Tradition is the foundation of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, as much as it is for the entirety of Down East Carteret County.
Every year, thousands from all over make their way to the museum’s Waterfowl Weekend held in early December to celebrate those traditions — decoy carving, hunting, boatbuilding, commercial fishing, waterfowl and fellowship — the way of life for the 13 unincorporated communities.
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The Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild‘s 36th annual Core Sound Decoy Festival takes place the same weekend at the Harkers Island School. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 7, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 8. The facility is filled to the brim with carvers, crafters and other artists. Competitions are planned throughout both days.
The three-day Waterfowl Weekend set for Dec. 6-8 begins with the Friday Night Chow Down at 5:30 p.m. Friday. Those with tickets for the cooking competition will be able to preview what the vendors, crafters and artisans will have for sale before the facility opens to the public 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. A church service will take place at 8 a.m. before doors open at 10 a.m. Sunday and close at 4 p.m.
“The first weekend of December has grown to be the Island’s homecoming weekend with the Decoy Festival at the school, craft sales all along the way, yard sales, fund-raisers and Down East hospitality every mile of the way,” Waterfowl Weekend organizers said.
Not only will visitors have a chance to meet with artists, carvers and crafters, Waterfowl Weekend is a way many begin their Christmas celebration by walking through the “Gallery of Trees: Telling Our Story,” when families, groups and businesses decorate trees to light up the museum through Jan. 10, and purchase their 2024 holiday ornament.
Johnna Brooks and the Della John
Each year the museum releases a collector’s ornament that celebrates Core Sound culture. This year’s numbered ornament features a painting of the fishing vessel Della John by Harkers Island native Johnna Brooks.
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Currently working on her doctorate in biomathematics at North Carolina State University where she studies quantitative fisheries ecology, she has had a passion for art her entire life. Her father built the Della John in 1979, which the family later sold, but Brooks said she’s been painting the vessel on and off for as long as she can remember.
Waterfowl Museum Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher said that the Core Sound ornament has become more than something to hang on the tree.
“It’s a glimpse of Core Sound that many of us hang in a special place all year long. From decoys and black labs to crab pot trees, these ornaments have told the story of Down East,” Amspacher said. “Each year we have tried to select an artist that shares that deep commitment to our heritage and this year Johnna is that connection to tradition as well as an excellent career in the marine sciences. She’s our future.”
The ornament can be purchased on the website or from the museum’s gift shop.
Brooks graduated as valedictorian from East Carteret High School in 2016 and earned her bachelor’s at North Carolina State University.
Her dad’s side of the family has been on Harkers Island for several generations, spending their days commercial fishing and boatbuilding, Brooks said. The Della John is the first boat that her father built from start to finish. The 50-foot wooden trawler was built in 1979 and her family owned and operated the boat until 2019 when they sold it to another local business, Miss Gina’s Fresh Shrimp. Her father retired from commercial fishing in the 1990s and has been in marine construction since.
She said that she likes to go fishing but not in the way many of her peers do at state’s Center for Marine Sciences and Technology, or CMAST.
“Now, I’m in this marine lab with people who like to fish. I go out with them sometimes, and I think they’re a little bit surprised with how little I know,” about recreational fishing, she said. But she’s been fishing since she was young.
“My granddad, he’s 90 now, but I remember when I was, no older than 10 years old. Pa, he would take me and my little cousin out – he’s younger than me — and we would pull in a mullet net, and it was just me and my kid cousin on one end of the net, and then my 70-something granddad on the other end,” Brooks said. “I’ve been doing that as long as I can remember.”
She said she’s always been strong in math but has enjoyed art just as much, having taken art classes throughout high school. She realized she missed the creative outlet when she was working on her bachelor’s and ended up with a minor in art.
“I’ve always found that math was very concrete, it made sense, it was structured,” Brooks said, and art helped her with her math classes, along the way though she didn’t see it as a viable career option.
When she began her undergraduate, she said she knew she was going to get a degree in math, and that she wanted to stay in Carteret County, “that was the only thing I was sure about.” But she was concerned her career options were limited.
Growing up in the area, she was familiar with all the marine labs in the county, but didn’t personally know anyone who worked there, aside from her grandmother who had worked at the Division of Marine fisheries for many years.
“I thought they dissected dolphins all day,” she laughed about what she thought when she was younger, adding “I can’t use math to dissect dolphins.”
It was her junior year of college when Hurricane Florence was lumbering toward North Carolina, and one of her professors asked if anyone lived at the coast. She and another person raised their hands. Brooks learned that her professor had been a statistician at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Beaufort Marine Lab, and it dawned on her that if scientists are going out to collect data, someone has to do something with that data.
Once it clicked for her that this is a way to stay in Carteret County and use her math degree, she started looking into getting a master’s but was encouraged to work on her doctorate. She initially didn’t want to get a PhD, because she didn’t want to be in her late-20s, still living in Raleigh. “I wanted to come back, start my life, put down roots where I want to live. This is kind of the best of both worlds.”
She spends most of her days doing research for her doctorate on speckled trout management. In what little down time she has, Brooks paints scenes from her childhood on old charts her dad used while he was a commercial fisherman.
“Nobody uses charts anymore,” Brooks said. “I had to get my dad to explain how to use them. This is a whole way of fishing that people did in the past. And just like with the Harkers Island bridge, it’s a thing in the past. It’s not there anymore.”
Her career plans and her art are a way for her to preserve the way of life loved as a child and a way to adapt to how the world around her is changing, which she acknowledges is going to happen, regardless. But she’s trying to preserve the culture and the stories, how things were done, in her own way, she said.
Waterfowl Weekend highlights
For the Friday Night Chow Down, cooks from Down East and neighboring communities will bring several different recipes of stewed shrimp, clam chowder, seafood chowder, stewed redheads, stewed oysters with dumplings, fish stew with cornbread, gumbo and venison chili.
Area bakers will be competing as well for the 2024 “Best Sweet Potato Pie Down East” award during the Friday night event. Seafood market and restaurant chefs from across the state will judge the cooking competition.
Tickets are $35 for members and $45 for nonmembers. Save $10 a ticket by becoming a member now for $30 a year. Tickets are for sale online. Each ticket includes four cups of your choice. Molasses Creek will perform that evening. There will be a cash bar
In addition to the grounds being covered with vendors, there will be scallop fritters and sweet puppies, online auction, and performances by Molasses Creek at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday. A church service with breakfast begins Sunday’s festivities.
Other highlights include book signings with local authors 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Raffle tickets are on sale for this year’s quilt, “Core Sound Kaleidoscope” by the Core Sound Quilt Crew, and there’s a Christmas cash giveaway raffle for a chance to win up to $5,000 cash.
