I wrote this back in the fall of 2016. It was one of the nicest falls that we enjoyed in our fifteen years on the North Carolina coast. I wrote more than one post arguing that fall was even nicer on the coast than in the mountains.
Here is a brief description of the memorable month of November 2016, as seen from the water and the beaches of Carteret County.
The good fishing and nearly perfect weather, continues but I can already feel the best of fall sliding away.
On Saturday, November 5, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful as you can see from the marsh grass picture. I also managed to catch and release another sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.
On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks in my kayak and I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In the last ten days, I have landed ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I have only kept one red drum but I have kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.
Last year, 2015, we did not have a fishing season like this one. I blamed it all on the early October rain we got. It is hard to miss a fishing season when fall fishing on the coast is such a tradition. This year we have been lucky. Since Mathew dropped three inches of rain on us October 8, we have only had two-tenths of an inch on October 22, and another two-tenths of an inch on November 4.
Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory.
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.Â
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.Â
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.
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.
Except for boarding school and college, I have always lived with enough space for my imagination to roam. I grew up in Lewisville, NC, with a wonderful back yard with woods that stretched farther than I could roam.
I have written of finally finding a real backyard for my somewhat rural life. I have had much wilder backyards in my earlier years. They ranged from the field of buttercups behind our old farm house in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia to miles of woods in New Brunswick and Virginia to the expanses of marshes on the NC Coast. Living on the edge with wilderness or near wilderness on my doorstep has enriched my life and that of my family.
The Lewisville backyard of my youth remains entrenched in my mind. The memories of the great, long-gone, cedar tree that shaded our picnic table are still there. The picnic table was my first office. When we were really young we were able to play baseball there. Home plate was in front of the plum and cherry trees. If you hit a ball and it ended up in the fig bush, it was a home run. Until it interfered with the septic system, the mimosa tree in the front yard was a great climbing tree. The yard was just a base from which to operate. The woods that stretched for a few miles down to the Yadkin River bottomlands were the real attraction for those us steeped in the lore of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.
We played in the streams, built dams where we could and climbed over the old boulders. The woods were a cool retreat in the summer and as we got older, a place to hunt squirrels.
While I felt marooned from the out of doors when I was at military school during my high school years, it was just the opposite in college. Maine was at our doorstep. When I visited LL Beans in the fall of 1967, it was a tiny place and one room still had a wood stove. Maine led to Nova Scotia, and Nova Scotia changed my life.
That field of buttercups on the waterlogged soil of my first farm was a great introduction to real wilderness. Only getting married kept me from moving to Newfoundland. Instead I ended up in the relatively civilized hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick on an old two hundred acre farm. It was a good place to get comfortable with wilderness, understand its charms, and appreciate its challenges.
My dream of farming started in Nova Scotia and was realized in New Brunswick where we build a cattle operation that had two hundred head of red and black Angus at one time. We built barns and learned to put up incredible amounts of hay while figuring out how to raise cattle in the woods. It was harsh environment once hitting minus forty and a couple of times approaching one hundred degrees with plenty of black flies and black bears to keep you alert. We were barely beyond party lines for a telephone so there not even dreams of cell phones. If you were a mile back in the woods alone, you were on your own.
I had dreamed of farming and built the farm of my dreams. It was a hard life with no vacations but with great neighbors living together in place that could push you to your limits. Eventually the dreams were no longer of farming but not because farming was too hard. It was interest rates of twenty percent that got us. It is hard to even imagine paying those rates today, but we did until we dispersed our cattle herd. Then the dreams turned to a better, perhaps easier life and more opportunities for our children.
We ended up in Halifax, Nova, on a tiny city lot. I had no time to dream because I was working for Apple then. It was twelve years after leaving the farm before I got time and space to dream again. Finding the space was driven by a new Labrador puppy, named Chester. Chester needed a lot of exercise and we both quickly grew tired of two and three mile walks in the neighborhood. We wandered into the woods and found an old road to a mountainside homestead. I met the owner of the land on a hike. He was elderly but eager to see someone clean up the old road. For over a decade Chester and I worked and wandered the trails on the mountainside.
Then one day the vets said that it was Chester’s time to cross over and he was gone. The mountainside and the trails were never the same without Chester so next I dreamed of the North Carolina coast which I had wandered as a college student. In 2006, we bought a home in the marshes along the White Oak River three miles from Bogue Sound and Swansboro.
The marsh turned out to be a good place to dream especially when aided by some almost wild stretches of sand over at the Point on Emerald Isle. There were wide rivers to kayak, inlets and near shore waters to explore in our skiff. The coast also gives you a very personal look at the power that nature can throw at you when the elements are right. We endured the eighty-five mile per hour winds of Irene and learned that there are moments like Florence when retreat is the safest option. We heeded the mandatory evacuation orders for Florence and came back to devastation, not at our home, but to many of our friends’ homes. Finally three years later after fifteen years of walking the sands and marshes, I began dreaming of those Piedmont woods of my youth.
In February 2021, we moved to Davie County, NC, about twenty-five minutes from where I grew up. The good news is that the backyard is plenty big enough for dreams and I am old enough that I can easily justify having someone mow it for me. I can still dream but I am no longer mowing my way through life while dreaming.
Our home on Raymond’s Gut near the beaches of Emerald Isle
Over fifteen years ago we started considering a move to the coast after years of living on a mountainside in Virginia. We have started our fourteenth year at the coast and are getting ready for our next adventure. Here is how the move worked for us.
Each of us is an interesting mixture of what we were born with, who raised us, where we have lived and the people whose lives have intersected our paths. How we have reacted to all those situations ends up defining us and our world view. Some of my best friends are living just miles from where they grew up. My wife, Glenda, and I have lived a far different life and it is about to get even more interesting again. Read more
Plenty of rain found us in the summer of 2015Â but it was still a great summer. The first few days of October 2015Â made us wonder if our streak of great falls would end. Â However after sloshing around for four days, a week of great drying weather has rescued us and we are back on track for another great fall.
We have seen a lot of rain this summer, but it was still a great summer.  The last week of September and the first few days have turned out to not so nice especially for our visitors.  Fortunately the sun is shining on Saturday, October 3,. Starting around Tuesday of next week, the weather should be on the mend and we can start fishing in earnest.  Read more at this link.
Our technological infirmity 
