Tag: CrystalCoast

Not Missing My Boat Yet

The White Oak River near Swansboro, NC

In 2006, we bought a home on Raymond’s Gut just off the White Oak River just ten minutes from the beaches of Emerald Isle. In June of 2007, we added a boat and a boat lift to our collection of things to make life more complete here along the water.

There were challenges to learning how to be safe boaters in our fifties, I even took a course and hired someone to accompany us on our first trip to Shackleford Banks in our own boat. It was a very long ride down there by boat from our house. The trip was so long, it was the only time we ever made that trip with our boat.

Everytime you use a boat, it takes more time than most people imagine to clean it up, and each year it needs maintenance which increases with the age of the boat. However even with all the work, we enjoyed boating for several years. These pictures taken from our skiff and going from Raymond’s Gut to Swansboro give you an idea of all the beauty we have seen from our skiff. Then there was this especially memorable trip with my friend, Brian, when we beached the skiff on an island just outside of Bogue Inlet.

It was truly nice when our children would come down and we could all go boating. I often told people that you could not really see the Crystal Coast without riding down the Intracoastal Waterway from the Emerald Isle bridge to Swansboro’s harbor. In my mind it was a much better main street for the area than Highway 24.

I learned out to the navigate the tricky waters of the White Oak River. I even got so I would venture out a little into the ocean. I even captained a few memorable fishing trips like this one where we caught bluefish until our arms ached.

However, I got so that I did most of my fishing from the kayak. Going out in the skiff, even my early morning ride to the marshes near Swansboro, became less a part of my life. Still I am grateful for all the beauty that the skiff allowed me to see.

Most boaters will tell you that owning a boat is a lot of work even if you have a lift for it. The other thing about a boat is that it is a lot of responsibility when you are the captain and you have others on board. A lot of things can go wrong on a boat and people do get hurt even in safe places to boat like the sounds of the Crystal Coast much less the more dangerous Bogue Inlet. I could handle emergencies a lot better when I was in my fifties than now when I am in my seventies. Making sure that you have a safe boating trip can be very stressful.

A few years ago I sold my truck. I was driving it less than 2,000 miles a year. Do I miss it? Once in a while I would like to have it back but it did not make sense given that we have limited parking at our house and I put less than 2,000 miles per year on it the last few years. I enjoyed driving it, but it wasn’t something that I had to have to survive. I guess the boat finally got to that same point.

This spring I had someone interested in buying my boat so I made the decision to sell my boat and get rid of my lift. I am pleased with the decision. It is a couple of less things to worry about as I get a little age on me.

When you get into your seventies, it is not uncommon to simplify your life. We’re working at that. I still enjoy getting out on the water, but I have plenty to fill my life like gardening, fishing from my kayak, and our newly found marsh kittens.

The changes required by the current crisis make you appreciate a lot of simple things in life. I am just happy to have a beautiful home along the water and that my family and friends are safe so far from the Corornavirus.

I have a lot of great memories with my boat, but it hasn’t been gone long enough for me to miss it.

HOAs Rarely Provide a Smooth Ride

The Low Tide Channel Between Oyster Rocks in the White Oak River.

Many of us live in HOAs. At the best of times HOAs stay out of our lives, provide a little safety, protect our property values and usually offer us some recreational opportunities that we might not have if we built our homes in the middle of a field.

Unfortunately, many HOAs are started by developers, have underfunded reserves, and people with agendas running them. Most will say that their agenda is to make the community a better and more beautiful place to live.

However, as we all know the devil is in the details. Something like navigating a river with hidden oyster rocks at high tide. When you put people of varying ages together in a community, it is hard to come up with priorities that suit the majority of the people. The guy in his seventies who has given up boating is going to care a lot less about the inlet needing to be dredged than the younger family that just spent $30,000 on a new boat.

HOAs also come with lots of skeletons hiding in their closets. Those are the poor decisions, reckless spending and down right illegal actions that sometimes box HOAs in a corner. The usual advice is to get involved with your HOA. However, there are times when doing just that puts you in one faction or the other in your community. They might even be warring factions.

My advice is to carefully investigate any HOA in a community where you are planning on buying. Talk to more than one person, try to find someone with a broad perspective of the community. Sometimes HOAs drink a lot of their own Koolaide so be careful accepting at face value the pitch from HOA directors. Someone not on the board might have a totally different view.

Here is a cautionary tale of what can happen when HOAs go off the rails.

Life is changing

One of our four rescued marsh kittens that have delighted us during the coronavirus crisis.

The COVID-19 crisis has undermined my optimism, broken some of my connections with others, and altered my view of our country. All that has happened and the crisis is far from over. In spite of the advice to stay home, the last couple of weekends we have seen the first significant wave of beach people with license plates from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Georgia, and even Florida. We also know that we have plenty of North Carolina visitors and likely most of them come from some of our state’s own hot spots. Things could get much worse in our coastal paradise.

I feel like the pandemic is peeling away layers of my psyche like the layers of an onion. Things have changed and what ends up as our new normal is still an open question. Read more

Saved by the Marsh Kittens

Our four marsh kittens that we recently rescued

Our time living on the North Carolina coast will hit fourteen years this fall. It has been a wonderful adventure. We live on Raymond’s Gut off the impressively wide White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle. I was not a boater when I came to the area, but we bought a 20 feet skiff in June of 2007 and we learned to love our time on the water. I also continued the kayaking that I have been doing since the mid-nineties. I even wore out one kayak by fishing very close by the oyster rocks in the river.

Living on the water, in the marsh has been a life changing event for us. We have lived a lot of different places including along the shore of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia and at Tay Creek in the hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick where we farmed and had 200 head of Angus for ten years. We learned a lot in our sixteen years in Canada but the marsh has been a good education for the later years in life. We have ridden out hurricanes here and seen an amazing amount of wildlife like our Great Egret buddy. Frank 29X who has visited from Canada every winter since 2012. However, we did not expect kittens to be a part of our life here.

About three years ago, I saw a starving kitten wandering the neighborhood. I lured it to our home where we started feeding it. Luckily Smokey had been fixed. A few months pass and a tiny cat shows up and starts enjoying some of the food. We gave her the nickname, Little Cat or LC, for short. Over the months, LC became Elsie and she became a regular. Two springs ago she had kittens. We managed to trap one and someone else got another. Our daughter took the one we caught home and it is living in luxury now instead in the unpredictable marsh. Last summer Elsie had some additional kittens. We tried to hire someone to trap them. We were unsuccessful with them and getting the county involved. We still feed Elsie and her two fully grown cats from last year.

This year Elsie had kittens again. This time she brought them to stay in our garage. We managed to trap three of them quickly but one kept eluding the trap. It took a week to catch the one we decided to call Maverick. The first three kittens were socialized very easily. Maverick has been more of a challenge. He loves to be held but is not fond of being picked up.

Still it turns out that rescuing marsh kittens and sharing videos of their antics is a great way to save your sanity, have fun and get your mind off the COVID-19 crisis. I still work but I make time to play with the kittens every day. It is much more therapeutic than even watching late night television. This is a short kitten video showing how much fun they can dream up. I have decided to post more of them via Twitter. Hopefully, they will make you smile. You can find me at @ocracokewaves on Twitter.

Disposable technology by default

Bogue Sound Sunset
Bogue Sound Sunset

I was working for Apple Computer in January 1985 when the company introduced the LaserWriter, the first laser printer to be widely used.

The list price was $6,995 and more important to those of us lugging it around for demonstrations, it weighed 77 pounds.

I was happy that my previous career was running a cattle farm where I spent much of the winter hauling around 100 lb+ bags of feed.

It is a measure of the change in our society in the last seventeen years that the third week in December 2011, I bought a Brother HL-2270DW laser printer for $99.98.  It only weighed 15.4 pounds.

The original Apple LaserWriter printed eight pages per minute of 300 DPI text and graphics using a 12 Mhz Motorola 68000 chip.

The Brother printer that I bought prints at 27 pages per minute at up to 2400 X 600 DPI.  It has a 200 Mhz processor.  The new Brother printer comes with Ethernet and wireless connectivity.  The Apple LaserWriter only had LocalTalk, a very slow but revolutionary network for 1985.

The Apple LaserWriters were built like tanks.  Most of them lived to a very ripe old age considering how fast technology changes.

It is an interesting story about how I came to purchase my $99 laser printer.

A little over five years ago, we bought a second home on North Carolina’s Southern Outer Banks.   We were not on the coast very long when I decided that we needed a second office.

There is a picture of the office that I created in November 2006 at this post, The Not So Reluctant System Engineer.  In the picture, you’ll see the Brother 5250DN laser printer that I bought at the time.  It was virtually identical to the one in my Roanoke office.  I paid around $199 for it at Staples.

In the slightly over five years since I put together my office, there have been some changes.  I still have and use my Dual G5 Mac and my HP C6180 AIO Photosmart printer.

My Dell desktop system now runs only Ubuntu Linux, and I have added an I5 iMac to my coastal office.  The iMac nearly overwhelms my desktop.  My trusty MacBook that I bought in July 2006 recently gave up the ghost.  My main laptop since February 2010  has been a HP I7 with a 15″ screen.

About the middle of December I finished the first draft of a book that I am writing about my career of nearly twenty years at Apple.  My wife told me that she would only proof a paper copy so I printed one copy of the book.  At well over one hundred standard sheets of paper, it was the longest thing that I have ever printed.  I got a warning light on my laser toner, but I pulled the cartridge and shook it around like I have doing for years. The warning light stopped.

Around a week later after some additional miscellaneous printing, the laser printer stopped printing.  Both the jam light and the toner light were blinking.  Over the last year, the Brother laser printer had shown a tendency to jam while printing.  I did all my tricks, but I still could not get the printer going again.

I knew that it might finally be out of toner, but I was somewhat suspicious since the last page printed did not look like it had come from a printer running out of toner.  Also I have never seen a printer just stop printing because of lack of toner.

I went to Staples in Morehead City the next day to pick up a toner cartridge.  I was a little worried that it might not fix my problem with the printer.   When I got to Staples, I found than a new toner cartridge that prints something over 4,000 pages would cost me around $85.  As I was walking to the checkout counter, I found that I could buy a new laser printer with a starter toner cartridge for $99.  The starter cartridge would be good for 1,250 pages, over a year’s worth of printing for me, and a larger cartridge would only cost $44.

It didn’t take me long to decide, I took the replacement toner cartridge back and bought the new printer.  It only took me a few minutes that evening to get it working with everything.

My old printer is sitting in a closet waiting for me to bring down the toner cartridge from my printer in our Roanoke house.  If the toner works and fixes the problem, I will try to give the printer away.  If it doesn’t fix it, I will just recycle the printer.  I know from past experience that once a piece of electronics dies, investing money in it is mostly like a waste.

The new printer works fine and looks at home on the printer shelf.  I am not very comfortable being a member of the disposable society but economically little else made sense.

While we aren’t at the epicenter of the shopping world, fortunately we have plenty of services in the area and a Staples not far away.  While we don’t have an Apple Store here on the Southern Outer Banks, we  seem to manage pretty well in the world of technology.

Given the choice of another computer store or having fish and beaches in my backyard, I don’t think my vote will go to the computer store.