big predators – Our technological infirmity

Love Where You Are Planted

I got sent off to boarding school at the ripe old age of fourteen. It was six hours from home and was a military school. I was pretty miserable for a few months. Then it dawned on me that there will be times in your life that you will have little control of where you are. What you can control is how you choose to react to the situation and your location.
Four years later when I got in my car and drove the twelve hours by myself to Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was determined to make the best of it. I had never been there, but I planned to push my limits.
As a married adult, I have lived in eight different homes in two provinces and three states. At least one was a little insular but we managed to find good people in all places.
From 2006 until 2021, we had a home on the North Carolina coast. It was on the water and had stunning views. I am a photographer so I was in paradise with all the water and big birds. I had a wonderful time. When we got ready to move, our friends started asking what beauty could we possibly find to compare all the scenery at the coast.
I simply smiled and said I am confident that there will be lots of things to capture with my cameras. That has turned out to be the cast.
When you have lived in a lot of places, you probably figure out quickly that there are no perfect places for those us not in the ranks of the super rich. We bought our current house during the pandemic-fueled housing boom. We are very pleased that it has turned out even better than we expected.
While I don’t have great egrets, great blue herons and otters at my beck and call, I do have beautiful forest and fields that remind me of where I grew up.
That is no real surprise because we moved back to the area near where my mother’s family settled in 1790. When I was wandering the hills and forests of the area in the fifties, I was living on Styers Street not far from Styers Ferry Road which happened to be named for my great grandfather who ran a ferry across the Yadkin River. So this is home, but it is more than that.
This is one of few rural areas in North Carolina where you have modern services and are within a few minutes of about everything that your consumer heart can imagine. On top of that we are blessed with farmers’ markets all through the summer.
After years of tolerating faux beach grass, we are now living where our yards don’t feel squishy when you step in them. We have a real backyard that is unlikely to ever flood. It is big enough for us to have a small garden.
Settling into an area which was not far from where I grew up is one of the most pleasant moves that I have ever made. I am just a few minutes from one of my grade school fishing buddies.
I laugh when some of my northern friends talk about North Carolina’s humidity. The thing is when we moved from the coast to the Piedmont, we took a serious step down in humidity. Summer humidity is very real across the South, but there are degrees of it and the marshes along the coast can feel like you’re being swallowed by the humidity.
Here in the Piedmont there is fall and spring. If you have ever lived on the coast, you know that both fall and spring are very subtle. Here in the Piedmont they are a riot of colors.
I wonder if I have enough time left to try living in the desert?

The Quest For My Red Drum

Red Drum fever consumed me for over a decade. I always fished for them with artificial lures and never kept one under 21 inches. It took me a few years before I figured out how to catch them. Then I could hardly wait for the waters to warm in the spring and cool in the fall so I could go sit by the oyster rocks and chance red drum.

All sorts of creatures find the oyster rocks useful. Oyster catchers nest on them. Crabs shrimp and lots of small fish use them as shelter. In the winter, the rocks are full of birds at low tide.

From late spring through late fall, you will also find fishermen working the oyster rocks. The cuts through the rocks channel the bait into the range of waiting predators like red drum and flounder. Fishing the oyster rocks become my favorite way of catching fish. Over the years I brought home flounder, trout, and red drum from the oyster rocks that are only ten to fifteen minutes of paddling from our backyard.

Most years catching a few nice drum off the rocks was just enough of a challenge to keep me motivated. There are folks who would like to get rid of the White Oak’s oyster rocks because of the hazard they pose to boating but I am not one of them.

Fishing the oyster rocks is not without its challenges. The White Oak is nearly two miles wide where I fished it. Wind could be a challenge and there were days when paddling out to my favorite oyster rocks seemed like a long trip. Then there were days like May 28, 2014 when the wind, waves, current, and tides cooperated. The 1.25 mile paddle took me about fifteen minutes of relaxation.

That day was a pleasant day on the river. The current and tide were close to offsetting each other and there were only some mild swells on the river. There were no other boats or kayaks in sight, so the river was mine. It did not take too long for the river to get me under its spell.

When the current is just right you can slide along the oyster rocks looking for a wandering drum. On that day I had only one thing on my mind and it was getting back to where I caught my first drum of the season just a few weeks earlier. The ride was pleasant and I only made two or three casts to test my gear before I arrived in my favorite spot which is a cut between two oyster rocks or probably more correctly oyster bars.

The current was just right to hold me lightly on the side of the oyster bar with my target fishing area within easy casting range. I made one cast with a white swimming mullet gulp and something chewed off the tail. I switched to a Tsunami plastic with a similar but tougher tail. I made one cast just up river north of the cut in the rocks. The next cast was in the middle of the cut in the oyster rock. I got an immediate hit and I knew that I had a drum on my line.

He made one run down river and then miraculously turned and came back through the cut and was on the same side of the oyster bar as I was. That was very lucky. A few years prior when I caught my first drum on the river, the drum went on the wrong side of an oyster rock leaving me paddling with one hand to get around the rocks and holding the reel with the other. This day the fish cooperated. It was just a matter of time, letting him take runs until he tired enough that I could slip the net under him. When I saw the drum I knew that he was at least 21 inches and was carrying a lot of weight.

I had forgotten my stringer but I just made a stringer out of my paddle safety line and headed home. I was back at the dock just an hour and ten minutes after leaving. My wife brought the cooler with some ice down to the dock and I handed her the stringer with the drum. As soon as we got the kayak in the yard, we took some pictures and I got my cleaning gear. The drum was a snug fit in the cooler.

By 1:15 PM, I had cleaned the drum, showered and was getting the grill ready a lunch sized serving of drum. I grilled the thinner parts of the tail and saved the thicker fillets for another couple of meals. We normally got three nice meals of out of each drum that I kept.

I feel lucky to have had oyster rocks which got in our way when we went boating in our skiff. I learned to love them and work with them not against them. I loved the way the water could be blue when the sun hits it one way and a beautiful amber when it hits it from another angle. We are fortunate to have had the opportunity to live in such a wonderful place which has been threatened by development since we moved away in 2021.