Katie and Dan's Travels

To see more, we took a little flat-bottomed skiff ferry out to Shackleford Banks at the mouth of Beaufort Inlet, close to the spot where Blackbeard’s sunken ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, is being excavated from the sand bank which has covered her for almost 300 years. … The three we did see were too busy cropping breakfast from amongst the sand dunes and under scrub pines to expend energy running with the wind, but it was easy to imagine what a sight it must be when they do gallop over the deserted beach. Lani would have been pleased to hear our ferryman tell the story of Rachel Carson’s work to make people realize that the DDT runoff from upland farms had killed the fish and birds along the coast, and then praise the work that had been done to clean up the rivers that were carrying poisons to the estuaries. … To get from Beaufort to Wilmington, you have to drive inland in order to get around Camp Lejeune, and it’s a long detour as Lejeune is enormous and includes a big estuary.

In the course of the visit we asked what the average range of the tides in the Sound is, and got one of those fun reactions that makes you realize you are REALLY out of your range: Essentially, there are no tides in the Sound; the outer banks being such a complete barrier, with few inlets, block any tidal effect.

…The pressure of that wind-driven tidal wave with no room for it to escape through the two or three inlets meant that it created a whole new inlet and washed across the banks from inside toward the ocean. … For an image of how this works, consider a big washtub filled to about 4″ from the top; pick one end up slowly until the water reaches the edge, then drop the edge you’ve picked up; what happens?

… Add to this that Pamlico Sound is essentially nowhere more than about 20 feet deep, and you can begin to grasp what happens when the wind blows at hurricane force across the ocean-equivalent of a puddle 1″ deep.

The trips are inexpensive, and the beauty of them is that you show up at the time and place specified and you’re taken in hand by experienced (well, mostly – we had one exception), led to the places where the action is, and are in the company of others who are interested in the same kind of experience.

…By the time we joined him, he had two powerful scopes focused on an immature Peregrine falcon on a sand dune. He then turned one of the scopes around and showed us three terns – a Forster’s, a Sandwich, and a Royal, all standing in a line at the water’s edge.

…By this time, we were late back and couldn’t stop for the truly magnificent sight of hundreds of pintail ducks feeding in flooded fields on the other side of the road, so there was no way of verifying the presence of other kinds of ducks among them. < Friday Dan went off in the afternoon for a WoW adventure billed as a walk through tidal swamps. … Also seen: American Oystercatchers and a flight of Tundra swans incoming from Canada to their wintering grounds in Pea Island NWR: a magnificent sight in the setting sun and honking to each other as they lined up for the approach. All in all, a terrific, well-organized week of seeing beautiful birds and places, in good company, with no lines at restaurants (the few remaining open that is), all this by the ocean.

What was more fun was the way the center was situated: it was right off Route 17, and right on the edge of the Intracoastal Waterway; on the west side of the parking area were docks for boaters on the ICW. When we walked into the center, the woman asked if we were off a boat – you get an idea of how seedy (or yacht-y, take your pick) we were looking! … We ended this leg at Elizabeth City for lunch, where there were a few ICW’ers tied up to wait out the Northeaster that was full of rain. We spent the next two nights in Historic Bath, North Carolina, with a side trip to Washington and New Bern, NC, and to Goose Creek State Park. … We took a wander on a well-done boardwalk in Goose Creek State Park, and while the season wasn’t the best for wildlife viewing, we did manage to find a Yellow-Rump Warbler and a hairy woodpecker. Bath had a small marina with a lot of undistinguished plastic clorox bottles in it, but it had also been homeport to a gorgeous old Herreshoff sloop, Margaret ( more here ), which had been carried ashore when her chain broke during hurricane Irene. … In the process, we asked them what the normal range of the tide is in the Sound and were fascinated to learn that because the barrier islands so effectively insulate the Sound from ocean tides, it is the wind which controls what appears to be tide: a strong easterly drives the Sound water up into the rivers and creeks; a westerly drains them out and piles up the water against the barrier islands, and in the case of really strong westerlies, cause a splash-over from the inside of the barrier islands into the ocean.