

Across the flat marshlands we could see the railroad trestle and the few buildings of Stella. We could have gone a little farther and perhaps turned around at Boondocks which is a paid access point and boat ramp just on the other side of the Stella Road bridge just north of the railroad trestle.

However, the sun was getting down in the sky, and the prospects of navigating the White Oak in the dark kept me on the cautious side of adventure. The old floats that are on the multitude of crab pots are a much harder to spot in dwindling light so we turned around and headed home.

We got the boat on the lift about six thirty. By the time we carried the gear to the garage and got in the house, the sky was turning golden, and the sun was getting near the horizon.

Our little one hour trip up the river was great fun. I am looking forward to going back when we have more time. October is the best month of the year for exploring.

I posted a few slides on the web of our trip.

The joy of discovery

I have been lucky to have been in a number of places that inspire the imagination. Those were places where the landscape can dwarf your ideas.

I can still remember the first time that I saw the Newfoundland barrens from the air. It was a wilderness that seemed never to end.

Now that I am shoehorned into a lot in a very special subdivision, it is hard to stand on hill and see nothing but trees. However, it is even more special to paddle around the corner and visit a pond that had been inaccessible.

This afternoon it did not take a lot of NFL football to get me thinking about doing something outside even with the clouds that had taken away our morning blue sky.

Sometimes I think living in Carteret County creates an addiction to blue sky. We have it so often, that it becomes part of consciousness. When it is not there, we miss it. The good news is that it is there more often than not. A day like today where the sky starts blue and turns cloudy throws me for a little loop.

But I managed to get myself motivated and in my kayak in mid-afternoon. We had a very high tide. It was probably the highest that I have seen while actually on the water paddling my kayak.

When I turned the corner to head out to the White Oak River, I noticed the high water had made accessible a pond where I have often seen Herons. In fact just before I started paddling towards the pond I noticed a Great Blue Heron and a White Heron in the old tree at the back of the pond.

As soon as they saw me heading their way, they moved to another tree across the gut while I explored the pond area.

There's something special about finding and exploring a neat spot like the flooded pond. I have paddled the area for two years and never suspected that the water might get high enough to let me paddle into the pond.

It is even more fun when the hidden area is just around the corner from your home.

I did not stay very long since the idea of dragging my kayak out of there over mud did not appeal to me. I moved on before the high tide started to disappear.

My trip out into the river was an easy one with the wind behind me. I managed to fish a little, but mostly I enjoyed the solitude of the river. Only two power boats came by in the couple of hours that I was out there.

I did catch one fish which was barely as big as the Gotcha lure that I was using. Still it was nice to know that the lure was capable of attracting fish.

I have found some pretty neat spots hiking in the mountains behind our home in Roanoke,Va. On our farm in Canada I can still remember finding a wonderful spring which the previous owner of our farm had mentioned to me. It was such a neat spot that I carried a Sierra Cup back into the woods and left it hanging there for anyone that happened upon the cool waters which flowed so strongly that you could see the steam from it in the woods even with four feet of snow on the ground.

I suspect I will remember this day that the tide was high enough to let me visit the Heron's home pond. It was a special visit where I got to see our inlet from a different perspective. It just shows you that adventure can just be around the corner.

I posted a few pictures of my trip which lets you join me on my visit.

Nature's Power

We can certainly can credit the weather channel with developing our fear of hurricanes.

All of us who walk the beaches can attest to the power of the wind and waves. The beach changes daily even without help from the storms.

Now that we are sitting here waiting for Hurricanes Hannah and Ike, there is the expectation that the beaches will be very different the next time we walk on them.

We went for a boat ride and very nice beach walk on Labor Day. There were some big changes on our favorite beach. One large dune had been cut in half. Of course the waves were somewhat stirred up from all the storm activity in the Atlantic Ocean.

We're not hurricane pros so today we went out and bought some bottled water and battery powered lights. The budget doesn't have room for a generator yet so we have to gamble a little.

If we lose power, we will pack our goods needing refrigeration into ice filled coolers and hope for the best. If Ike continues to gain strength, we might head to the mountains after securing everything.

The Cape Carteret area is in the Cone of Possbility for a hurricane. I hope they are wrong or that at the very least the storm exits quickly,

Changing times

Our world is changing. Some of the changes are not exactly what I would call positive.

There is no question that the is world is a far different place than when the millstone to the left was working in Styers Mill in Yadkin County, NC in days around 1915 when my mother was a little girl.

People knew each other a little better a hundred years ago. Most people were still on the farm. I still remember my mother telling me about her first driver's license. "The Mount Airy DMV" which I believe was a judge at the time asked her if she could drive, she said "Yes," and the judge told her to give him fifty cents, and he gave her the license.

If the reports about the Prince George's County, Maryland SWAT attack are accurate as presented, we're living in a world where danger might be coming from the people charged with protecting us.

Even if the reports are wrong, why do we have SWAT teams that regularly seem to go after people who are unarmed? On top of that why do the dogs always get shot?

Is the drug war such a priority that people have to face raids like this?

If we have SWAT teams sitting around waiting to be used, perhaps they will eventually find the shootout that they seem to want.

I understand some drug dealers have automatic weapons, but most of the reports that I am reading aren't about shootouts with heavily armed drug dealers.

I am pretty sure that the Labrador Retrievers were unarmed.

The bigger view

Sometimes it is hard to take the bigger view of a situation. It is easy to get bogged down in the details.

This picture of Bogue Sound looking east towards Morehead City is truly a large view. Yet when I am piloting my boat on the sound, I end up paying a lot of attention to the next channel marker.

If I do that consistently I generally stay out of trouble. Normally I take short trips on our skiff, but my career and life are much longer journeys. Yet in their cases it is even harder at times to rise above the details and focus on the big picture.

I recently was confronted with a situation where someone did something unethical. Not only was it unethical, but it harmed my income at a time when there is not a lot of income.

The experience that I have had in the business world let me back away from the situation and look at what was really important, my client. I did not lose my cool, I went forward with the situation until it resolved itself without me having to do anything other than the right thing for my client.

It was actually pleasing to watch the problem resolve itself without any real intervention.

The appropriate things ended up happening. I'm not sure if the unethical person learned a lesson, but certainly their behavior only ended up hurting them and the person who decided to play the game with them.

There was no collateral damage and for that I'm happy. Maybe being able to go for a walk on the beach makes it easier to see the big picture. That is one of the great benefits of living where we live.

Here are some shots of a perfect beach trip which might help some folks step back enough to focus on the big picture.

If that doesn't work, some visit us on the Crystal Coast and take a real walk along the beach.

Treating customers right

Most people are aware that the real estate business is not booming these days.

While the market is changing things are still challenging. We certainly are not the only industry under the gun. Airlines, automakers, and restaurants just to name a few are all having their problems surviving the economic downturn.

Realtors® are not different than others, our costs are rising, and our incomes have certainly tanked.

I have often quoted Dennis Waitley's famous phrase, "Crisis is an opportunity riding dangerous wings." I believe that change is inevitable in most business. You either change or you go out of business.

However, change has to be carefully considered. Need jerk change can often be harmful. We have become a very value conscious society. If you bump your prices up and don't deliver more value for the money, you will likely have a problem.

On Monday, I gave some potential long term clients a ride around the county. I probably spent $25 dollars in gas. Yet I was able to show them in a couple of hours what might have taken them a couple of days to find and see.

I didn't ask for a buyer's agency before driving them around because they aren't ready to buy. I could have charged them $100 for being a tour guide, but that didn't make a lot of sense either.

It made the most sense to do what I have being doing all along, differentiate myself through the value and hard work that I bring to my clients

Trying to provide value to my clients has served me well, and I hope that the word of the extra efforts that I provide my clients continues to spread.

In the long run that will be worth more than $25 for gasoline