Icy Morning on the Gut

There are some years when when ice comes to our spot on the Crystal Coast earlier than others.  The year 2012, is not one of them.  We have enjoyed some great weather in December.  I even spent the morning of Christmas Day out in the White Oak River in my kayak.

The icy picture in the post was taken the morning of the last day of 2012.  It finally got cold enough to create some ice on Raymond's Gut.  The gut flows behind our home and heads out to the White Oak River.  We are subject to tides so you never know exactly what is going to happen with ice, but this time the ice disappeared by the middle of the afternoon.

The only reason that I got to see the ice is that I usually take an early morning walk of a couple of miles around the marsh that is near our home.  My first stop after I leave the house is the dock behind our home.  It takes me about five minutes to walk from there over to the boardwalk around our clubhouse.  There the sun is usually just getting to the tops of the big pine trees when I walk onto the boardwalk.  I snapped the picture at the top of the post just before I left the boardwalk.

It was December 31, when I was greeted by some ice in the gut and an otter enjoying an icy morning swim.   There was a pair of them and one even swam over to check me out.  It not unusual  to come upon wildlife on my morning walk.  We live in a natural paradise populated by egrets, herons, kingfishers, ducks, and other birds.  We also apparently have a good supply of fish that they enjoy eating.  At least that I what I assume since they keep coming back.

The icy morning I finished my hour and one half walk by checking out the water by our dock once again.  I found one of the otters looking for fish not far from the dock.  I only watched a couple of minutes before he caught one.  Luckily I had my video camera with me so I took a video of the otter enjoying his very fresh morning breakfast of fish.  The fish-eating otter video is now posted on YouTube.

People often ask me if I get tired of walking in the same area.  I do try to get over and hike the beaches when the weather isn't so cold, but I rarely am disappointed with my walk around the marshes.  While the cast of characters is often the same, I usually find them in a new spot or doing something different.

The numerous great blue herons that visit are my favorites.   It takes some patience and care to sneak up on a great blue and actually take a few photos.  It is a challenge that I enjoy.

I figure that my passion for taking pictures of wildlife is a great hobby.  It gets me outside, but it is a lot easier than owning a dog.  I also get to take pictures from our skiff and my kayak.  I have gotten some fantastic pictures from the kayak.  For some reason it is easier to sneak up on the big birds in the kayak than it is on foot.

You can enjoy many of the photos that I have taken in the area this fall at this photo album.  If the photos make you want to come for a visit, you can find more information at this page.

Before the Blow

We're lucky to be living tucked in by the water not far from the beaches of Emerald Isle, North Carolina.  Being protected just off a big river without pine trees close around your home is a pretty good recipe for staying out of trouble in the winds and storms of the Crystal Coast.  It is also very convenient when you want to enjoy the area's waters.

Our home is on Raymond's Gut a little more than half a mile from the center of the White Oak River.  The White Oak depending on how you measure its width is close to two miles across where we live.

Swansboro and the Intracoastal Waterway even with some zigging and zagging around oyster rocks are only about three miles down river.  The beach over by the Point at Emerald Isle is about six miles away as a pelican flies. 

A trip down the river in our skiff takes only six or seven minutes once you have idled out our inlet.  The total ride is about ten minutes and another ten minutes will put you well out Bogue Inlet and almost in the Atlantic Ocean.  We live in a place where the water provides easy access to many neat areas including Hammocks Beach, the Point, and Bogue Inlet.  These pictures of a ride down to the marshes south of Swansboro provide an idea of the beauty of the area.

It does not take many years of living near the beach to learn to appreciate a few miles of separation from the Atlantic Ocean.  Usually the wind blows a lot harder over by the beaches.  The cold seems to penetrate a little more by the ocean, and in the spring it seems to take a little longer to warm up the ocean compared to the river.  The beach is a little cooler in the summer, but I have heat pumps for that if I can't find some water to cool my body.

I truly enjoy going to the beach, but I don't mind the short commute from our home.  It comes with a lot of advantages.  One of those is protection from most storms.  As we are sliding toward the holiday season, the weather is definitely changing.  We are seeing more frequent storms and being a little farther away from the incubator of the storms is definitely an advantage.

In the last three weeks, we have witnessed Hurricane Sandy and two Northeasters.  When the storms are coming that regularly, any protection from the power of the Atlantic Ocean is welcome.  Of course as we have all learned, no place is immune from the power of Mother Nature.

Timing and location are often very important.  We have been lucky to to be witnesses to the formation of the Northeasters instead of seeing them at their peak power.  We also ended up on the less powerful end of Sandy.  My wife and I were traveling in Canada when Sandy started up the coast.

As soon as we realized the magnitude of Sandy, we turned and headed down the coast.  It seemed like we were seeing the stormy weather of Sandy from over a thousand miles away.  Yet being those six miles inland often provides a more protected life on the coast even with a huge storm like Sandy.

Barrier islands and marshes are the keys to protecting homes from storms.  We're really lucky to have Emerald Isle and its well-treed hills standing tall between our location and the power of the Atlantic Ocean.

As the wind and rain was slamming against our home on this Sunday before Thanksgiving 2012, it was easy to imagine just how much stronger the winds might be over on the shore.  I would love to open my door and go down to the beach to fish.  However, that pleasure comes with a bit more challenging weather than we have inland.

We often can tell when the weather is going to be bad.  The pelicans and herons will often abandon their more coastal haunts and come ride the storms out in our inlet.  They seem to enjoy the protection of our trees and marshes that keep much of the wind away from their perches.

I've written before about one spot where the Herons go to hide.  I'm very fortunate to be able to see that place from our upper deck and our dock.  One of the especially protected corners of the aviary requires a walk over to the community boardwalk, but I have seen several herons in there at one time.  When there is more than one heron in there, you know the weather is going to be bad because herons are not noted for being social.

Sunday morning before our latest Nor'easter, we had a pelican swimming behind the house and two great blue herons jostling with a younger great blue heron for a prized perch in the rookery.   I knew with all those big birds wandering around our cove that we would likely get a dose of nasty weather.

The rain and winds came early Sunday afternoon, but we just turned on the gas fire place logs and had a peaceful nap while the weather raged outside.  The knowledge that we were just far enough away to miss the worst of the storm made our nap just that much more peaceful.

Life by the River

Living on a coastal river is a very different experience than living on a river in other places.  One thing is that coastal river are often very wide.  The river near where we live is close to two miles wide.

While rain often causes flooding along rivers that are in the hill country or the mountains, if you live on a coastal river that is close to the ocean, the tide can often take care of a lot of problems.

In the summer of 2010 I wrote a piece called How to Enjoy a Coastal River.  Now that I look back at it, I was only beginning to understand the White Oak River when I wrote that post.

It is no joke to say that a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the summer of 2010.  In September of 2010, we had a freak rain storm in Bluewater Cove, the subdivision where we live.  We got over twenty inches of rain in less than twenty-four hours.

I have seen the Roanoke River where we lived in the mountains have serious flooding with less than half that amount of rain.  Fortunately for us the day we got the twenty-plus inches of rain on the coast, it came just as the tide was reaching its peak.  As soon as the tide turned, the high water at my dock started dropping even as the rain continued.

That the tide could take away all that water left a lasting impression on me.  Still the river had other lessons to teach.  In August of 2011, Hurricane Irene came for a visit.

Irene was an impressive storm, but our area came through in good shape.  Our power was out less than four hours.  The day after Irene came through the area, we went over to Emerald Isle and enjoyed ice cream cones.  I am certainly not belittling the power of hurricanes in saying we managed to survive in "good shape."   Another day things could have been different.

However, hurricanes are not strangers to the area.  People try not to have too many trees close to their homes here.   People in areas that are flood prone have foundations that let waters move through them.  Fortunately our beaches and marshes have not been over developed.  There is plenty of vegetation on Emerald Isle compared to many other coastal areas.

Our geography also helps us a little.  Just a little north and east of us, the Neuse River is much more subject to flooding because there is no land mass to slow the water of Pamlico Sound from blowing into the Neuse when conditions area right.

Even with these advantages life on the river has still been full of surprises.  On May 30, 2012 a very rare event happened.  We were brushed by a tornado.   Before May 30, I had heard that tornadoes normally dissipate as they approach the ocean waters.  It turns our that while it is very rare, we can have tornadoes just like the rare tornado that visited our friends in the mountains by Pulaski, Virginia.  Fortunately both in Pulaski and here in Peletier no one died from the tornadoes.  Our tornado lasted less than a minute.

The lessons of the last few years have taught me to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best.  No matter where we live, we all live close to very powerful forces of nature.  Those forces are closer than we care to admit.  We just have to realize that we cannot control mother nature.

In spite of getting a close hand look at the power of nature, I would not trade where we live for any of the many places that we have lived or even the ones that we have visited.  There is incredible scenic beauty here on the coast.  While there are times to be very respectful of the forces that surround us, there are other times when it almost seems that nature opens its arms for us.

The third week in April of 2012 I anchored my kayak in the middle of our river.  Sitting there are the oyster rocks, it was hard to think of a more peaceful place.  Especially one that can so easily renew your appreciation of the world where we live.

It often seems like our world along the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina is one which has no walls.  There are times that the water, the horizon and the sky seem to merge in a world of blue.

Because our water is so accessible, it is a big part of our life.  The morning of June 25, 2012 on my boat ride down river I saw hardly any ripples.   The same river nine hours later is a mass of white caps and foam.  The morning river ride was a wonderful pleasure.  Yet even I wouldn't challenge the river and its impressive whitecaps later in the day.

Respecting the weather and the water comes naturally when you have seen the awesome power that mother nature can unleash.  That the calm water pictured in the post can have whitecaps on it in the same day is just one of the wonders of being alive.

March Winds on the Coast

Spring has arrived on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina.  While we might be surprised with the early dose of warmth that 2012 has delivered to us, no one who lives here on the coast is surprised by the wind which is nearly a constant companion this time of year.

It does not matter whether you are on the river in a skiff as in the picture at the top of the post or walking along the beach.  Things are usually all stirred up by the winds through much of March and April.

We live on a very sheltered cove just off the White Oak River.  It is not unusual for spring winds to blow directly into our cove and create waves on our normally very quiet little inlet.

Waves on our inlet are not much cause for worry, but waves out on the river and sounds are a different story.  When you are trying use a skiff to get from one point to another and there are white caps on the river, you have to get your boat up on top of the waves and hold it there even as the winds and waves change.

If you don't, it can be a bumpy ride it. Handling a boat on top of the waves takes some practice, and even then sometimes things get rough.  A ride down the river with choppy water is nothing like a ride down the river on a quiet summer morning when the river is glassy smooth.  Still riding on some rough water is part of spring.

While we have great days in spring, there is no shortage of wind in the spring.  While the winds make the water rough for a time, they don't keep us at the dock all of the time.

As one of my fishing buddies is fond of saying, "All you have to do is find the right spot, and you will be out of the wind."  Sometimes in the spring and even in the fall, we will use Bear Island (Hammocks Beach State) as a windbreak.  There is a great channel behind the island.  It is often sheltered from some of our more persistent winds. Where there is will, there usually is a way to get on the water.

No one questions that our world of dazzling water exposes us to lots of wind and weather.  However, we are fortunate that we can count on our weather to nice more often that not here along North Carolina's Crystal Coast.

How many ofter places can you plant your tomato plants and go wading in ocean water in March and the next day cool off in the neighborhood swimming pool after mowing your yard for the first time in 2012?  I wonder how April 2012 could possibly top March? Then again, April 2011, was certainly a month to remember.

Maybe the winds will stop in early April this year.  It is the coast, and since we usually don't know the weather until we wake up in the morning, I wouldn't be surprised. Whatever happens, you will find me on or near the water most days because living here is all about the water.

December on the Beach

It is hard to believe that the four days leading up to Christmas Eve have had temperatures over 65F along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.  While it has been a warm winter so far on the east coast,  it has been terrific along the south facing beaches of the Crystal Coast.

The Crystal Coast runs roughly from Beaufort, NC to Swansboro, NC.  It is just enough off the beaten path to miss the huge crowds during the summer.  Most of us living here year round enjoy the few weeks each year that we have tourists.  The area seems festive and busy for about eight weeks during the summer.

Then we slide into the fall which is the favorite season for most of us.  The water is warm, the beaches are empty, and this fall the fish were biting.  It is the best time to be on the coast.  As the fall progresses and the water cools, the fish don't bite as much, and most of the fishermen start thinking about next year.

As late November arrives, usually we cool down considerably.   That didn't happen this year. December has been full of days when the temperature got to seventy degrees and even better.  It has been shorts weather all through our last month of 2012.  There have been some stellar beach days.

When the holidays get close, the beach gets very quiet.  A few restaurants close for part of December and January.  As the new year gets into sight, residents often wander inland to visit family and friends.  A lucky few enjoy the piece and quiet along the waters along Bogue Sound and our coastal rivers as Santa makes his rounds.

With crab pot Christmas trees adorning many yards, and few places to go crazy shopping, the peace of the Crystal Coast seems to remove some of the commercialism from the holiday season.  It is a very quiet time on the coast, but there are still boats on the water and even a few fishermen trying their luck.  The beaches, while uncrowded, are far from deserted.  You can still buy some fresh shrimp and a nice flounder for dinner without much difficulty.

Only during the coldest weather do the beaches become completely empty.  When we do get our cold weather, usually defined by temperatures during the day of just under 50F, the herons, egrets, and pelicans retire to the sheltered creeks and marshes where they find protection from the cold winds.

Winter rarely lasts long.  Even last year's record winter started to fade in the middle of February.  By the end of February the warm North Carolina sun always heats up the soils of Carteret County.   By March things are starting to grow, and sometime between late March and the middle of April, the strawberries announce the beginning the berry season.

By late April or early May, the fishing begins to show some life.  The tourists start showing up on weekends during the spring, and by the second or third week of June, we're back to being a tourist beach.

The rhythm of life along the Crystal Coast doesn't change a lot.  It is a pleasant mix of warm and cool weather with plenty of outside festivals to keep us busy. We have visitors just long enough to make us feel festive.

Join us in the coming year if  you have never been or you can't make it down for the 2012 holidays.  If you need to relax and find the real you once again, we are a good place to start looking.  More information is available on this welcome page.

Fall on the Crystal Coast

We're lucky along North Carolina's Crystal Coast.  Fall sometimes is the most gentle time of the year.  It is not unusual to wake to cool mornings, but by the time you get moving around after a cup or two of coffee, the air temperature is already quickly warming.  With little humidity, a bright sun, and cloudless skies, you cannot complain about the weather, especially the beautiful brilliant blue skies.  By late morning, it is usually warm enough for shorts and a tee shirt.  Fall in 2011 has been just such a year.

The weather is so good that it is easy to forget the work that needs to be done.  In the last week, I have boated, walked the beaches, kayaked, biked and fished.  Saturday afternoon, November 12, I was so tired from paddling around the river, that I couldn't help myself from a little napping.

It was one of those perfect naps where you are still aware of what is happening, but your mind is resting peacefully.  The warm sun was shining on me, and my interest in football was so little that napping seemed much more important.

This summer we were on a roller coaster of weather. Fall, however, has been pretty amazing in comparison.  There are times that I have suggested that the weather was good enough to bottle.  At the same time, we have had more moisture than we did during the summer.  The fall plants have been gorgeous.  We still have some beautiful geraniums and our hydrangea has some great blooms on it.

Unlike the bluegrass and fescue yards of the Piedmont and mountains to the west of us, our centipede yards have been dormant for a while.  No grass to mow just gives us more time for the important fall things like fishing.  We have also managed to plant our fall snap dragons and pansies.  We will enjoy their blooms all through the winter.

The week of November 7, 2011 has been the best week that I have had for fishing in a while.  I have fished three times this week.  One day my fishing was just a few minutes, and the other two days, I fished for a couple of hours.  I caught fish each time, and on November 12, I caught a nice 20" trout that weighed 2 lbs and 3 oz.  The trout was the perfect size for dinner for two.  It is nice to have fish in my backyard.  This week it didn't seem to matter whether I was in my kayak or skiff, I was catching fish.

Water access here along North Carolina's Crystal Coast cannot be beat, and in late fall, there are no crowds.   If you want to get on the water, there are plenty of places to do it even with the Cedar Point Wildlife Resources Ramp being closed for a month, it is still easy to find a spot to launch.  Even if you just want to walk the beaches, there are plenty of places to do that.   It is also cool enough to walk the trails at the Cedar Point Croatan Access.

I watch a couple of the beach areas, Emerald Isle's Third Street and the Point,  pretty closely, and it is not unusual for the beaches to change from day to day even in the fall.   We were at Third Street about a month ago, and were surprised to find a huge amount of sand had disappeared.  About a month later, the waves put the sand back.

On Thursday, November 11, I walked about 2.5 miles along the beaches at the Point on Emerald Isle.  I wore shorts and a tee-shirt, and I was very comfortable even wading in the water at times.  While the water is cool, it isn't bone chilling like it is in early spring.

The only problem that I have this time of year is that there isn't enough daylight left to do everything that I want to do.  I have to pick and choose my activities, which is okay since I would rather have too much to do than not enough.

It you have never visited the Emerald Isle-Crystal Coast area, there is no better time to do it than fall.  The annual Christmas Parade in Emerald Isle is coming up soon on November 26.  This is a movie of the 2008 event.  The town always loves to have visitors.  Without lots of visitors during the parade, there is always a risk that there will be more people in the parade than there are watching it.

When you drive across the Emerald Isle bridge this time of year and look out at Bogue Sound, it is hard to not be impressed with the beauty of the scene, the blues, greens, and golds are never prettier than they are now. The view like many others in the area will renew soul and stretch your imagination.

If you need some quick information on the area, visit my free online guide to the area.

High water at the dock

The more that the out of doors is part of your life, the more attention that you pay to the weather.   Yet each place you live usually requires paying attention to different things.

Not many in this generation of Americans have the experience of spending most of their lives in one area.  I have some family members who are living within ten miles of where their grandfather and great grandfather were living in 1910.  I have some friends in Canada living in a settlement not far from where their families first put down roots in the late eighteen hundreds.

I never got the chance to walk the banks of the long-gone millpond where my mother grew up with her family.  My grandfather and the millpond were gone before I had a chance to learn about them, but I did get to visit the site of the old dam once.  I still remember the walk through the woods.

I can imagine that if you were living on a millpond, dependent on water flow in a small stream, when and how much it rained would have been very important.  However, the first public weather forecasts did not show up until 1925.  My mother and the family had moved away from the millpond by then.

The early years of my own life showed a strong taste for wanderlust.  I moved to Saint Croix Cove on the shore of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, and only marriage stopped me from giving Newfoundland a try.  When we lived in Nova Scotia one of the most important things in the weather during the summer was fog.   A partner and I were trying to farm with a few cattle.  Making hay in the "summer" was how we got feed for the cattle in the winter.

We lived on the north mountain of the Annapolis Valley.  The mountain sloped rapidly down to the Bay of Fundy.  The scenic beauty of the area and the charm of the old farm were undeniable.  Yet the almost inevitable fog during the summer made it really hard to make good quality hay.  As so often has been the case in my life, there was no real local weather forecast.  The only way to figure out the fog was to become a keen observer of the signs which were often followed by fog.

We eventually moved to just north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  We happened to end up in Tay Creek, which was known locally as a "snow belt."  Our first year there, I measured twenty-three feet of snow.  Once again it did not take long to figure out that the only real local forecasts would have to come from us.  Fredericton, which is the capital of New Brunswick was twenty miles away and much lower in elevation.  I came to learn that Fredericton could easily be eight degrees Fahrenheit warmer than Tay Creek.  In a Maritime climate that makes a huge difference in how much snow you receive.

As we went through our city phase, living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Columbia, MD and eventually Roanoke, Virginia, it was easier to find forecasts that matched reality until we moved to Roanoke where we ended up living on a high mountain above the city.  Sometimes the weathermen would call for rain, and we clearly got snow.  While living on the mountain was great for getting beautiful sunrises, it made getting an accurate weather forecast challenging.   Once again, we had to learn how to watch the signs and predict our own weather.  Fog also came back into our life.  There were mornings when the fog made the rest of the world invisible.


Now that we are living on the North Carolina coast, I think we might be in the most complex weather area of our lives.  While we have a number of reporting weather stations very close by, it is rare that they can accurately forecast our weather.  When I see a long-range forecast I just chuckle knowing that the odds of it being right are very slim.

Yet here at the coast, the weather is a huge part of our lives.  We have to get ready for events like Hurricane Irene, and often what we are hearing from the weathermen is more focused on other areas than our spot just off the White Oak River.  When Irene visited, I took to issuing my own forecasts to a number of neighbors.  It was helpful to me and them.  Things are a lot different than in the days of the millpond.  Much of the information needed for a forecast is there, you just have to know where to look and how to interpret it.

It is October 11, and for days we have been hearing about a tropical low that forecasters were guessing would dump up to three inches of rain on our area.  Three inches of rain doesn't mean a lot to our area which has seen some extreme precipitation over the years.  However, the forecasters were also calling for high winds and tides.  I knew to watch the morning tide to see if I needed to raise my boat a few inches.  Sure enough, at about 11 AM, I had to raise my boat a little.  However, so far the rain total is only eleven-hundredths of an inch at 1 PM and the sky is significantly lighter than when we got up this morning.  I suspect that my feeling that most of the rain was going to miss us is going to play out accurately.

Snow, heavy rain, and fog might not be problems here, but high water and winds can make us pay close attention to the weather.  The attention we pay is not much different I suspect than how my grandfather watched for rains around the millpond.  I would love to know if he got some great weather suitable for bottling just like we have recently seen.