Living near the tidal waters around Swansboro, North Carolina, was one of the true pleasures of my life. Pictured above are the marshes between Swansboro and Bear Island. Those marshes had some of the most spectacular scenery along the coast and some prettiest waters that I have seen anywhere. They were less than a fifteen minute boat ride from our house.
I was reminded of how wonderful living on the water is each morning when I looked out towards the River from our dock on Raymond’s Gut. Part of my morning routine is to check the tide level on one of the dock pilings and survey the water’s surface. Our home was very close to the water as you can see from this picture taken from my kayak back before we built a small house on the back deck
After checking the tide, I tried to gauge the winds out on the river. If it is really windy out on the river, it is pretty easy to catch on from the visible whitecaps. However, it can be very calm in our inlet and still windy on the river. Or it can look calm on the river and still be pretty windy on the river once you are out there. About the only way to really know how windy it is on the river is to get in the boat or kayak and head out to the river.
There were mornings when the air, wind, and tides just seemed to tell me to get in our skiff and ride down the river. It was one of the urges in life that I never tried to resist.
Many mornings I could actually take the boat down to Swansboro and be back before my wife even got out of bed. Usually early in the morning, even in the summer, the river mostly belongs to solitary boaters. A typical trip might look like the one shown this Google map.
Once in a while, there is an another early morning fisherman or someone checking their crab traps, but mostly an early ride down the river is a solitary experience that lets you really enjoy the pleasure of being on the water.
There are couple of reasons that the traffic on the White Oak is so light. One, there is plenty of other water for boating down here, and two, there are oyster beds in the lower river which require you to pay attention while boating. The channel is well marked, but if you aren’t used to following buoys it can be challenging especially if the light is bad. Many boaters would rather not pay attention since they are accustomed to boating in lakes where there are few if any marked channels
If you are lucky enough to have a GPS and can follow someone up the river who knows where they are going, it is pretty easy to establish your own road map. Most people going up the river know where they are going, but once in a while someone who seems to know where they are headed will venture off into shallow water and start looking lost. You can get into trouble on the White Oak quickly and it is not unusual to hear a boat scrapping its bottom on oyster rocks.
This is a photo of the oyster rock that runs across much of the river near where we lived. The picture was taken at low tide. At high tide these rocks are sometimes covered by as little as six inches of water. Hitting those oyster rocks at high speed makes a terrible sound. The boat bottom always loses.
However, with the right conditions, a little forethought and attention to the marked channel, I can think of nothing that I enjoy as much as my early morning boat ride. It sure beats mowing the lawn or going to a sales meeting.
I have a number of maps of the river posted, but this Google maps one shows the most challenging part of the channel between Bluewater Cove at Red Sixteen and Jones Island just before the Swansboro Harbor.
Here is an album with a number of White Oak photos containing GPS data which can give you a good idea of a ride down the river.
The river is a great place to enjoy the water, but it also leads to lots of other places like the marshes pictured or even Bogue Inlet and out to the Atlantic Ocean. Once you get to know the waters along our coast, they are not such a big puzzle.
Living by the water was a great adventure and the main reason I lived at the coast for sixteen years. I did even start boating until I was fifty-seven and I did it safely for sixteen years until I sold my boat.
Our technological infirmity 
