Tag: Travel

Memories to hold close

The Mouth of Raymond’s Gut

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.

The anonymity of technology

Traffic in Cary, NCWhen I used to drive between college in Boston and my home in Mount Airy, NC in the late sixties and early seventies, I could tell where I was by the radio station.

You could pick up some local news and weather. Today real local radio stations are hard to find. We get our weather from looking at one of the gadgets in the car.

Radio in our case is XM, though it might not be much longer given how poorly the new antenna is performing.

Still technology, google maps, Accuweather long range forecasts, and satellite radio have created a cocoon for us as we travel.

When you throw in chain restaurants and pay at the pump, it is little wonder that it is hard to tell one place from another.

I can still remember one fateful evening on the way back to Boston in the old days. The belt driving the fan on my Jaguar XK-E broke on the Interstate highway. This was well before cell phones. I waited for the engine to cool and drove a mile or so a couple of times.

That got me to a local filling station which was still open on a Friday night. Unfortunately he didn’t have a fan belt to fit my car. He gave me a ride to the local hotel in Hagerstown and said he would pick me up in the morning.

Good to his word, he showed up the next morning, and we found out that the closest thing in town was a belt for a washing machine. I bought three, and he quickly installed one, and I was back on the road.

No Onstar, no cell phone, no triple AAA, and no advance computer registration at the hotel. Laptops had not been invented. Being wireless meant someone ripped your wires out. How did I manage to survive?

I wonder if the lack of interaction with the local world as we fly by in our technology aided cocoons has made for more or less understanding of our neighbors?