The steady rush of a 32-foot-tall Smoky Mountain waterfall is what greets the hundreds of thousands of visitors that filter each year through the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores.

The impressive sight is the start of an up-close journey through aquatic habitats found from the “Mountains to the Sea,” the theme the staff came up with when the facility that opened its doors in 1976 was upgraded in 2006. As visitors walk through the aquarium, they’re able to see thousands of aquatic animals in a range of habitats.

“We came up with the theme of ‘Mountains to the Sea’ so that the five galleries at the Pine Knoll Shores aquarium would highlight some of the animals and features all across the state,” former director Jay Barnes said.

Compared to when the Pine Knoll Shores site opened 50 years ago, the facility is nearly unrecognizable.

Launched as the North Carolina Marine Resources Centers in the 1970s at the same time as the Roanoke Island and Fort Fisher locations, which were also revamped 20 years ago, the research hubs were rebranded in 1986 as the North Carolina Aquariums.

N.C. Aquariums Director Hap Fatzinger told Coastal Review that since its inception, the goal of the educational facilities has been to focus “on creating incredible guest experiences that create connections to people, animals and the natural world.”

Having three aquariums along the state’s coastline was a strategic measure to ensure residents would have access to learn about the treasures of our coast. The education hubs grew in popularity, and gained strong legislative support that allowed for the aquariums, which were accredited in 1990 by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, to expand in the early 2000s into the 65,000- to 93,000-square-foot facilities they are today, Fatzinger added.

With the addition in 2011 of Jennette’s Pier at Nags Head to the aquarium system, the four locations see a total of more than 1.4 million visitors a year.

The aquariums today stands “as vibrant gateways to discovery, conservation and connection, bringing visitors face-to-fin with aquatic life and ecosystems,” according to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which the aquarium division is under, and “have inspired conservation action to protect the ocean and waterways through unforgettable encounters with aquatic life, while expanding access to science education and contributing to conservation research, rehabilitation, and emerging rescue work.”

Though the three N.C. Aquariums officially turn 50 in September, there are several anniversary and birthday events happening throughout the year, including the “Birthday Splash” during regular aquarium hours 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at Pine Knoll Shores, followed at 7 p.m. by the ticketed 70s-themed “Rock the Reef” for those 21 and older.

“For 50 years, the North Carolina Aquariums have played a vital role in inspiring visitors, strengthening coastal communities, and protecting the natural resources that make our state so special,” DNCR Secretary Pamela B. Cashwell said earlier this year in a press release. “This anniversary reflects decades of visionary leadership, sustained community support and dedicated staff who have ensured the Aquariums remain places of learning, wonder, and conservation for generations of North Carolinians.”

Barnes began his career at Pine Knoll Shores in 1980 and later was appointed as director there, a role he held for more than 20 years before retiring in 2009. He then joined the nonprofit partner organization, the North Carolina Aquarium Society, from which he retired as director in 2023.

When the sites first opened in the 1970s, the centers were shoestring operations with few on staff and tiny budgets, Barnes explained about those early years. Funding was so poor that there wasn’t air conditioning at the Fort Fisher site, and there were very few exhibits, all of which were created by staff.

“We were open seven days a week, but we only had a full-time staff when I joined of five people,” Barnes continued.

With the help of several volunteers and some interns that came every summer, “we pieced together enough support to keep the doors open,” he said. “We were trying to build something from nothing.”

The building was there, but when it comes to the exhibits, “we had to go collect the animals, build the displays, and try to offer something to the public that was educational, and we did a lot of programming too,” Barnes said. “We started working a lot with schoolchildren, and the schools loved us, because it’s a free opportunity to bring their classes to the coast and get their feet wet in the marsh and learn a few things about sea life.”

Then, programming began to evolve, and “it’s amazing to think about this small staff that we had, the small budget that we had in those early days, and the fact that it was free admission. When you have free admission, I think that one of the things that happens is people’s expectations are not real high.”

Barnes said that after being open to the public at no charge for many years, “we realized that if we were ever going to make progress financially, we were going to have to bite the bullet and develop an admission charge,” which the legislature approved, to build a fund that would go back to the aquarium.

This was in 1986. In addition to being renamed that year as North Carolina Aquariums, the division moved from the North Carolina Department of Administration over to what is now the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and the nonprofit partner, North Carolina Aquarium Society was formed to support aquarium efforts.

Barnes said that the rebranding “made perfect sense” because the leadership at the time recognized that people were visiting the sites for the exhibits that featured fish, sharks and turtles.

“We changed departments, changed our name and began an admission fee, and that’s when things really started to look up in terms of the kinds of improvements we were able to make in the years to come,” he explained.

In the late 1990s, the aquarium society was successful in generating support from the General Assembly and began looking at capital funding to improve and expand the aquarium sites. Roanoke Island underwent the first round of renovations unveiled in 2000, then Fort Fisher reopened its upgraded site in 2002 and Pine Knoll Shores in 2006.

As director, Barnes said he was excited about having $15 million for a big renovation but Hurricane Floyd struck North Carolina in 1999 and as a result, the funding for Pine Knoll Shores was rescinded, “which we understood the reasons why; there were a lot of people hurting across North Carolina and that (renovation) funding went to help.”

The Aquarium Society’s Board of Directors came up with a plan the General Assembly passed to allow private financing for the renovations.

“The aquariums then essentially borrowed the money to build the renovation at Pine Knoll Shores, and we got that underway in 2004,” Barnes said.

The previous building was around 35,000 square feet, the upgrades tripled the footprint to 93,000 square feet at a cost of $25 million, according to state documents.

“It was a very exciting time for me as director to be able to work with our staff to come up with what we wanted the new aquarium to look like and how we wanted it to be laid out,” he said, adding they reused portions of the previous facility, redesigned the traffic flow, added lots of new exhibits and came up with the Mountains to the Sea theme.

By joining the staff just four years after the site opened, he said it was an opportunity to grow with the organization.

“And I have to say, all of us are proud of what has transpired over the years with not only increasing the funding and the staffing, but the exhibits just got better and better over time, and the work that the aquariums do now is light years beyond where it was back in those days with regard to research and conservation and the number of people that we reach.”

The evolution from the small, state-owned facilities to one of the most popular tourist destinations and conservation organizations in the state is really something we can all be proud of, he added.

‘Birthday Splash,’ ‘Rock the Reef’

The “Birthday Splash” on Saturday, which is included with admission, is expected to be a “vibrant ’70s-inspired day” featuring special animal encounters, hands-on themed crafts, historic photos and video exhibits throughout the aquarium, a 1970s-themed selfie photo booth, and birthday treats.

That evening, the aquarium will be transformed into retro-inspired lounge for “Rock the Reef,” which continues in the 1970s vein. Open to those 21 and older, the event will feature live dueling piano music, curated food and beverages, a ’70s outfit costume contest, and a celebratory toast with a commemorative champagne flute.

“We’d like to thank our local community for all of the support they’ve given us over the last 50 years,” Pine Knoll Shores Aquarium Director Clint Taylor said in a release. “To show our appreciation, we’re showcasing our history, sharing stories and photos, and highlighting our progress and how much we hope to continue to grow.”

Tickets are $50 per person and $40 for members. The event is sponsored by Southern Bank with all proceeds to benefit the nonprofit Aquarium Society.

Other celebrations include Roanoke Island aquarium’s Golden Gala on Sept. 9 and a Birthday Bash on Sept. 12, a birthday party at Jennette’s Pier and Fort Fisher, which is undergoing a 30-month renovation project, is to hold birthday beach cleanup events throughout the year.

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The state’s ongoing drought is affecting water levels in the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s North River Wetland Preserve near Otway, where wading birds take advantage of conditions recently to feed on the fish, tadpoles, frogs and aquatic insects left with nowhere to go. Nearly the entire state was facing drought conditions at the time this was published, with most of the coast in moderate drought with increasing severity toward New Hanover and Brunswick counties and the western portions of most other coastal counties.

The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center is rolling out this week a new speaker series that delves into the relationship between people and place.

A similar format to its annual Parlor Talks offered every Thursday afternoon in the summer, the “Water/Ways” speaker series set to launch at 2 p.m. Wednesday at the museum on Harkers Island is an extension of the Smithsonian’s traveling “Water/Ways” exhibit on display until Aug. 9.

The exhibit “explores the centrality of water in our lives including its effect on the environment and climate, it’s practical role in agriculture and economic planning, and its impact on culture and spirituality,” organizers said.

Geoffrey Adair, an area historian from Beaufort, is to give the first talk this week on waterfowling traditions. Other topics for the series include water and the arts with Connie Mason July 8, water and a changing coast with Dr. Reide Corbett July 15, water as recreation with Frank Tursi July 22, and water as a way of life with Wayne Davis and Staci Davis Basden July 29.

The museum began its fifth year of Parlor Talks, which focus on the history, heritage and the research taking place in Carteret County, earlier this month.

Next on the schedule is Dr. Nathan Hall who will focus on “Our Amazing Seagrass.”

Hall is a research assistant professor and director of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute for the Environment’s Morehead City Field Site at UNC Institute of Marine Sciences. His primary research focuses on understanding the factors that control microalgal biomass and community composition in lakes, rivers, and estuaries.

His talk Thursday afternoon will highlight why seagrass matters and why it need lots of light, what factors determine how much light reaches the seagrasses, and why scientists are worried about the current state of seagrass. Hall plans to wrap the talk up with what data exists on water quality where there are seagrass beds, and new efforts led by the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership to improve understanding of water quality.

Parlor Talks summer schedule:

• July 9: “The Wit & Wisdom of Ordinary People of Harkers Island” with Joel Hancock.
• July 16: “Opening Season for the Krakens” with Carteret Community College.
• July 23: “Everyone Has a Story” with Wayne and Staci Davis.
• July 30: The Atlantic Hotels of Morehead City with Geoffrey Adair.
• Aug. 6: Cape Lookout Foundation’s restoration of the U.S. Coast Guard Station with Bud Doughton, Mason Williams and Garry Brown.
• Aug. 13: “Coastal Heroes: An Old Newsman Looks Back at Those Who Fought to Make a Difference” with Frank Tursi.
• Aug. 20: “Growing Up in the Promise Land and the Inevitable Changes” with Promise Land friends.
• Aug. 27: “100 Years of Shark Research off Cape Lookout” with Dr. Joel Fodrie, who is moving from his role as UNC-IMS director to director of Duke University Marine Lab.
• Sept. 3: “Songs & Stories We Love the Best” with Connie Mason

There’s been a lot of talk and writing about how ocean levels have been rising and will continue to rise. The current projections are that the ocean will rise an estimated 12-14 inches by 2050 and ever higher in the ensuing decades.

With all of the very technical and well-researched and documented writing published about this topic, let’s take a look at what that means for us as anglers and other people who enjoy the coastal waters.

Fourteen inches of rise may not seem like a big deal when accounting for the vastness of the entire ocean, but there will be definite changes. They won’t be great.

Dr. Shintaro Bunya, an avid angler, is also a research scientist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Center for Natural Hazards Resilience. His work involves hydrodynamic and coastal modeling, specializing in developing and applying numerical models to simulate and forecast storm surges, compound flooding and the general physics of coastal water movement.

His goal is to provide the data and tools that government agencies and local communities need to better understand and prepare for coastal flood risks. This all means that he is right in the middle of what is going on concerning coastal flooding.

First, let’s talk about tides. It will happen gradually but the number of times the tide will rise over the streets in coastal towns will increase.

“The data confirms that sea levels are not just rising; the rate of that rise is accelerating,” Bunya recently said to me.

Obviously, this will make it more difficult for smaller beach towns than bigger cities due to limited resources, but even the biggest coastal cities like Miami and New York will have problems with saltwater in the sewage treatment plants. South Florida towns already see high tides coming into lawns almost every day. Some days the low tide will be what the high tide used to be.

Higher tides will disperse fish over wider areas. With more places to access, fish will be more difficult to locate. It’s likely that they will be less abundant, also because of increased pressure on fish populations from humans and water quality issues. What this means is that fishing will become increasingly difficult and individual anglers will have less and less success.

Access to the water will become increasingly difficult as well. Many of the places we use now may become inaccessible as water rises, as documented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“According to NOAA’s tide gauge measurements, we have observed about 11 inches of rise since 1950 along the North Carolina coast and we face a unique challenge here because our land is also slowly subsiding (sinking),” said Bunya.

Let’s take boat ramps for example. These are already built upon the lowest ground available in order to accommodate parking next to the water. During high tide conditions, parking lots may become flooded, ironically making the ramp unusable due to there being too much water.

Some communities may become unlivable. In certain areas, high tides will make it impossible to access places. At this time, only the very highest tides cause this flooding. The popular term that has been coined by the TV weather stations is “King Tides.” These are the very highest water level periods, which coincide with the periods of full moon, especially during September and October.

People who live in Down East Carteret County are familiar with having to drive alternate routes or even plan their trips to the grocery store around the tides.

“What was once considered a ‘100-year flood’ is happening much more frequently,” Bunya said. “We are seeing a marked increase in high-tide flooding (often called ‘sunny day flooding’), where coastal streets and yards flood even without a storm, simply because the tide is higher than it used to be.”

Higher tides such as these will occur more frequently. Anglers will find the fish so spread out they will be extremely difficult to locate. In many places, as has been already mentioned, the tides will get so high that locals will find themselves stranded for hours and possibly days at a time. Military-style vehicles with super-high ground clearance will be needed in order to drive around numerous coastal communities. Going fishing will not be a great concern.

Personally, I have been stuck with no recourse a time or two already and have had to either take long detours or find a place to hang out as the water receded. The increased sea levels will make it harder for commercial fishers to make a living in seaside communities because access points will become inaccessible and because the fish will be more difficult to locate. Also just driving from one place to another will be difficult in these places.

According to a 2024 NOAA report, Beaufort will face 60 high-tide flooding days by 2050 and 338 by 2100. Wilmington will experience 30 high-tide flooding days by 2050 and 323 by 2100. This will make it extremely difficult to travel and work in those communities. From there on, the situation only gets worse.

Again, according to Bunya, “By the end of the century, we are looking at a likely range of 2 to 4 feet of rise, though scenarios up to 7 feet are possible.”

So the next several decades will provide challenges to already existing infrastructure such as bridges and culverts that were not built to withstand such saltwater intrusion. The groundwater will be inundated and the tillable soil in areas such as Open Grounds Farm, a roughly 45,000-acre farm in Down East Carteret County operated by a corporation based in Italy, will be threatened. Work and school will be disrupted due to the inability to travel. Tropical storms will be more of a problem in the future because storm surge will be on top of higher water levels than measured historically.

There is a lot to ponder here. Hiding our heads in the disappearing sand will not make the problem go away.

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Case Skinner, 4, son of Kathleen and Jeremy Skinner, fishes around 8 a.m. earlier this month from his parents’ dock on on the Newport River in Mill Creek, an unincorporated community in central Carteret County. The young Skinner is also accomplished with a cast net. Photo: Jeremy Skinner

Dr. Joel Fodrie has been named the new director of Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort.

Most recently director of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, Fodrie will succeed outgoing director Andy Read, who was in the leadership role for 10 years and will remain on the faculty once Fodrie comes aboard, Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment said Wednesday.

“The Duke Marine Lab is a gold standard among centers of coastal and marine research, both in the social sciences and the natural sciences. Its coastal setting is ideal for exploring how humans and natural systems affect one another. I’m very excited about working with the faculty, staff and students to support, and even enhance, place-based research and teaching that has local and far-reaching impacts,” Fodrie said in a statement.

Fodrie will join later this summer the lab that “has centered on field-based discovery, immersive learning and close mentorship” for nearly nine decades, the university said.

“As director, Joel will build on Andy’s legacy and further strengthen strategic connections between Beaufort and Durham while guiding the Marine Lab’s next chapter as a world-class leader in marine science and research,” said Lori Bennear, Stanback Dean of the Nicholas School.

Fodrie earned his bachelor’s degree in biology and history from UNC Chapel Hill, and his doctorate in biological oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego.

His research focuses on coastal and estuarine ecosystems, fisheries ecology and the resilience of marine communities and his scholarship includes more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and extensive external grant support.

“Joel has the research, academic and leadership expertise we were looking for in a director. But beyond that, he brings a reputation as a trusted community partner deeply appreciative of and knowledgeable about North Carolina coastal ecosystems,” said Erika Weinthal, the Nicholas School’s John O. Blackburn Distinguished Professor, who chaired the Marine Lab director search committee

Among various honors, Fodrie received recognition as an Early-Career Research Fellow with the Gulf Research Program, part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. In 2024, he was named one of five recipients of the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair in Public Policy, a five-year term professorship to recognize and honor outstanding teachers and scholars.

“On a personal level, I grew up in Beaufort, North Carolina, and have known about the significance of the Marine Lab essentially my whole life,” Fodrie said. “I certainly view this as a one-of-a-kind opportunity to help shape the direction and impact of the Lab to ensure wise and sustainable use of our coastal and marine ecosystems.”

Fittingly, it was a Carolina blue sky that greeted University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee H. Roberts as he joined Institute of Marine Sciences researchers for a boat ride Tuesday morning to Cape Lookout National Seashore’s undeveloped barrier islands, a stark contrast to the celebratory gridlock on Franklin Street that the Orange County city can expect after a big win.

Roberts was in Carteret County to meet with faculty and students and learn more about their research at the lab in Morehead City, one of the handful of stops for the chancellor’s second summer tour this year in eastern North Carolina.

The first summer tour in 2025 covered the western part of the state. The 2026 tour began May 29 with two days at Fort Bragg. After Carteret County, he stopped in New Bern, UNC Pembroke, UNC Wilmington and the USS Battleship North Carolina.

Roberts told Coastal Review Tuesday afternoon from inside the institute that these tours are the university’s connection to the state, and its people are “the source of our strength at Carolina.”

Because most of the state’s people do not live in Chapel Hill, Roberts explained that “it’s important to get out around the state and see people where they live and work and see as many communities across the state as we can.”

Roberts continued that most communities don’t have a facility like this one, “where we’ve made a large investment for a for a long time, and so this has been a particularly important part of Carolina’s history, having the physical outpost here, but the work Carolina scientists and researchers are doing is in every nook and cranny of the state, trying to help move the state forward.”

His visit Tuesday included a tour of the lab with a small group, including area media, led by Institute of Marine Sciences Director Dr. Joel Fodrie, a professor in the Earth, marine and environmental sciences department.

Fodrie said that the institute is approaching its 80th year, and the existing building was built about 25 years ago to house research for environmental processes, like water quality, biogeochemistry and geology.

Throughout the tour, Roberts was able to observe research as it was happening and speak to the scientists as they analyzed microbiomes on the coast’s shark species, collected data on how much sediment flows downstream from inland waterbodies, and harvested seagrass seeds for large-scale seagrass restoration. Fodrie also made a point of introducing Roberts to the facilities and administration staff as well, highlighting their important role in keeping the the lab running smoothly.

During a pause by the office of Dr. Rick Luettich, former institute director, the alumni distinguished professor out of his office to talk about an ongoing flood data collection initiative called the Sunny Day Flooding Project.

Luettich said they’ve been working with people on campus, in city and regional planning, and with N.C. State University on the project that uses sensors installed in storm drains and ditches to record water levels.

Luettich pointed to the neighboring office where research specialist in physical oceanography Tony Whipple was building the sensors that measure in real time how “frequently flooding is occurring now, not when a big storm comes, but just when it’s a King Tide, or with sea level rise.”

Luettich said there are sensors in New Bern, Beaufort, Carolina Beach and Down East Carteret County, and there’s a website that shows in real time what the water levels are in these understudied areas.

“We haven’t been really paying attention to whether they flood, but we’re seeing that they flood very frequently, and more and more often as sea level’s rising. So really interesting collaborative project that we’re kind of right at ground zero for,” Luettich said.

On the second floor, UNC Institute for the Environment Director Dr. Michael Piehler paused working on what he called a “really cool experiment” looking at salinity intrusion in farms to chat with Roberts.

Piehler said the “experiment is working on a farm where salinity is coming in and seeing how that affects both the way that the farmers experience the soil and the way we see it as a processor of nutrients, so it’s just another great case of IMS being a beautiful thing.”

When Fodrie directed the group outside of the facility, he gestured to what looked like abstract sculptures with concrete-saturated rope as the medium.

He said these were different types of structures used to build living shorelines, and the university is collaborating with the companies that make these alternatives for hardened bulkheads and seawalls for shoreline restoration.

“We get to play a valuable role,” Fodrie said. “We’re engaging a lot of companies that are doing that to help them refine their projects and protect shorelines better, and in more environmentally friendly ways” he said about what he called the bourgeoning industry.

Fodrie also used the tour to show the chancellor existing needs at the research lab.

The outdoor experimental tanks are high on Fodrie’s list to be modernized and be more accessible to all students for experiments and research, and they’re looking to expand the 2,100-square-foot dormitory that sleeps about 20.

“We would love to have students here,” for the semester, Fodrie said from inside the cramped living space beside the lab, and want to expand the dorm to accommodate about 32 beds. “We have the footprint. We have the space” and plans have been drawn.

“Our grad students have had an increasingly hard time finding a place to live,” Fodrie said. They used to rent beachfront homes and “that game is over. So, we have a real housing crunch.”

In the past, students could pool their resources and together rent the larger beach houses for a reasonable amount, but the by-owner vacation business has priced the students out.  

In the shorter term, Fodrie said IMS is going to invest in turning the existing dorm into four apartments that sleep four each.

“We’re going to actually reduce capacity to 16,” and the apartments will be small, but they’ll be perhaps livable for a whole semester. That only gets us to 16 and we’re trying to get to 32. It’s a good short-term fix, but not a long-term solution,” Fodrie said.

Roberts told Coastal Review after his tour of the lab that the university has had a presence on the coast for 80 years, and “when you spend time here, you realize why. How important it is to undertake the kind of research that our scientists and faculty are pursuing.”

The coast is crucial to the state and to its future, from standpoint of fisheries and the environment, the research into sustainability, oyster farms, and dozens of other areas of research everywhere you look.

“We have 75 people here year-round. It’s a remarkable effort supported by the people of North Carolina, and, and for a good reason, because what’s happening here is integral to North Carolina’s future,” he said.

In a follow-up interview, Fodrie told Coastal Review that the facility serves as UNC’s vanguard for meeting challenges facing the coast, as well as for discovering solutions in focal areas that include coastal resilience, water quality, human health, and fisheries.

“Knowing how broad and diverse the chancellor’s responsibilities are, we are very gratified and appreciative that he would choose to visit the Institute to learn more about our ongoing efforts to serve North Carolina and also explore with us ways to expand our capacity in research and teaching/mentoring,” Fodrie said.

Roberts’ choice to visit the institute also highlights the unique and high-impact role that it has played in UNC’s mission over the last 80 years, since the institute was created, Fodrie continued.

“In this regard, one telling statistic we discussed related to the Impact Awards that UNC uses to recognize graduate students that conduct research focused on serving the needs of North Carolina,” Fodrie said, explaining that IMS-based graduate students represent less than 0.2% of all UNC graduate students during the last decade but represent about 14% of all award recipients over that same period.

“In turn, we also appreciated the chance to learn more about the chancellor’s broader goals and priorities for UNC during his team’s visit, and therefore how IMS might continue to grow our impact within and beyond the university.”  

Through a partnership with a national nonprofit, the North Carolina Coastal Federation now owns more than 150 acres of protected land along U.S. Highway 70 at what is often called the gateway to Down East, Carteret County’s 13 unincorporated communities east of Beaufort.

The Conservation Fund purchased the land, placed a permanent conservation easement that limits future development on the 153 acres and conveyed ownership to the Coastal Federation, which called the acquisition, “another major step in the long-term protection of the North River landscape and coastal wetlands.” 

The newly conserved land is within the broader North River conservation landscape, where nearly 7,000 acres of wetlands, forests, and marsh migration corridors have been protected and restored over the past several decades, according to the Coastal Federation.

“This project represents the intersection of conservation, resilience, and public education,” Coastal Federation Executive Director Braxton Davis said in a statement. “These wetlands are not only vital to fisheries and water quality, but they also help protect coastal communities from flooding and storms.” 

A short public nature trail is planned designed to introduce visitors to the ecological importance of the North River region and the nearby North River Wetlands Preserve, one of the largest coastal wetland restoration and conservation landscapes on the East Coast, the Coastal Federation said in a press release.

The trail and interpretive exhibit will help visitors understand how coastal wetlands protect water quality, fisheries, wildlife habitat, and coastal communities from flooding and storm impacts. 

“Securing this property is a tremendous achievement for the North River landscape and for the future of coastal conservation in Carteret County,” Coastal Federation Senior Adviser Todd Miller explained. Miller helped coordinate the transaction on behalf of the Coastal Federation.

“This property reflects the continued growth of our land conservation program and the power of strong partnerships with organizations like The Conservation Fund, dedicated landowners, and our public funding partners,” Miller added.

North Carolina Land and Water Fund grants, donations and bargain-sale contributions from the property owners made possible the land purchase, conservation easement, transaction and title-related costs.

“This project demonstrates how collaborative conservation partnerships can permanently protect some of North Carolina’s most important coastal landscapes while also expanding opportunities for public education and climate resilience,” said Guenevere Abernathy, North Carolina State Director for The Conservation Fund. “We are proud to work with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, the North Carolina Land and Water Fund, and the landowners to help conserve this remarkable property for future generations.” 

The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

The Swan Quarter-Ocracoke and Cedar Island-Ocracoke ferries have begun offering additional routes across the Pamlico Sound to accommodate summer traffic.

As of Tuesday, the schedule for these ferries are as follows:


• Cedar Island-Ocracoke: 7:30 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke-Cedar Island: 7:30 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Swan Quarter-Ocracoke: 7 a.m., 10 a.m., 1:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.
• Ocracoke-Swan Quarter: 7 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 12:45 p.m. and 3:45 p.m.


Officials with the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s ferry system highly recommend those who plan to use the ferry routes during the summer to make reservations online or by phone by calling 1-800-BY-FERRY.

Ferry users may sign up for the Ferry Information Notification System to receive real-time text or email updates on weather or mechanical delays.

Matthew Godfrey, a sea turtle conservationist with extensive experience in several regions, is the the featured guest this month for the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s “Green Drinks” speaker series in Morehead City.

This month’s session is set for 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 28, on the third floor of Jack’s on the Waterfront at 513 Evans St.

The casual monthly gathering for people who care about the North Carolina coast is hosted by the Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review.

“Whether you enjoy boating, beach days, or simply want to keep our waters clean and our communities strong, this is a relaxed space to connect with others, hear from local voices, and stay up to date on important coastal topics,” according to organizers.

Godfrey began working in North Carolina in 2002, after being hired by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission to coordinate the North Carolina Sea Turtle Project. Since then, he has played a key role in monitoring and protecting sea turtle populations along the state’s coast.

Godfrey will give an overview of sea turtle nesting and nest protection in the state, highlighting some of the joys and challenges associated with sea turtle conservation along North Carolina’s coast.

Grab a drink from the bar and join the conversation. These events are free and open to the public, however registration is strongly encouraged.

Resources to help prepare for tropical storms will be in one place 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, May 30, during Carteret County’s annual hurricane preparedness expo at the Crystal Coast Civic Center in Morehead City.

Carteret County Emergency Services, Carteret County government and the National Weather Service’s Newport office are offering the expo ahead of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, which begins June 1 and ends Nov. 30.

During the expo, representatives from North Carolina Emergency Management, Carteret County departments and other organizations will be available to answer questions, and provide preparedness resources.

Information presentations are to begin at 9:30 a.m. and will include “Preparedness for Hurricane Season 2026” by Warning Coordination Meteorologist Erik Heden, emergency managers, county staff and community organizations, including the Salvation Army and local volunteer groups.

There are some vendor spots still available for businesses and nonprofits that provide storm-related services, supplies and resources. To reserve a vendor space, visit carteretcountync.gov. 

For more information, call Carteret County Emergency Services at 252-222-5841.

For the past year, lifelong Carteret County resident Shannon Adams has been using the skills he’s built through his career in technology to digitize about five decades of the local newspaper for the county’s public library system.

He never expected that by taking on this volunteer project to get editions of the Carteret County News-Times from between 1963 and 2012 from microfilm to the computer screen would lead to a connection between his alma mater, Appalachian State University, and his hometown of Beaufort.

The News-Times has always been a part of Adams’ world. As a child, he said his mother would take him to the store to buy the most recent newspaper for herself and a treat for him.

“That’s kind of how I learned to read. Mom always had it on the table, and it just stuck with me for years. Even when I was away for school, I subscribed to the News-Times,” Adams said. “I think my whole life I’ve always been into local news.”

Adams said that as he got older, he started digitizing whatever media he could: family photos, yearbooks, old film, and home movies.

When he decided to take on the project to digitize the library’s microfilms, Adams recruited a friend also in the technology field, Kris Pettijohn, who resides in Minnesota.

Pettijohn, who told Coastal Review that he has an interest in preserving local history and records, came up with a way to digitize the microfilm using a camera and backlight setup, rather than using expensive commercial scanning equipment.

“A lot of it was trial and error, but it made large-scale digitization much more practical and affordable,” Pettijohn explained.

Once the digital copies were in front of Adams for processing and organizing, he said he would often find himself going “down rabbit holes” while looking through these decades-old editions.

One night in May of last year during one of these deep dives, Adams read a May 1977 article about five visitors from App State who spent a few days in Beaufort to record interviews with notable residents, including the late Grayden Paul, Shirley Babcock, Jean Kell and Eugene Pond, for the Appalachian Oral History Project. The project was launched in 1973 to collect oral histories from residents in Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell counties.

According to the article, the professor directing the project, Pat Morgan, was encouraged to go to Beaufort by Borden Mace, who was executive director of the Appalachian Consortium. No longer in operation, the consortium operated from 1970 to 2004 to preserve the region’s heritage.

Mace “grew up in Beaufort and recommended it as a good area to study,” Morgan explains in the article. Adding that the interviews with the town’s residents “reveal a lifestyle which has been maintained over the years and can be used to further research and as a teaching tool.”

Adams, who graduated from App State in 1993, immediately shared the article with fellow alum Karen Willis Amspacher, because “Karen and I have always connected over Appalachian because there aren’t many people in Carteret County who went there.”

Amspacher, a 1981 graduate, is executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, and she encouraged Adams to find out what he could about those oral histories.

Adams then contacted the university and was connected to Mark Coltrain, an oral historian for the campus’s Special Collections Research Center.

Coltrain told Coastal Review that he was aware of the trip that Morgan took with his assistant and students to Beaufort in May 1977, because he had stumbled on some paper files about the visit in the project’s physical collection while researching another topic several years ago.

He later learned that the trip was at the behest of Mace, who “was inspired by the oral history project’s focus on documenting the memories, experiences, and traditions of rural mountain folks and wanted Morgan to explore a possible partnership that might initiate a counterpart of sorts in rural Carteret County,” he continued.

Another clue about the trip was found in the proposal, “Boone to Beaufort,” that had been stored in the archival collection, which Coltrain shared: “The purpose of the visit is to begin an exchange of interviews and exhibits between the people of the two towns. The Project hopes to conduct a variety of cultural-social interviews with people who are residing in Beaufort and begin making a comparative study of the cultures of these two areas of North Carolina.”

“It appears that ‘the Project’ never took off after that initial excursion but we are left with a small collection of fascinating, rich recordings documenting the experience. The recordings are a combination of tours the Appalachian State group took with local guides and oral history interviews they conducted with local residents,” Coltrain continued.

Coltrain was looped into the email conversation between Adams and the university archivist in May 2025, giving the 1977 trip even more significance.

“I recalled the documents I had seen previously. I dug a little deeper and soon found recordings from the trip.” He shared those finds with Adams, prompting his first visit to the research center.

Adams and his wife Cecilia, also an App State graduate, headed to the mountains in the following month to listen to the recordings and said he “was just blown away,” by the interviews. They returned to Boone a few months later with Amspacher.

In the time since, Coltrain has been working to transfer the physical recordings to Core Sound and has been able to track down one of the five visitors to Beaufort, Audrey Jackson McGee, and connected her with Adams and Amspacher.

McGee, who grew up outside of High Point and lives in Vale now, attended the university from 1974 to 1979, and was in the same work-study program as Amspacher. That’s how McGee ended up in Beaufort with a few other students, Morgan, and another staff member.

While McGee remembers the trip, she said she doesn’t remember all the details. Memories that stick out are setting up the cultural exchange exhibit in the county library and staying in “one of the beautiful historic homes on the water.”

One aspect she found interesting about the project was being able to meet Beaufort residents and to hear about their lives, “about things that were so different from my own experience.”

McGee has revisited the recordings since being Coltrain contacted her, and it “has been wonderful to be able to hear those and some of the people that we met there.”

Coltrain said Adams’ “excitement at hearing some voices of people important to the history of Carteret County was palpable and contagious. These recordings had not been heard in years. It wasn’t long after Adams’ first visit and then his follow-up visit with Karen Amspacher in October 2025 that I knew these recordings should go back ‘home.’”

Amspacher knows more than most about the Appalachian Oral History Project. Her work-study assignment was to listen and transcribe the recordings, and it’s a large part of why the museum has such a sizable oral history collection.

During her first semester on the Boone campus in 1979, she worked “in this little white house” where the Appalachian Consortium was located, “and my job was to transcribe on an old IBM Selectric with headphones and foot pedals these oral histories from the mountain people.”

After about the third one in, she said she thought about home and wondered why oral histories weren’t being recorded in Carteret County.

“Oral histories are important on so many levels. It’s not only the information, but it’s the voices, it’s the time period they represent,” Amspacher explained in an interview. Adding that her top priority at the museum is oral history, and that is because of Appalachian State University and her work with the Appalachian Oral History Project.

Now, the Core Sound museum has more than 600 oral histories in its collection “and I don’t know if we’d have that if I hadn’t going to Appalachian and had that job,” she said. The museum has invested a lot of time, work, and grant money to build the collection because oral histories offer a perspective that documents or artifacts can’t.

To welcome the recordings that will grow the museum’s collection even more, Core Sound is holding an evening program Tuesday to talk about the chain of events leading to these recordings becoming part of the museum’s collection. The covered dish dinner starts at 6 p.m. and Coltrain and Michelle Moriarity Witt, Core Sound’s digital archivist, are to lead the program that begins at 7 p.m.

The museum has the recordings available online now and will be receiving the collection from Coltrain when he arrives for the program.

Amspacher and Adams both have been reaching out to the family members of the people who were interviewed to invite them to the special evening. They are encouraging anyone related to or interested in these recordings to come out to the museum for the special program.

They also contacted this reporter, a 2002 App State graduate and previously with the News-Times, to explain the chain of events.

Coltrain said working with and getting to know Adams and Amspacher has been a highlight.

“It is a real pleasure to connect with people so passionate about their community’s history and reinforces why I’m in this field. The fact that they are both Appalachian State alumni is icing on the cake,” Coltrain explained.

“As a steward of Appalachian State’s oral history collections, ensuring historical materials are in the community where they belong through methods like cultural repatriation is an important value that I take seriously,” Coltrain explained.

“The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum made sense to me as the organization where these materials should go because of Amspacher’s recognized work preserving her local community’s history through methods like oral history. Amspacher’s work, the work of the Appalachian Oral History Project half a century ago, and the continuing work of collecting and preserving oral histories at Appalachian State feels linked in a cosmic way that is impossible to ignore. I am honored to have a role in making these historical connections stronger and these voices more accessible to the community and the world.”

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

Cecelski stumbled on this travel account while looking for historical sources for a story focused on Marshallberg’s Crockett cannery and the sea turtle fishery in the 1930s. 

In the May 13, 1903, edition of the Raleigh News & Observer, correspondent C.J. Rivenbark told the story of his journey to Graham Academy, a school on the outskirts of a fishing village called Marshallberg that is located in the Down East part of Carteret County.

Marshallberg is on a peninsula bound by Sleepy Creek, Core Sound, and a body of water called The Straits that runs between the village and two islands, Harkers Island and Browns Island.

In the early 1900s, Marshallberg was far more out of the way than it is today. It is only 8 miles east of Beaufort, the seat of Carteret County, but at that time, no bridge had yet been built across the North River, and no roads had been paved anywhere east of Beaufort.

As we can see in Rivenbark’s account, people, freight and mail in Marshallberg all came and went by boat.

Rivenbark arrived in Morehead City by train on May 11, 1903. He then boarded the naphtha launch Violet for the trip to Marshallberg.

Operated by the Morehead City, Beaufort, and Ocracoke Steamship Co., the Violet left Morehead City on a regular schedule, stopped just across the river in Beaufort, then worked its way Down East.

The Violet’s captain carried mail to the fishing and farming communities between Beaufort and Cedar Island, then crossed the sound to the southern end of the Outer Banks. First to the village of Portsmouth, then to the village of Ocracoke on the other side of the inlet.

Along the way, the captain picked up and dropped off passengers and freight as the need arose.

According to Jack Dudley’s lovely book “Ocracoke Album,” the steamship company’s captains left Beaufort at first light on Monday mornings and aimed to be in Ocracoke by Wednesday evening at 6 p.m.

After spending the night in Ocracoke, they set off for home early the next morning, hoping to make it back to Beaufort by 6 p.m. on Saturday.

On the spring day that Rivenbark was on board, the Violet was only carrying him, the captain and two other passengers.

“Aboard the Violet…,  the writer has but two traveling companions. Dr. W. T. Paul, of Atlantic, who is recovering from a fractured rib, the result of a fall through the trestle work at Pier No. 1 at Morehead…, and a lonely widow, en route to the Island of Hatteras.”

I could not confidently identify the Violet’s “lonely widow en route to the Island of Hatteras,” but I wondered if it might have been Viola Johnston Scarborough, a Hatteras Island woman who had lost her husband only a month earlier.

Ms. Scarborough’s husband, George M. Scarborough, was said to have been a native of Cape Hatteras.

At the turn of the 20th century, Scarborough was the assistant keeper of the Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse, a screw-pile lighthouse located at the southern end of Croatan Sound.

On April 14, 1903, he had been home visiting his wife and child on Hatteras Island, then set off in what was apparently rough weather in a sail skiff bound for the lighthouse. His boat overturned in the storm about a mile offshore, still in sight of his family.

Viola Scarborough– if it was she on board the Violet— was left feeling grief upon grief. According to a notice of her husband’s death that appeared in the North Carolina Advocate (20 April 1903), she had already lost one husband in her young life.

The Advocate’s story did not say how her first husband died, and it could have been anything. But thinking of that time and place, one can’t help but wonder if she had also lost him to the sea.

The Violet’s only other passenger that day, Dr. W. T. Paul, was born in Pitt County, N.C. in or about 1848.

Paul served in the Confederate army’s reserves during the Civil War, when he was no more than 16 or 17 years old.

“His youth gave great promise,” one source said.

The village of Atlantic, where he came to practice, was on the northern end of Core Sound. It was some 30 miles north and east of Beaufort, and like Marshallberg, it was reachable only by boat.

In Atlantic, Dr. Paul did whatever was in his powers to do: he treated the sick and dyspeptic, delivered babies, mended broken bones, and performed surgery when, as was almost always the case, there was no time to get a patient to a hospital.

In those days, the people of Atlantic made their livings largely by fishing, waterfowl hunting, and going to sea, though many of the village’s women also worked in a clam cannery that was there for a few years around the turn of the century.

Like so many of the local fishing villages, Atlantic also seemed to attract outsiders, perhaps like Dr.. Paul, who were looking for a place to hide from the world or to shelter their frailties.

Dr. Paul died on New Year’s Day, 1917. He was 69 years old. I found several of his obituaries, and while only disclosing so much, they make it seem as if he had had a tough time of it.

In the Greensboro News & Record’s (2 Jan. 1917), for instance, the obituary writer implied that Dr. Paul had been worn down by “drink and dope,” to the point that he had long been reduced to poverty.

(At that time, “dope” most often meant opium, morphine, or heroin, not marijuana.)

Dr. Paul ended his life at the Confederate Soldiers’ Home, a residence for indigent Civil War veterans in Raleigh. He committed suicide there on New Year’s Day 1917.

I guess it is always that way. If seen from a distance, the scene would have seemed so idyllic: a boat, a captain at the helm, the three travelers, the sea around them, the lighthouse in the distance.

I am reminded again of how little we know of the burdens that others carry, or of the wounds they bear.

-To Be Continued-

The Crystal Coast Tourism Development Authority in Carteret County announced Monday that Karen Gould will become its executive director, effective May 16.

The TDA is responsible for promoting and developing tourism in Carteret County. It receives funding for these marketing efforts from a 6% county occupancy tax on short-term accommodations that is shared 50-50 with the county commission responsible for Bogue Banks beach nourishment projects.  

The TDA said that Gould brings extensive experience in destination marketing, stakeholder engagement and tourism strategy to the role. An area native, she has been with the TDA for more than a decade, most recently serving as its deputy executive director.

“Karen brings a deep understanding of the destination and region’s tourism landscape and there’s no one else I’d rather have as my successor,” said current Executive Director Jim Browder in the announcement. “That, paired with her extensive destination marketing experience, makes her an exceptional fit to lead the TDA. She has a clear vision for sustainable growth and thoughtful destination storytelling, which are instrumental when it comes to promoting our destination on both a regional and national scale.”   

In her new role, Gould will oversee the TDA’s strategic direction, including marketing, communications, stakeholder engagement and tourism development initiatives.  

“I’m honored to step into this new role at the Crystal Coast Tourism Development Authority,” said Gould. “The Crystal Coast holds a special place in my heart, not just because it’s home, but because of its natural beauty, rich history and strong sense of place. I look forward to building on the foundation I’ve built over the last ten years, while continuing to share the destination’s story with travelers.” 

For more information about North Carolina’s Crystal Coast visit www.crystalcoastnc.org/ 

Emerald Isle commissioners are expected to consider at their meeting later this month raising tenfold the town-imposed penalty for violations involving damage to primary dunes.

The proposal, one that would increase the fine from $1,000 to $10,000, was unanimously approved last Tuesday by the town’s planning board and comes on the heels of Emerald Isle’s issuance of a cease-and-desist order for construction on an oceanfront lot.

Remarque Home Builders LLC was slapped with a notice of violation and ordered to stop working at 3405 Ocean Drive until the dune destroyed at the property, as well as a designated natural area on the lot, have been fully restored.

“I’ve been working as a beach town manager for most of my career, nearly three decades, and this is the most egregious violation I have ever seen,” Emerald Isle Town Manager Frank Rush said by telephone late Wednesday.

Carving more than 5,600 square feet of primary dune that buffered the lot from the oceanfront beach is a violation of the Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA, minor permit the builder’s obtained May 1, 2024.

The developer also violated a town ordinance that requires 35% of a lot remain as undisturbed natural area.

The owners of the Cedar Point-based limited liability company did not respond to Coastal Review’s request for comment in time for publication, but in a statement to WCTI-TV, the owners said they were “cooperating fully” with the state and the town.

“We are working cooperatively with the regulators to finalize a remediation plan, to restore the dune in accordance with their directives, and to satisfy any lawful fines or penalties that may be assessed. We will continue to do what the Town and CAMA ask for us until this matter is fully resolved. Dune stewardship along the coast is a shared responsibility.”

It is unclear why the dune was leveled.

“The questions being examined at our property, such as how construction, landscaping and dune work interact with CAMA requirements, are not unique to 3405 Ocean Drive,” Remarque Home Builders said in the email. “We understand that similar work has been undertaken by other owners on Ocean Drive without triggering comparable regulatory action.”

“We raise this not to deflect responsibility, but to underscore that these are questions faced by many property owners along the coast, and by the regulators charged with applying the same standards to each of them,” the statement continues. “We welcome a regulatory process that produces clear, consistent guidance and even-handed enforcement across all similarly situated properties, and we are committed to helping that process succeed here.”

Rush said that sand from the dune was redistributed on the 0.43-acre lot and, in some cases, pushed onto adjacent properties.

“Essentially they have to put it back the way it was,” he said.

That entails restoring the dune to its original height of around 25 to 26 feet and planting it with vegetation commonly used for dune stabilization.

Under the terms of the notice of violation, the developer will also have to resubmit a new, separate pool permit so town staff “can judge that application on its own merits after this violation is completely resolved.”

The town’s notice of violation issued April 22 came with a $1,000 fine. The developer also faces an estimated $1,000 state-imposed fine, according to the town. If the limited liability company does not come into compliance within 60 days, the developer will be fined $1,000 a day until work is complete.

“They’ve indicated they intend to rectify it much sooner than that,” Rush said.

The town will not issue a certificate of occupancy for the 7,300-square-foot, 12-bedroom, 13 ½-bath house listed for $6 million until the repairs and restoration have been completed, he said.

Remarque, in its statement, reiterated that the property is privately owned and asked the media and public to stay off the lot where the conspicuously missing dune has drawn the ire of area residents and property owners who’ve taken to social media to express their outrage.

“If this is not escalated appropriately, it opens the door for others to push limits, take shortcuts, and deal with the consequences later. That is not a precedent we can afford to set in Emerald Isle,” Jamie Vogel, a former town commissioner, wrote in a social media post last month.

“The oceanfront dunes provide critical storm protection, aesthetic, and ecological value for Emerald Isle and the Town places the highest priority on a healthy beach strand and dune field,” Rush wrote in the May edition of the town’s newsletter Emerald Tidings. “Collectively, the community has invested tens of millions of dollars in beneficial beach nourishment projects over the past 23 years, and these sane placement efforts have resulted in the significant augmentation of existing dunes and the construction of new dunes to advance the Town’s goals. The Town’s existing dune protection regulation and State CAMA regulations are carefully crafted to balance dune protection, private property rights, and overall storm protection for the entire community and the violations at 3405 Ocean Drive were clear and obvious.”

The Emerald Isle Board of Commissioners will hold a public hearing during its May 12 meeting at 7500 Emerald Drive before considering amending an ordinance to increase the penalty for violations that involve primary dunes. That meeting will begin at 6 p.m.

New York Times bestselling author Kristy Woodson Harvey returns to the fictional, sleepy, seaside town of Cape Carolina in her newest novel “Summer State of Mind.”

Hitting shelves on Tuesday, the reader meets a burned-out neonatal intensive care unit nurse that crosses paths with an injured former baseball star who finds an abandoned newborn in their tight-knit community, Harvey explained.

A contemporary women’s fiction author, Harvey was on her way home from the Piedmont to Beaufort a few weeks ago when she carved out a few minutes of her day for a chat with Coastal Review.

She said that “Summer State of Mind” is a companion to her “Under the Southern Sky,” a 2021 novel about two childhood friends and neighbors, Parker and Amelia, raised in Cape Carolina, and the book in which she introduces secondary characters, aunt Tilley and Parker’s older brother, Mason.

In “Summer State of Mind,” the “very eccentric” Southern aunt and baseball player Mason are the primary characters along with Daisy, the NICU nurse who is new to the coastal setting, Harvey said.

The plot was inspired by a newspaper article written about an ICU nurse who adopted an abandoned baby, “and it just stuck with me for a long time,” Harvey explained. She mentioned the article to a friend who is an ICU nurse, and the friend shared with Harvey that she knew others with similar experiences. Then a book crossed her desk about nurses who had to make really difficult decisions, “and those kinds of gray areas where sometimes we find ourselves, and (then the novel) all came together.”

Harvey is getting ready to head out Friday to Charleston, South Carolina, to begin her “Summer State of Mind” launch tour. She will be back in eastern North Carolina on Sunday for brunch hosted by the Beaufort Historical Association in Atlantic Beach.

The rest of her tour takes her to Greensboro on Monday, and then on Tuesday, when the book is officially released, she has events in Greenville, South Carolina, and Salisbury, before heading May 6 to Chapel Hill and Raleigh.

Outside of the Carolinas, Harvey has events in Tampa, Florida, on May 7, followed by Franklin, Indiana, on May 8, then Webster Groves, Missouri, on May 9. She heads further west May 10 to Gig Harbor and May 11 to Seattle, both in Washington, and then on May 12 San Diego, California, for two events.

She will return to the east coast for events May 16 in Sneads Ferry and Ocean Isle Beach, and wraps up her tour in South Carolina May 17 for Pawleys Island and Columbia and then Camden on May 18. Tickets and more details are available on her website.

With this book being released in May and then “Falling for Peachtree Bluff,” the fifth installment of her “Peachtree Series” expected to come out in September, the second leg of her 2026 tour will be announced is this fall.

The road to Southern fiction

Harvey grew up in Salisbury, where she said she fell in love with writing when she was a senior year in high school. She was an intern at a “great, small-town daily newspaper.”

“I was actually going to medical school and decided to become a journalist instead, because I just absolutely fell in love with writing for newspapers,” she said.

As an intern at the Salisbury Post, “I just fell in love with writing for newspapers and interviewing people, and so I ended up going to journalism school at UNC and just ate it up. Just loved it,” she said. During that time, she worked on the university’s Blue & White magazine and served as its managing editor.

Harvey explained that when she earned her undergraduate degree in 2007, it was an unusual time in journalism because of increasingly adopted internet service, which “hadn’t really hit its stride yet, and the future of journalism was looking a little questionable.”

She decided to pursue her master’s in literature, with the thought that, if writing doesn’t work out, she can teach. But life sent her on a different path. After grad school, she started working in finance but continued to freelance as a writer.

She also began weaving together storylines. And though she took creative writing classes in college, she never really planned to write fiction.

“I think there was something really perfect about the way that it unfolded, because I started getting these ideas and then decided that I was going to write a book just to see if I could, just for myself,” Harvey said.

When she began writing, it wasn’t with the expectation of publishing or becoming an author, which she said was the right approach for her because there was no pressure in it at all. She wanted to see if this was something she could do.

“And I kept writing, and I kept writing,” and by the time she had her third manuscript, she decided to submit her work to literary agents.

She sold her debut novel “Dear Carolina” to a publishing house in 2014, and the book was out in 2015. Set in Kinston, the work follows the path of two women from different circles who bond over the adoption of a baby girl.

Her second book, “Lies and Other Acts of Love,” is set in her hometown of Salisbury, she said. This standalone 2016 novel delves into family secrets.

Harvey initially planned to set her next project, the Peachtree Bluff series, in Beaufort, but “then I realized how incredibly freeing it was to be able to just make up a town” and build the world to suit the story.

She draws inspiration from the beach communities on the East Coast like Beaufort, calling the fictional towns “loose interpretations” of places she knows, all with the goal to give the readers small southern towns.

“That’s what I know, and also because I think it resonates with readers,” she said, giving them a touchpoint that they can return to again and again.

The “Peachtree Series” launched in 2017, the same year she and her husband decided to try Beaufort out full time.

Harvey explained that they bought their house in Beaufort in 2012 and had spent about 18 months remodeling what they had planned to be their beach house. They had been driving to and from Carteret County, “And when our son was in preschool, we decided to move for one year, and now he’s in eighth grade and we still haven’t left,” she said about their move to Carteret County. By then she had published her third book.

The beauty of Carteret County, aka the “Crystal Coast” in marketing materials, and its residents are special to her.

Being from Salisbury, Harvey’s family was much closer to South Carolina beaches, and with her father being from Wilmington, “When we were going to the beach, we were either going to Wrightsville or Litchfield. And so, it was new for me, and I just fell in love with it right away.”

‘Friends & Fiction’ podcast

Harvey co-hosts “Friends & Fiction” with New York Times bestselling authors Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel and Patti Callahan Henry.

The podcast launched in 2020 when Andrews texted a handful of authors who had books scheduled to publish, but all their tours had been canceled because of COVID-19, and, “we were really worried about independent bookstores. There was no foot traffic, there was no events.”

While brainstorming about ways to reach their readers and help the small businesses, they decided to go live on Facebook and talk about their new books and remind people to support their independent bookstores.

“The first night we did it, we didn’t think anyone would show up,” she said, but a thousand people tuned in. The bestselling authors decided to go live every Wednesday night for seven weeks, when the hosts’ books would be out. And now, the show is coming up on its six-year anniversary, with 350,000 members.

“It’s just like a nice corner of the internet world where people can talk about books,” Harvey said. “We’re really good friends and we love what we’re doing, and we love supporting authors, and our mission is still to support independent bookstores, and as long as, as long as viewers keep showing up to watch, we’re going to keep going.”

One benefit of the podcast is that it pushes Harvey to read books outside of her preferred genres before interviewing the authors.  

“I’ve read so many things that I never would have read, but I did because the author was going to be a guest,” and through that process, she said she’s discovered new authors, genres and novels that broadened her view in some way. “I do think reading really widely can really help inform our own writing.”

She added that she loves to hear from the authors and the paths they took.

“It’s so cool to me how people just come to the page in such wildly different ways. And everybody has their own journey. Everybody has their own writing process.”

In addition to the two books released this year, “A Happier Life,” her 2024 work set in a historic Beaufort home, is in development for film by MGM/Amazon.

“The Summer of Songbirds,” the 2023 novel about lifelong friends who met as children at summer camp, is in development for television with Hulu, and a handful of other projects are in various stages of option or development for film and television, according to her provided bio. Her work has been Southern Living, Parade, Traditional Home, USA TODAY and other publications.

With more than a decade of full-time writing behind her, Harvey told Coastal Review that she loves watching the story unfold as she writes it.

“I’m so happy that I did it. I always look back and think, ‘What if I’d never done this?’ I never would have known,” she said.

Harvey remains unsure what life will look like in the next five years, but her plan is to focus on “writing my next best book and what’s the next best step.”

The North Carolina Division of Coastal Management is now accepting reservations for a series of free-of-charge public field trips this summer to the Rachel Carson Reserve in Beaufort.

Beginning in June, two types of field trips will be offered on the Reserve, including nature hikes, which will occur during low tides when the most land on the island is exposed.

Participants of these hikes must wear close-toed shoes to protect their feet from the abundance of oysters, specifically their sharp-edged shells. Make sure your footwear is suitable for wet, muddy conditions. And, if you desire to wade in the water on the hike if given that opportunity, dress accordingly.

For those who prefer a little drier ground, the division is also hosting boardwalk trips, which will take you down Taylor’s Creek to the boardwalk on Carrot Island. Close-toed shoes are required for these trips as well.

Field trips have been scheduled as follows:

• June 16 — Boardwalk trip.
• June 23 — Nature hike trip.
• June 30 — Boardwalk trip.
• July 7 — Nature hike trip.
• July 16 — Boardwalk trip.
• July 23 — Nature hike trip.
• July 30 — Boardwalk trip.
• Aug. 6 — Nature hike trip.
• Aug. 13 — Boardwalk trip.
• Aug. 18 — Nature hike trip.

Boats will depart from Pivers Island in Beaufort.

Participants must be at least 4 years old and all are encouraged to bring sunglasses, hats, binoculars, water, and sunscreen.

For additional information or help making an online reservation call 252-515-5426. If you leave a voicemail, expect a return call within 24 hours.

To join a waitlist if a trip is full, you may call the number above or email staff at lori.c.davis@deq.nc.gov.

While these field trips are free, donations are accepted for the nonprofit organization Friends of the Reserve  by PayPal.

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Two cottonmouths, aka water moccasins and known scientifically as Agkistrodon piscivorus, came face to face while foraging Sunday at the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s 6,000-acre North River Wetlands Preserve, with one rising up and the other backing down. One of six venomous snakes in North Carolina, the cottonmouth is the most aquatic, preferring wetter habitats. It’s a pit viper, having a pit on its face that senses heat. The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission offers tips on how to coexist with snakes. Photo: Doug Waters

PEA ISLAND — Recently I had the pleasure of giving Johnnie Van Willis a tour of the historic Pea Island Cookhouse museum. Johnnie traveled to the museum from his home in Marshallberg, a historic fishing community situated on a peninsula in Carteret County and directly along the shores of the Core Sound.

Marshallberg has been characterized as a sleepy, close-knit village with a rich history of commercial fishing, boatbuilding and family heritage. Johnnie’s great-grandfather was Isaac Van Willis Sr. He’s the surfman sitting in the middle top row in the only known photograph of a “Checkerboard Crew.” This term was used in the U.S. Life-Saving Service, the predecessor to today’s U.S. Coast Guard, to identify racially mixed surfmen crews, crews with both Black and white surfmen, like a checkerboard.

In March 2023, a painting depicting this image was unveiled at the College of the Albemarle – Dare County Campus. Both the photograph and painting are on display at the “Cookhouse,” the shortened name for the museum housed in what once was a building in which surfmen cooked and ate their meals.

As background, Johnnie shares both his middle and last name with his great-grandfather and grandfather, Isaac Van Willis Sr. and Isaac Van Willis Jr. In spring 2018, Johnnie took a road trip with his wife and daughters in search of his great-grandfather’s grave. Through a friend, he had learned it was somewhere near the Marshall and Gussie Collins Trail, a trail named after my grandparents at the Collins homestead. They were part of a small and closely knit community of Black residents of Roanoke Island. It included those connected to the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island, as well as the rich Native American history here.

Like many Black people in their community, my grandparents were known for their hard work, family, friends, and record of service. They once owned a home and farmland near where the trail is now, including much of the property that surrounds the Dare County Governmental Center and not far from the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge.

I had noticed when Johnnie and two of his daughters were walking on the trail and struck up a conversation with them. They told me they were searching for the gravesite but couldn’t find it, and they were super excited when I revealed that it was a just a few yards away. Leading them there, I sensed our special connection.

Johnnie did not know much about his great-grandfather, other than that he had worked several years in the Life-Saving Service.

I quickly realized the parallels and differences associated with our two families. My great-grandfather also worked in the service. We both had family members and friends who had lived in small, tightly knit communities and had grown up fishing, oystering, catching crabs, building boats, farming, hunting, and going to church together. Yet, we also shared the understanding that history shows the lives and experiences of our two families were very different, simply because of race. 

Born in January 1873, my great-grandfather, Joseph Hall Berry, began his career initially serving as a “substitute” surfman when the legendary Keeper Richard Etheridge commanded the historic Pea Island Life-Saving Station. He enlisted in February 1902, the same month that my father would do the same 37 years later. My great-grandfather Berry is also the only of several family members who served in both the Life-Saving Service and the Coast Guard. He retired in February 1917 after serving for 15 years.

The trail signage at Isaac Van Willis Sr.’s grave shows he served for 30 years. Given that Life-Saving Service stations that once stretched along coast were spaced about seven miles apart and that our great-grandparents worked at neighboring stations, in all likelihood they knew each other. They could have each lived on Roanoke Island, but I am uncertain where Isaac Van Willis Sr. may have lived. They also likely participated in joint rescues. Before motorized equipment was available, these rescues were especially difficult and dangerous, often requiring the manpower of several stations.

Today, Johnnie still chuckles when he recalls how we met. When I realized who he was, the first thing I told him was to wait a few minutes, that his visit was important and I needed to I grab a pen and piece of paper. Yet, as we stood talking, I realized that, other than knowing his great-grandfather spent several years in the service, Johnnie knew little about him. He died when Johnnie was just a small child.

Johnnie knew more about his grandfather, Isaac Van Willis Jr., had who worked in the U.S. Lighthouse Service at the Cape Lookout Lighthouse.

In 2018, I also knew little about Isaac Van Willis Sr., and the story of Checkerboard Crews. Yet, each time I looked at the gravesite, I sensed he was important. His prominent marker, which includes the Life-Saving Service emblem and information about his wife on the opposite side, has always intrigued me. I was delighted a few days ago to receive a call from one of Johnnie’s daughters telling me that she wanted to bring her father back to Roanoke Island and to visit the Cookhouse. The trip was quickly planned. Johnnie and his daughters were thrilled to see a framed copy of the 1910 photograph and the vibrant oil painting of the same, each showing Isaac Van Willis Sr. They had never seen either image before. The discovery even brought tears to one granddaughter’s eyes.

I also made Johnnie aware of a letter that I had discovered about Isaac Van Willis Sr. several years ago. I promised to search for it in the research material I have collected over the years. At the time he was Surfman No. 1 at the Oregon Inlet station, the position typically next in line to become Keeper. Although I haven’t looked at it for several years now, I still recall being surprised to find Keeper Richard Etheridge’s signature on it. He and several others had signed it in support of Isaac Van Willis Sr.’s desire to become Keeper. Before Johnnie left, I promised to search for it and send him a copy.

Likewise, although Johnnie did not have any pictures of his great-grandfather, he had brought along something very special for me to see. He showed me a cherished framed photograph of Isaac Van Willis Jr., a photograph showing him doing work inside the lantern at the Cape Lookout Lighthouse. He promised to send me a copy of the photo when he returned home.

After a day that began with a seafood lunch, then a long visit at the Cookhouse, and ended with a cherished joint return to the Isaac Van Willis Sr. gravesite, I have concluded that our chance encounter eight years ago was destiny, simply something meant to be.

The broader story of Checkerboard Crews is a planned topic for “Cookhouse Chats,” a new initiative for 2026 that started in February. These periodic chats are to provide information on lesser-known stories associated with the history that the Cookhouse represents. Our next planned chat will be announced soon. 

The North Carolina Coastal Federation is set to break ground next month in Carteret County on what officials describe as a first-of-its-kind facility intended to help shellfish growers overcome market barriers.

The Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, says the Shellfish Mariculture Hub in Straits, an unincorporated Down East community with deep commercial seafood heritage, will serve as a shared resource for shellfish growers, marking a significant milestone in sustainable shellfish aquaculture in the state and supporting the local community. The Shellfish Mariculture Hub promises to enhance the production capabilities of shellfish farmers while promoting collaboration and innovation, according to the Coastal Federation, which plans to hold a groundbreaking ceremony at 11 a.m. May 4.

Situated at the Straits Landing Boat Ramp, the facility will provide shared refrigeration, equipment and water access, all of which farmers need to grow a thriving local industry rooted in coastal heritage and vital to the state’s blue economy. 

“From costly water access to long hauls for refrigeration and distribution, oyster growers face logistical barriers at every step,” explained Coastal Federation Oyster Program Director Alyson Flynn. “This facility is the solution towards streamlining operations and strengthening the shellfish mariculture industry.” 

Construction of the 50-foot, square building is expected to begin this summer.

The Shellfish Mariculture Hub is part of a broader, coordinated effort to grow the state’s oyster industry into a $100 million sector by 2030 — creating jobs, strengthening the coastal economy, and advancing resilient working waterfronts. By addressing a critical industry gap, the hub will lower barriers to market entry for new growers while enabling existing growers to expand and scale their operations, supporting the next generation of shellfish farmers. 

“Not only is the hub a centralized support facility for growers, but it is also an innovative model for the future of shellfish mariculture—equipping growers to thrive and serving as a blueprint for industry growth and investment along our coast,” said Flynn. 

Carteret County is offering its residents a free drive-through service on Saturday to collect common household hazardous waste.

The waste collection is hosted by the Carteret County Solid Waste Division, in partnership with Coastal Environmental Partnership, and is set for 8 a.m.-1 p.m. at the Carteret County Health Department parking lot, 3820 Bridges St., Morehead City. Proof of residency will be required.

Small quantities of household hazardous items, including cooking oil, automotive fluids such as gasoline, used motor oil and antifreeze, lawn and garden pesticides, batteries and paint will be accepted.

Trained staff who will be on-site to unload these materials from resident’s vehicles will not accept infectious waste, gas cylinders, commercial waste, radioactive materials, ammunition, or explosives.

“Proper disposal of household hazardous waste helps prevent contamination of water sources, reduces risks to sanitation workers, and protects the environment,” according to a county release.

Coastal Environmental Partnership, or CEP, which serves Carteret, Craven and Pamlico counties, provides a series of household hazardous waste collection events throughout the year.

For more information about this or future collection opportunities, visit carteretcountync.gov or contact the Carteret County Public Works Department at 252-648-7878.

Residents may also contact CEP Education and Outreach Coordinator Somer Peede at 252-633-1564 or somer@crswma.com.

Four new historic districts and 19 properties across the state, five of which are on the coast, have been added to the National Register of Historic Places in the last year, the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources announced this week.

Part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources, the National Historic Register is the “official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation,” that was authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and is under the National Park Service.

“Each addition to the National Register of Historic Places represents another step in preserving North Carolina’s unique story,” said the department’s Secretary Pamela Cashwell in a statement Thursday. “These sites help connect our communities to their past while supporting cultural tourism and local economies.” 

In Beaufort County, Pantego School No. 2 was listed Feb. 24. The Rosenwald-funded school building was completed in 1926 and remained operational as an integrated school after 1968, until it closed in the spring of 2001, the application states.

Winnabow is an 1845 Greek Revival frame house with a double-pile center-passage plan at 677 Governor Road, in Brunswick County that was was Dec. 29, 2025.

Clubfoot and Harlow Canal in Carteret and Craven counties, which was listed Feb. 23, is a roughly 3-mile artificial channel dug that opened July 1827 across a peninsula connecting Clubfoot Creek and the Neuse River at the north to Harlow Creek and the Newport River to the south.

The 1850 Adam Dough Etheridge House in Dare County was listed Aug. 11, 2025. The two-story, single pile, vernacular dwelling features a side-gabled roof and partially enclosed full-width porches on the façade, common among houses on Roanoke Island in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Located in Pasquotank County, Oak Grove Cemetery, which was listed Aug. 11, 2025, is Elizabeth City’s oldest extant Black cemetery. The Black community formally established it on 2.53 acres in 1886, expanded it twice in 1921, and again in 1955 to approximately 8 acres, which it remains today within a 14-acre parcel, according to documents.

The listing of a property in the National Register places no obligation or restriction on a private owner using private resources to maintain or alter the property.

Over the years, various federal and state incentives have been introduced to assist private preservation initiatives, including tax credits for the rehabilitation of National Register properties.

As of Dec. 31, 2025, there have been 4,455 completed historic rehabilitation projects with private investments of $4 billion statewide.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation has acquired 787 acres along the North River in Carteret County, expanding the North River Wetlands Preserve to close to 7,000 acres.

The property, purchased for just shy of $1.9 million, is expected to further the nonprofit organization’s mission to protect water quality, while supporting military operations. The new land is also going to provide a new official portion of North Carolina’s Mountains-to-Sea Trail, the environmental group said Monday.

The North River Wetlands Preserve was once mostly ditched and drained farm land but has been restored over the past two decades into one of the largest rehabilitated wetland systems in state.

The new property was purchased through a partnership of state, federal and nonprofit funding, including $590,000 from the U.S. Department of Defense, $449,000 from the Complete the Trails Program for the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, and $964,691 from the N.C. Land and Water Fund for acquisition and transaction costs. 

With the property acquisition April 2, the preserve includes the headwaters of the North River, Wards Creek, and Jarrett Bay, “forming a connected natural system that filters runoff, improves water quality, and sustains productive fisheries downstream,” according to the organization.

“The newly protected tract includes forested wetlands, upland areas, and approximately 6,900 linear feet of tributaries flowing into the North River—a designated Primary Nursery Area and contributor to the Outstanding Resource Waters of Core and Back Sounds,” the organization added.

The Coastal Federation said it plans to begin restoring the site’s natural hydrology by reconnecting wetlands, improving drainage patterns, and enhancing long-term resilience to sea level rise. 

Coastal Federation Executive Director Braxton Davis explained in a release that the acquisition reflects the kind of forward-looking investment North Carolina needs.

“One that protects water quality, strengthens coastal ecosystems, supports military readiness, and creates meaningful public access. Expanding the North River Wetlands Preserve to nearly 7,000 acres ensures this landscape will provide lasting benefits for communities, fisheries, and future generations,” he said.

The land will be a new official section of North Carolina’s Mountains-to-Sea Trail, which is a 1,400-mile route connecting the Great Smoky Mountains to the Outer Banks, and is managed by North Carolina State Parks. 

“The acquisition of this property represents a transformational moment for the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in this area,” Brent Laurenz, executive director of Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, said in a release. “We’re so appreciative of the partnership with the Federation to acquire this property for both the significant addition it will make to the MST and for its long-term conservation value.” 

The Department of Navy used funding from the Defense Department’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration, or REPI, Program, to secure a permanent restrictive use easement over the property where low-altitude helicopter training routes associated with Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point operations are held.

“This project represents years of work bringing together the right partners and funding to protect a truly special place,” Todd Miller, senior adviser to the Coastal Federation and project manager for the acquisition, said in a statement.

“By securing this property, we are safeguarding the headwaters of the North River, expanding one of the most important coastal preserves in the state, and creating a permanent route for the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. It’s a powerful example of how conservation can deliver clean water, public access, and support for our military at the same time,” he added.

This project is part of the organization’s “Lands for a Healthy Coast” initiative, which focuses on conserving strategic coastal landscapes that protect water quality, sustain fisheries, and build resilience to climate change. The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

Additional partners on the project include the North Carolina General Assembly, and Morehead City attorney John Harris.

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An American alligator sunning at North River Wetlands Preserve in Carteret County slides in for a dip recently as March temperatures rose. The 6,000-acre preserve is the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s project to return farmland back to its original state and to use the wetlands to naturally treat polluted runoff. The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review. Photo: Doug Waters

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found on his website.

Earlier today, March 20, I gave a lecture at the annual Whales and Whaling Symposium in Beaufort. It is a special event, and one that I treasure.

Sponsored by the Bonehenge Whaling Center, which is part of the North Carolina Maritime Museum, the symposium invites scientists, historians, and the public to come together and share their knowledge of whales and the history of whaling on the North Carolina coast and throughout the Atlantic.

My lecture was titled “Nye’s Clock Oil and the Bottlenose Dolphin Fishery at Hatteras Island.”

The photograph above was one of the illustrations that I used in my lecture. It shows one of the crews that was hunting bottlenose dolphins on Hatteras Island in the winter of 1907 to 1908.

This crew worked for the William F. Nye Co., a New Bedford, Massachusetts, firm that operated a bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island between 1907 and 1928.

Arising in New Bedford when it was the whale oil capital of the world, the William F. Nye Co. was the country’s largest maker of highly specialized whale and dolphin oils uniquely suited for lubricating clocks, watches, chronometers, scientific instruments, and other delicate machinery.

The company did not obtain those oils from whale blubber, but from two anatomical structures only found in the heads of bottlenose dolphins, pilot whales, belugas and other small-toothed whales.

Specifically, the William F. Nye Co.’s “oilers” extracted those oils from the fatty tissues in the animals’ lower jawbones and from an organ in their foreheads that is called the “melon.” 

Both play central roles in the echolocation ability of those whales and dolphins. That is, they are key to the way that they navigate, find prey and generally “see” underwater by emitting sound waves and interpreting their echos when they reflect off objects around them.

On Hatteras Island, the company’s workers butchered the dolphins on the beach. They then did a small degree of refinement at a facility on Durant’s Island, a knoll on the sound side of the island.

They then shipped the oil to the company’s factory in New Bedford for far more extensive refining.

Between the American Civil War, which spanned from 1861 to 1865, and 1900, the William F. Nye Co. acquired the largest part of its supply of those oils from pilot whale strandings on Cape Cod and Long Island.

In many of those cases, local fishermen herded the whales into shallow waters where they were trapped and grounded.

To establish a more stable supply of those oils, William F. Nye’s son Joseph came south and established the bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island in 1907. He recruited local fishermen and seafarers, many of whom had been involved in earlier bottlenose fisheries on Hatteras.

Hatteras Island was the site of the oldest and longest running bottlenose dolphin fishery in North America.

At the National Museum of Natural History’s Paleobiology Archive, I found records indicating that there had been a commercial bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island on and off since at least 1851.

To oversee the Hatteras fishery, Joseph Nye employed a third-generation Hatteras oiler, William C. Rollinson.

Rollinson had been involved in hunting bottlenose dolphins most of his life, as had his father and grandfather before him.

His father, John W. Rollinson, had been superintendent of a bottlenose dolphin fishery at Hatteras that had been operated by a company based in Wilmington, Delaware, in the 1880s and 1890s.

Even further back in time, his grandfather had been captain of a bottlenose dolphin crew at Hatteras Island before the Civil War.

It was hard, dirty work. When I was younger, and some of the men were still alive, they described it as a very grim business, the kind of job that one only did if there was no other way to make a living. But that was often the case on Hatteras Island in those days.

The William F. Nye Co.’s bottlenose dolphin fishery remained on Hatteras Island until 1928 or 1929.

I do not want to give the whole story away here, but if you want to learn more, the North Carolina Maritime Museum has already posted my lecture on its YouTube channel.

The whole symposium was wonderful. The amazing Vicki Szabo, who teaches at Western Carolina University, gave a fascinating presentation on the extensive mythology and scientific knowledge of whales in Medieval Iceland and other parts off the North Atlantic.

Keith Rittmaster, the founder and driving force behind the museum’s Bonehenge Whaling Center, gave an extremely informative overview of the 35 species of cetaceans that have been documented on the North Carolina coast.

Keith also discussed the conservation challenges ahead for whales and dolphins on our coast, and he charted some the exciting, day in and day out work that is happening at the Bonehenge Whaling Center, also in Beaufort.

Another exciting presentation was by marine biologist Tommy Tucker of the Coastal Studies Center on Cape Cod. With a contagious passion, they are devoted to understanding and raising public awareness of the critically endangered Rice’s whale, which is only found in the Gulf of Mexico.

Their presentation was brilliant. In addition to studying Rice’s whales, Tommy also uses arts and crafts to nurture interest in them, including this tapestry in which each depiction of a Rice’s whale represents one of the 51 Rice’s whales currently known to be surviving in the Gulf of Mexico.

All of these presentations are now available on the museum’s YouTube channel. I don’t know about mine, but the presentations by Vicki, Keith, and Tommy are not to be missed!

I found the whole day inspiring. It was so encouraging to be at a museum where the staff are so dedicated to telling the story of North Carolina’s coastal history and do so in such a professional way.

The museum’s auditorium was full of people from many walks of life, including scientists, historians, students, fishermen and women, and all sorts of other lovers of whales and the sea.

All were coming together to discover more about these glorious creatures of the sea and what we might do to make sure that they are still here to inspire and enthrall our children and grandchildren.

It was a joy to be part of it.

* * *

The Bonehenge Whale Center was built by volunteers dedicated to marine conservation, education, and research on the whales, dolphins, and porpoises of the North Carolina coast. You can learn more about the Center’s remarkable work and how you might contribute to it here.

Millions will be awarded to broadband providers across rural North Carolina to connect homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions to high-speed internet access.

The governor’s office announced last week that $26 million will go to bring 5,161 rural homes, businesses and community anchor institutions in 66 counties access to high-speed internet infrastructure by the end of the year through the Stop-Gap Solutions program.

A part of the North Carolina Department of Information Technology’s Division of Broadband and Digital Opportunity, the program administers funding from the federal American Rescue Plan Act to coverage gaps in internet access. This is done by targeting broadband line extensions to reach individuals and small pockets of homes and businesses in hard-to-reach areas.

“These broadband projects will ensure more families can soon access telehealth, students can complete their homework, businesses can compete in larger markets, and communities can thrive,” Gov. Josh Stein said in the release. “I am committed to improving broadband access across the state and making sure no community is left behind.”

On the coast, FOCUS Broadband, also known as Atlantic Telephone Membership Cooperative, has been selected to receive $1.65 million to connect 145 locations in Duplin and Pender counties.

Connect Holding II, LLC, doing business as Brightspeed, will be awarded $1.68 million to connect 2,439 locations in Beaufort, Camden, Carteret, Craven, Currituck, Hertford, Hyde, Onslow, Pamlico, Pasquotank, Tyrrell and Washington counties on the coast. Other counties to benefit from this award are Alamance, Bladen, Caldwell, Caswell, Chatham, Columbus, Cumberland, Edgecombe, Franklin, Greene, Halifax, Harnett, Hoke, Johnston, Jones, Martin, Montgomery, Moore, Nash, Northampton, Orange, Person, Pitt, Randolph, Rockingham, Sampson, Stokes, Surry, Vance, Wake, Warren, Wayne and Wilson counties.

HarvestBeam Inc., a broadband provider for rural North Carolina, will receive $413,260 for 95 locations in Craven and Pitt counties.

Roanoke Connect Holdings, operating as Fybe internet provider, will be awarded $2.4 million to connect 826 locations in Bertie, Chowan, Gates, Granville, Halifax, Hertford, Martin, and Northampton counties. 

Wilkes & RiverStreet Networks has been selected to receive $959,828 to connect 306 locations in Camden, Currituck, Stokes and Wilkes counties.

Other providers to be awarded serve customers in Alexander, Bladen, Buncombe, Durham, Henderson, Hoke, Iredell, Forsyth, Jackson, Macon, Orange, Robeson, Rowan, Sampson, Scotland, Swain, Transylvania and Yadkin counites.

“High-speed internet access is the foundation for health care delivery, public safety operations, workforce development, and economic growth in our state,” Teena Piccione, NCDIT secretary and state chief information officer, said. “This program allows us to move with urgency and precision to connect more North Carolinians.”

This story is presented in celebration of Women’s History Month, the theme for which in 2026 is “Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future.”

Heather Rose flashes a knowing smile toward her sister, Becky, across a table at Blackbeard’s Grill, their family’s seafood restaurant in Beaufort. “Honey, we’ve got some gooood memories together.”

“Epic memories,” Becky replies.

Those unforgettable moments were often squeezed into late nights between the grueling days when Heather clocked 12-hour kitchen shifts, and Becky, stepping away from the restaurant and neighboring Rose Seafood Market, worked dawn to dusk, moving dirt, hauling rocks and setting shrubs for her own landscaping company.

Their grind never stood a chance against the tide.

“When darks come and the businesses closed, we go get in the truck, go to the boat ramp,” Heather says.

Pushing off for the banks to fish until the sun touched the horizon, the women were overjoyed to be under the stars, even that night when a mud-clogged motor stranded them, exhausted and ravenous, until their parents arrived like a rescue squad with cheese biscuits.

“We just sat there in the boat eating those biscuits. We could barely hold our eyes open,” Heather chuckles, Becky nodding in rhythm. “But we had a boatload of flounders, and we had spent all night talking to each other.”

The sisters’ bond is as deep as their roots on the Carolina coast. It’s a connection forged in the salt of their shared seafood heritage and tested by the daily demands of the family business.

Despite the relentless labor of running both Blackbeard’s and Rose Seafood Market, and the looming shadow of an uncertain commercial fishing industry, Heather and Becky are unwavering. They’ve made it their mission to keep their landmark corner of Beaufort thriving for the next generation.

A legacy without blueprints

Surrounded by black-and-white snapshots of the commercial fishers and boat builders who came before, the women reflect on the proud way of life handed down to them. Today, the sisters lead that legacy: Heather oversees the seafood market, while Becky serves as the chef and proprietor of Blackbeard’s Grill.

Their ties to the coast reach back to the 1700s, Becky says. Ancestors were boat captains in the Northeast before navigating south to Swan Quarter, where a bay bears the Rose name. Some relatives headed to Cape Lookout, establishing the early Rose Town community.

In 1910, their great-great-grandfather, George Rose, moved his family from the cape to Harkers Island. There, later generations established Rose Brothers Boat Works, which became famous for crafting fine wooden yachts and charter boats built entirely by eye without plans or blueprints.

It was in that boatyard that Heather and Becky’s parents, Rodney and Mary, first met.

Rose Seafood Market was born of necessity. Frustrated by low dockside prices, Rodney and Mary founded the business in 1986 to eliminate the middleman. What started as a backyard mom-and-pop grew into a Marshallberg fish house sourcing from 30 local commercial fishers. By 1993, the couple moved to their current Beaufort location, soon after adding a take-out window. Two years later, they opened Blackbeard’s Grill to highlight “Down East” heritage recipes.

Today, the sisters manage day-to-day operations, with their parents’ constant inspiration and presence. The women draw strength from recollections of their father networking with fishermen, setting the standard for relationship building his daughters rely on today.

Dad, who still fishes, pops in — though not often enough, Heather laments, missing her father — to deliver and help process the catch, as well as share insight with customers about the challenges facing commercial fishers.

Years of watching their mother diplomatically negotiate the sale of thousands of pounds of fish weekly to far-flung markets in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, then turning around to masterfully head shrimp, shuck scallops and pack fish, made anything seem possible.

“Growing up and seeing that, I never felt like a woman was out of place in this industry,” Becky says of the male-dominated seafood sector.

The market still sources catches docked by local commercial fishers, including Heather, and carries beloved Rose family recipes, like their Aunt Dora’s shrimp salad. Locals watch Blackbeard’s specials for regional favorites such as scallop fritters and hard crab stew. Offerings depend on what’s fresh next door.

The scale is staggering. “We’re probably going to feed about 60,000 people here (at Blackbeard’s), and just on five nights that we’re open each week, for the year,” Becky says. Between the restaurant and the market’s grab-and-go section, which Becky stocks with crab pies, lasagnas, shrimp salad and more, the sisters are in a state of constant motion.

“We love the connection,” Becky says. “When you go and catch something yourself, do all the work involved in doing that, and then you prepare it and cook it for somebody, and you hand it to them and they eat it…that’s a feeling that can’t be duplicated in any other way.”

‘Don’t fight it, accept it’

Heather remembers happy childhood days clamming and shrimping with her parents and packing seafood at their then-fledgling business. “I was young, full of energy, you know, and always willing and anxious to help.”

Becky, 11 years younger, was just a toddler at the time, trying to stack boxes in her tiny oilskins. As a youngster, she headed shrimp after school at Rose Seafood in Beaufort and told customers, “My daddy caught these.”

“I still have some older ladies that come here and say, ‘Were you that cute little blonde-headed girl that waited on me in the seafood market?’”

Despite those precious memories, both women envisioned paths away from the water. In college, Becky studied marketing, a talent she skillfully applies to the businesses’ engaging social media feeds. Heather worked for 10 years as an officer with the Morehead City Police Department. Throughout their own careers, both sisters kept a foot in the family seafood business.

“I think both of us felt that was our calling,” Becky reflects.

“There was a time when I was younger, I was always trying to run away from it,” Heather adds.

“Well, I think we both knew how hard it was,” Becky says, finishing her sister’s thought.

The pair’s management era began with the COVID-19 pandemic. When the virus’s spread shuttered dining rooms, the Roses, like many restaurateurs, turned to walking takeout orders to vehicles lined up in the parking lot. By then, the market had closed, but with the public’s limited access to grocers and other seafood outlets, the Roses realized that they needed to reopen the store to sustain the community and their own livelihoods.

Heather had already left police work to help her parents at the restaurant, but she was facing burnout even before the pandemic. That’s when Becky stepped in, leaving an unfulfilling job in the wholesale plant industry to help her family keep up.

“It was really hard on me at first, because I hadn’t really been dealing with seafood for a decade,” she remembers. “It was hard to build up to the strength and endurance that it takes to clean 500 pounds of spots a day, to filet 1,000 pounds of flounder, to head 1,000 pounds of shrimp.”

The sisters stop to compare scars. “You can look at our hands, and you know,” Becky says.

Heather smiles. “Me and Beck, we look at each other when we’re exhausted and we say, ‘Don’t fight it, accept it. This is your calling.’”

‘These are the really special times’

Demanding work and a powerful desire to make their parents proud fuel the sisters’ mission. They also genuinely like their jobs.

Becky, always a foodie, found that working in horticulture deepened her interest in herbs and cooking, setting her up as a chef who understands both local food culture and how to craft contemporary dishes like crispy crab Rangoon with sweet Thai chili sauce or half-shell oysters roasted with bacon jam, a dollop of goat cheese to finish.

“She literally elevates this kitchen to a different level than it’s ever been,” Heather says of her sister. “She has a lot of pride, and she’s, she’s a perfectionist. She wants it to be right and won’t accept it any other way.”

Heather loves nothing more than fishing, but her wide-ranging experience in and outside the business make her indispensable to both operations, Becky says. Heather’s seafood chowder is an enduring menu staple, and she formulated the various breading recipes used to fry different seafoods.

“The tenacity,” Becky says of Heather, “if she makes up her mind that we’re doing something or she’s doing something, she’s doing it…And she can wire things. She’s very mechanical, and I am totally not…So when we come together, we don’t fight or argue like sisters sometimes do. We really work well together.”

Who will take on the business years from now is a constant worry, especially as North Carolina commercial fishers lose docks to new waterfront development. They also face fierce competition from recreational fishing interests with the capital to fund lobbyists and marketing campaigns that, as the sisters see it, demonize fishing families as destroyers of the very resources they depend on.

“We don’t have family to leave it to,” Heather says. “And that makes me very sad,” Becky adds, “and it’s something I think about every night before I go to bed.”

That uncertainty pulls at them, but it hasn’t slowed their pace. Instead of pulling back, the duo doubles down with new ideas, like Heather’s upcoming seafood boils to go and adding beer and wine sales to the market’s offerings. Becky takes on public education, sharing the story of the state’s seafood heritage through speaking engagements and staging fundraising dinners aimed at preserving the commercial fishing way of life.

Both agree they’d like nothing better than to fire up the boat after work more often and head out for an all-nighter. Meantime, they try to live by the advice Becky often gives Heather.

“You’re going to look back on today, and you’re gonna say, ‘Those were good times,’ even if you’re having a bad day here … We got to make the most out of each day, because these are really special times right now for this business and for our family.” 

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality State Energy Office has set a public hearing next month on a state program that provides free weatherization services for income-eligible households.

Comments will be accepted on the proposed adoption of the New North Carolina Project, a nonprofit founded to increase civic engagement among underserved communities and to act as the service provider to a regional territory that includes Brunswick, Carteret, Craven, Duplin, Greene, Jones, Lenoir, New Hanover, Onslow, Pamlico, Pender and Wayne counties. 

The N.C. Weatherization Assistance Program, funded under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, aims to reduce energy bills and increase home comfort and safety by providing free weatherization services for eligible households.

The state program in 2021 was appropriated $89 million for enhancing energy efficiency in income-eligible households throughout the state. In March 2023, DEQ held a hearing on the proposed plan, which was approved by the U.S. Department of Energy in August of that same year.

DEQ has conditionally approved the New North Carolina Project to be the region’s service. The organization will be awarded about $5 million to be the regional service providers until 2029 or funds are depleted.

The hearing is scheduled for 4 p.m. April 8 at the DEQ Green Square Office Building, training room No. 1210, 217 West Jones St. in Raleigh.

To join the hearing by Webex link to https://ncgov.webex.com/ncgov/j.php?MTID=m21fb07102030a6f681df2f99a5537f0c and use meeting number/access code 2438 254 6635. You may also join by phone at  +1-415-655-0003 with meeting password ncwap (62927 when dialing from a phone).

The hearing officer may limit speaking times to accommodate all speakers.

The agency is also accepting public comments by mail to DEQ Weatherization Assistance Program, 1613 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, North Carolina 27699-1613, or by email to seo.publiccomments@deq.nc.gov, with “2026 NNCP Comment” in the subject line.  

All comments must be postmarked, emailed or hand-delivered no later than April 10.

Additional hearing documentation is available at www.deq.nc.gov/wap-hearings. 

The North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort plans to resume this month its outdoor field programs.

The museum offers each year during the warmer months three field programs: “Hiking and History on Shackleford Banks,” “Exploring Coastal Habitats on the Rachel Carson Reserve,” and “Kayak the Salt Marsh.”

Related: Beaufort Maritime Museum reopens after yearlong closure

“We designed these programs to help the community explore our rich environment, history and culture while also learning about the diverse habitats found here,” Education Curator Courtney Felton said in a statement.

The first two programs take participants to local barrier islands and through the various habitats found just off our mainland.

“Exploring Coastal Habitats on the Rachel Carson Reserve” is set to resume for the year 8:30 a.m. to noon March 11. Participants will be guided on a walking tour through maritime forest, salt marsh and sound-side habitats while learning about the plants and animals that make the estuarine system unique. Additional dates for this program are April 23, May 26, June 24, Sept. 8 and Oct. 6. Cost for each program is $25, which includes transportation by local ferry to the islands.

“Hiking and History on Shackleford Banks” is scheduled to resume for the year 8:30 a.m. to noon March 25. The guided hike combines natural history with stories of the people who once called the island home, offering insight into maritime lifeways, shipwrecks and the wild horses that roam the island today. Additional dates for this program are May 12, June 9, Aug. 19, Sept. 22 and Oct. 20. Cost is $35, including ferry transport.

“The Rachel Carson program is perfect for those interested in coastal ecology,” Felton said. “And the Shackleford tour is perfect for history buffs and nature enthusiasts alike.”

“Kayak the Salt Marsh” is a guided 1.5-mile paddle in one of the museum’s sit-in kayaks that will resume 9 a.m. to noon April 2. The tour winds through Gallants Channel’s marshes, focusing on the plants and wildlife that can be found within. Additional dates for this program are May 5, June 3, Aug. 13 and Sept. 1 and 30. Cost is $35, or $30 with your own kayak.

“Some kayak experience is helpful,” Felton said. “However, we provide basic kayak instruction on shore and work with the tides to keep the program accessible to all skill levels.”

A special “Science and Exploration on the Rachel Carson Reserve” program is to take place April 27 as part of the NC Science Festival. During the monthlong effort April 1-30, sites and organizations offer science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, programming to spread science education.

The hike will be guided by a museum educator and the Central Sites manager from the N.C. Coastal Reserve & National Estuarine Research Reserve. They will additionally highlight how the reserve’s ecosystems are managed for research, education, and long-term stewardship. Participants will also learn how they can support the reserve through citizen science efforts. Cost is $25, which includes transportation by local ferry to the islands.

“These field programs provide an opportunity for visitors to experience the coast in a deeper way,” Felton said. “We hope participants leave with a greater appreciation for our natural resources and a sense of stewardship for these special places.”

All of the museum field programs are recommended for ages 12 and up, with adult supervision required for those under age 18. Members of the Friends of the Maritime Museum, which sponsors the programs, receive a 10% discount. Advance registration is required.

To register or for more information, visit ncmaritimemuseumbeaufort.com or call 252-504-7758.

Registration is open for the 2026 North Carolina Aquaculture Development Conference, a three-day event that focuses on the future of aquaculture in state.

The event, which will be held March 25-27 at they Crystal Coast Civic Center on the Carteret Community College campus in Morehead City, is to include keynote sessions, technical workshops, and interactive discussions on a range of aquaculture species and production systems relevant to the state.

The program is a time for the public, current and aspiring fish farmers, scientists, educators, researchers, students, and agency and regulatory professionals to come together to share ideas, advance best practices, and strengthen connections across the aquaculture community, organizers said.

The Got to Be NC Seafood Expo, which celebrates the state’s seafood industry, will take place during the event, and innovative equipment, technologies, and products will be showcased

There will be a career fair March 25 and attendees may join in at 6 p.m. for trivia night at Tight Lines Pub and Brewing Co. in downtown Morehead City.

Agendas for each day of the conference are available online. To register for the conference and the expo visit https://ncaquaculture.com/registration/.

Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center volunteers are cooking away ahead of the Harkers Island museum’s annual Taste of Core Sound winter edition happening this weekend.

When doors open at 6 p.m. Friday, ticketholders can snack on oysters on the half shell, crab dip, fruit and cheese before the meal is served at 7 p.m. This year’s menu includes Hancock salad, stewed conchs, scallop fritters, crabmeat casserole, garlic shrimp and rice, stewed redheads and rutabaga, chicken and pastry, winter collards, sweet potatoes, squash casserole and light rolls.

Guest speaker, Beaufort native Geoffrey Adair, a retired District Attorney Craven County and historian, will take the podium around 8 p.m., while a dessert of homemade cakes is served.

“Adair, who was born and raised in Beaufort, vividly remembers the smell of Menhaden steamers moored at Beaufort’s docks, the cool air of the season’s first mullet shift and the simple pleasure of swimming across ‘the cut’ on a hot summer’s day,” organizers said.

There will be a live auction of Core Sound decoys at the close of the program.

Tickets are $100 per person for museum members and $125 for nonmembers. Ticket includes annual membership. Purchase tickets through the museum’s website.

Second installment of a two-part series special to Coastal Review

My mullet-fishing experience began in Carteret County, over half a century ago, but over the subsequent years and many scientific expeditions to find fossils, we have continued to cross paths with our “jumpin’ mullet,” catching them in places as far-flung as Hawaii and seeing them in markets of Europe, Africa, and Madagascar.

We have long marveled that our local tradition for drying mullet roe, which goes back many generations in my wife Lida Pigott’s family, somehow has its roots on the Mediterranean Island of Sardinia, the source of “Cabras gold,” the prized bottarga di muggine of Italian cuisine.

On my first visit to this enchanted island, just off the coast of Italy and second only to Sicily in size in the Mediterranean, I presented a talk at an international meeting of paleontologists and archaeologists on the topic of “Early Man in Island Environments,” featuring my years of work studying prehistoric Madagascar. I was fully captivated by the mysterious Sardinian landscapes, with more than 7,000 ancient ruins from the Neolithic and Bronze Age, some as old as Stonehenge and the pyramids.

I told myself I had to get back to Sardinia one day with more time to absorb it. I knew Lida would love this place because it is so strange and at once familiar. That was 1988.

We finally got back there a few months ago, for a nice long stay, and one of our projects was to explore the very heartland of one of Italian cuisine’s most famous products, bottarga di muggine, our own beloved mullet roe.

The wonderful archaeological museums and sites on the island tell the story well. Big estuaries with hydrology and scale similar to our own Core Sound, known locally as stagno (ponds), have been exploited for mullet seasonally, just as here in coastal NC or Hawaii or hundreds of other places in all the warm oceans of the world.

Mullet have undoubtedly fed Sardinians steadily for 5,000 years or more, from the indigenous Nuragic culture, through successive colonization by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Spaniards, and medieval feudal lords.

In fact, one of the last vestiges of feudalism as an economic strategy anywhere in Europe was the mullet fishery of famous bottarga producers like the Stagno di Mar `e Pontis, near Cabras, Sardinia.

By the mid-1900s this ancient lucrative industry, still owned by what today might be described as an “oligarch,” was regulated through eight levels of bureaucracy, whereby so many folks with fancy titles and allegiance to the “owner” got such large cuts that sometimes not much was left for the fishermen who did the catching.

Long-standing issues flared up regarding the maintenance of the canals to the ocean that have regulated the water flow for centuries, even millennia. Poaching was rampant. The fishery was in a poor state.

Something had to be done, and some violence came with the transition, as fishermen’s consortiums, government officials, and local business interests tried to set things right in a variety of sometimes conflicting ways.

In an infamous 1978 crime incident, the feudal overlord, Don Efisio Carta, was kidnapped by banditi and never found, although a ransom was collected.

By the 1980s, the now outlawed feudal hierarchy had been replaced by a consortium of fishermen’s cooperatives, and to this day they run a thriving fishery based primarily on the mullet and bottarga but also with eel and tuna fisheries, shellfish farming, and other maritime industries to sustain the large work force through the off-season for the migratory mullet.

Over several weeks, Lida and I had been eating seafood, especially targeting bottarga dishes, all over Italy and Sardinia. We were especially excited to arrive in the absolute world capital of the jumpin’ mullet and the bottarga industry, Cabras, for a few days of culinary “mullet research.”

We visited the splendid local museums, but as mullet fishermen ourselves we were just as interested to see where the fishermen store their nets and dock their boats, what kinds of tackle they are using, and what they are generally about.

We were amazed to discover that the Cabras cooperative uses a single type of molded fiberglass skiff, a stout outboard motor of a single brand, and nets nearly all alike in tidy labeled bins and net bags.

As net hangers ourselves, we were impressed that their tackle and techniques looked almost exactly like ours, down to the corks and knots.

The folks at a local store selling bottarga and smoked mullet insisted that, with our interest in the subject, we really had to visit the museum dedicated to the history of the local fishing culture, just down the road a bit.

We walked there along a causeway through the vast wetlands to reach the cluster of buildings on a high place out in the marsh, beside a deep channel leading out into the stagno.

Part of the “fish tourism” project of the Cabras fishermen’s consortium, Mar’e Pontis Museum had a sweet friendly charm that reminded me of our own Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

The site also hosts a great restaurant, featuring local seafood, and an ancient chapel where the fishermen have prayed for safe and productive fishing for almost a thousand years.

From Pinuccio Carrus, a mullet fisherman who also guides museum tours, we learned about the boats, fishing gear, and thousands of years of fishing and fishing culture on this spot.

Probably since the Neolithic, fishermen here used small agile boats made entirely of reeds from the marsh, and some still do.

Wooden rowboats from years past, shaped like large high-ended canoes, similar to the gondolas of Venice, are now mostly rotting in yards, with molded fiberglass being the material of choice for most commercial fishing in the stagno today.

The museum had all kinds of nets and traps, for mullet and eels primarily, including ones that looked like our pound nets and gill nets.

Today, the fishermen use monofilament gill nets almost identical to ours in North Carolina, although the spear-fishing from reed boats is still practiced, too, much as it has been since prehistoric times.

Drawings and photos of fishing activity during the heyday of the feudal fishery show pound nets and fish corrals full of mullet with fishermen standing in their midst, taking them out by hand.

Having done a bit of that myself, I couldn’t help wondering if they had to watch out for stingrays lurking on the bottom of the mass of hemmed-in fish the way we do!

Of all the mullet-based meals of the trip – and there were many all over Italy and Sardinia – one of the most memorable was at the Restaurante de Madre de Rosy Circu in the heart of Cabras, at a junction of several of its ancient labyrinthine streets.

It was the only time anywhere that we dined on an entirely mullet-based pizza. It had a thin crust, a tomato and parsley sauce, and a topping of smoked mullet, sprinkled liberally with ground mullet roe (bottarga), a kind of double-mullet treat!

Another favorite we had several times around the island was a type of thick, rectangular local pasta with tiny clams (vongole veraci) and loads of ground bottarga. One of the best dishes was purple artichokes smothered in thin amber slices of bottarga, a feast for both the eye and palate.

Local shops sold a wonderful pâté made from bottarga and just right for any imaginable cracker.

The mullet fishery of Sardinia, although today only a small fraction of the historical fishery, seems to be doing fairly well. The industry in value-added fish products from local mullet, eel, and tuna seems to be thriving.

One change is that whereas relatively cheap U.S. mullet roe used to be imported salted or frozen to Italian factories for conversion to preciously expensive bottarga (not quite as expensive as caviar, but in that league), fish industries from Carteret County, to Manatee County, Florida (Cortez area) have sprung up that convert local mullet roe to a quality bottarga that sells on the internet for prices similar to the celebrated Sardinian stuff.

Combined with beach tourism and the draw from internationally unique 3,000-year-old giant stone statues (I Giganti di Mont’e Prama), folks there on the Sinis Peninsula seem to make a pretty good living by the stagno.

The mullet still come in large numbers from the sea every year, swelling the estuaries and feeding the people, dolphins, and birdlife, then returning to deeper water to complete their life cycle. Just like back home here in Carteret County,  and virtually all the warm coastal waters of the globe.

Our mullet is a fish for the world, a true cosmopolitan. I’m glad to have made its acquaintance in so many wonderful places.

NEWPORT — State Rep. Celeste C. Cairns, R-Carteret and Craven, members of the Carteret County Board of Commissioners, county staff, area town officials and project partners broke ground Friday for a new public boat launch in the growing western part of Carteret County.

The ceremonial groundbreaking for the Western Carteret County Boat Launch Facility at 4411 N.C. Highway 24, Newport, has been in the making for a long time, said Commissioner Mark Mansfield, the county board’s vice chairman, at the event. “As you can see, the western part of the county has been deficient in access to the water for quite some time, and this will hopefully enable us, with all the growth that’s going into the western end of the county, provide access to the waterways, which actually helps with the tax base and the property values in this area”

Former Commissioner Robin Comer, who was in office years ago when the project was conceived, was also on hand for the ceremony. He said the launch site is on one of the last available parcels that would facilitate the kind of facility needed in this part of the county where residential development has been rapid.

“This project became so popular — and when I say popular everywhere — everywhere we went to try to round up money for this thing, everybody was on board,” said Comer during his remarks.

Comer said the state provided money, as did the federal government using funding from a Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point program to buffer its nearby auxiliary airfield from residential encroachment. “And everybody wound up, everybody we asked, wound up putting money, time and effort in this thing.”

He said that Emerald Isle businessman Ronnie Watson represented the site’s then-landowner, Steven Stroud.

“If anybody knows Steve, he’s a tough businessman, so a lot of appreciation goes there to (Watson),” said Comer.

Cairns, in her remarks, credited her predecessor, former Rep. Pat McElraft, who served eight consecutive terms ending Jan. 1, 2023, for providing the initial momentum that made the project possible.

“I’m here to celebrate this occasion, that it has finally come to fruition with all the hard work that your county commissioners and my predecessor and others have put into it,” Cairns said. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for folks on the western end of the county to be able to get access to the water. A wonderful collaboration with the Coastal Federation conservation folks. It’s just beautiful all the way around this great project. And I’m just honored, as I can be, to be a part of it today.”

The North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, is developing an abutting parcel for its new Center for Coastal Protection and Restoration being built on Bogue Sound. Construction on that project began in late 2024 and is anticipated to wrap up later this year. The center will share access with the county facility through a common driveway.

County Commissioner David Quinn, who represents the Newport area, expressed how meaningful the boating access is to residents here.

“If you’ve lived in Carteret County, you know that the water isn’t just scenery, it’s part of our daily life. It’s how we relax, it’s how we work, it’s how we make memories with our families,” Quinn said. “Bogue Sound has always been central to who we are, and having safe, dependable access to it matters. That’s exactly what this facility is going to provide for folks who live here year-round and for visitors who come to enjoy the coast. This gives people a safe, convenient place to get on the water. It also helps take pressure off of other boat ramps that have been overcrowded for years.”

Quinn said that with six launch ramps and a transient floating dock, boaters will be able to get in and out more efficiently with less waiting and less congestion, especially during peak season.

“That makes a real difference for families, makes a real difference for fishermen, makes a real difference for anyone that’s trying to enjoy a day out on Bogue Sound without frustration,” he said. “But in Carteret County, access alone isn’t enough. We also understand, if we don’t take care of the waters, then the waters will not take care of us. This project was built with that in mind.”

He explained that the 159-space trailer and vehicle parking lot will help keep vehicles out of sensitive areas. A channel connecting to the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway was designed to minimize the environmental impact while still proving easy for navigators.

“One of the most important features is the living shoreline,” Quinn noted. “Instead of concrete walls, we’re using natural systems that protect marshes, reduce erosion and preserve submerged vegetation that helps improve water quality and it keeps it healthy for a long time for fishing, for boating and, more importantly, for future generations. This site isn’t just about boats, the nature trails connecting Bogue Sound to the Croatan National Forest will give people another way to experience our outdoors, whether that’s a quiet walk, learning about the marsh, or just slowing down and enjoying where we live.”

He said the partnership with the Coastal Federation was important.

“It shows what can happen when public access and environmental stewardship work together instead of against each other. That kind of cooperation reflects Carteret County values: It’s practical, responsible and rooted in long-term thinking,” Quinn said.

Quinn said that in addition to the expected economic benefits of the facility, the project strengthens our connection to the water and to each other.

“It’s a place where kids learn to fish, neighbors cross paths, families spend time together, making memories together, the same way generations did before us,” said Quinn. “Found here in this body of water is the mind-clearing quiet of nature, and the small sounds of its islands are stark and healing, the squeaky flap of a cormorant’s wings overhead, the sizzle of salt foam over broken shells in a backwashing wave, the clicking of sandfiddler claws as they scuffle in the mud, and the splash of a jumping mullet breaking that flat water.

“My granddaddy was a commercial fisherman on these waters. My daddy was born here. I was raised on Bogue Sound. It isn’t just a place that I love, it’s who I am. I want to see my sons and future generations of Carteret County citizens to enjoy, to protect and to appreciate this beautiful place we call home.”

First of two parts in a series special to Coastal Review

To many Carolinians coming to the beach for a little fishing, the mullet is a lowly baitfish, often cut into strips for bottom fishing. They may confuse it with an unrelated fish in the drum family known locally as the “sea mullet.”

To the folks of Down East Carteret County, and some locals throughout coastal NC, however, the “jumpin’ mullet,” as they call it, owns a special place in their hearts and kitchens. Often known as the grey mullet, flathead mullet, or striped mullet elsewhere in the English-speaking world, Mugil cephalus is a consummate jumper.

Back in 1980, while cutting mullet strips to use on offshore trips on the Carolina Princess with the original owner and captain, the late James “Woo-woo” Harker of Harkers Island, he and I would joke about how much better-flavored they were than the fish that we caught with them to sell at the fish house or that our clients from upstate were seeking on their charter trips with us — red snappers and groupers mostly. (Those were different times!)

For nearly a decade by then, I had been learning from my in-laws, the Pigotts and Nelsons of Carteret County: 1) how to strike-net mullet in a fast shallow-draft boat with lots of gill-net set in a circle around a seething school of mullet; 2) how to charcoal the fillets on pecan wood, for several hundred people at a time if necessary; and 3) how to prepare that most wonderful of eastern North Carolina delicacies – dried mullet roe – the bottarga di muggine of Italian cuisine (more on that later).

Well over a century ago, many Carteret County families literally cast their fates with the mullet fishery. Some of my wife Lida’s relatives even followed the mullet fishery elsewhere, particularly to Cortez and Punta Gorda, Florida, as described by historians Dr. Mary Fulford Green and David Cecelski.

This “mullet fishermen’s migration” showed how important one species of fish can be to human livelihoods and culture, reminiscent of the singular role of cod in European history or salmon for the Northwest Coast Native American tribes and the indigenous Ainu of northern Japan.

But where did North Carolinians pick up mullet fishing and all that goes with it, especially their appetite for the dried egg masses? North Carolina explorer John Lawson wrote in 1709 that eastern parts of the state had “Mullets, the same as in England, and in great Plenty in all places where the water is salt or brackish.”

Perhaps Down Easters may have learned originally about mullet and their fabulous roe from their Native American neighbors in the late 1600s and early 1700s, who undoubtedly knew it well.

Or perhaps, one could speculate, they learned or relearned directly from cultural transmission from Europe. After all, fishermen in this area have been selling mullet roe for export to Italy for many decades. In any case, drying mullet roe for cooking later is part of the “traditional ecological knowledge“ (TEK of anthropological lingo), of eastern Carteret County people.

During World War II, my father-in-law, the late Osborne G. “Bill” Pigott, asked his family back home to send him just one thing – some dried mullet roe. When he heated it on the wood stove in his tent somewhere in France, it drove his tentmates out with its powerful smell. “That was OK,” Bill would recount with a twinkle “more for me that way.”

As Lida and I made our way through the 70s and a subsequent half-century, we crossed paths with the cosmopolitan, under-rated mullet in many improbable places. It’s truly a worldwide fish and fishery, we began to realize, as we encountered them in fish markets of Europe, Africa, Madagascar, Hawaii, and elsewhere.

Part of our research involved excavating fossil sites on islands, to try to better understand past natural and human roles in the drastic environmental changes there. Lida and I feel really lucky to have done island paleoecology all around the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.

Several of our sites on the Hawaiian island of Kaua`i, especially Makauwahi Cave on the south shore, were full of bones of prehistoric mullet, that same Mugil cephalus as our “jumpin’ mullet.”

Sites we excavated and radiocarbon dated showed mullet were there in large numbers thousands of years before the first humans to land on those shores. But we also studied prehistorically managed fishponds, places where the mullet (`ama`ama in Hawaiian) were raised in large numbers.

Oral tradition indicates that mullet were caught in nearby estuaries and transferred live to these ponds, or lured inside through slatted gates. They were kept well-fed on what mullet like best, low-on-the-food-chain treats like algae and zooplankton. These most revered fish were for consumption only by the ali`i or chiefly class. Commoners could make do with ordinary reef fish and such, but for the chief and his guests – it was likely to be `ama`ama.

On outings with my friend Joe Kanahele of Ni`ihau Island, I had the good fortune on several occasions to see how native Hawaiians catch mullet and similar fish today. With an oversized cast net, he would often catch a dozen large fish in one throw, after a careful stalk along a rocky shore.

On the Alakoko (Menehune) Fishpond near Lihu`e, I helped the pondkeeper, Robert Rego, set a gill net across the pond, and we caught and ate some nice mullet — from the same place Hawaiian aquaculturists practiced mullet farming in a pond that our radiocarbon dating had shown they built in the 1300s.

Native Hawaiians were among the first people to build fishponds and cultivate fish on a large scale, but they were certainly not the only ancient folks, as Pliny the Elder writes about Roman fishponds shortly before his demise in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that buried the Pompeii area in 79 C.E.

The magnificent tile mosaics and other art recovered from the buried city included pictures of — you guessed it — mullet. Two kinds actually, our grey, or jumpin’ mullet (cephalo in Italian), and the red mullet (Mullus surmuletus, or triglia di scoglio in Italian).

So the ancient Romans knew all about our dear Carteret County fish, but although Rome might have been the capital of the known world at that time, the real capital of the jumpin’ mullet is arguably the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.

In part 2, Lida and I will make a “culinary pilgrimage” to the very heart of the mullet fishing and bottarga-making industries, along a body of water so much like our own Core Sound. Our cosmopolitan fish was already at the center of the culture there before the time of Stonehenge and the pyramids.

Next in the series: Back to where it all began

Featured Image

Marshallberg Harbor is iced in during last weekend’s winter storm. Despite warmer temperatures in the days since, black ice and snow along with refreezing of standing water remain a threat to travel, National Weather Service forecasters in Newport said Thursday. Also, after this brief improvement, strong winds will again develop Friday night over coastal waters as an Arctic front moves through the region, producing strong gale conditions expected to persist into Sunday morning. Photo: Rachael Carlyle

On a clear day, the Cape Lookout Lighthouse is visible from the entrance of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

The black-and-white diamond lighthouse built in 1859 is the centerpiece of the Cape Lookout National Seashore, but it isn’t the only structure of historical significance on the protected, 56-mile-long barrier island system.

Construction began in 1916 on the Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station, one of three stations built on Core Banks in Carteret County, and the waterfowl museum is hosting a celebration to honor the building and what it represents: the county’s Coast Guard history and its guardsmen.

The event, “U.S. Coast Guard Station at Cape Lookout 110th Anniversary Celebration Day:  Honoring Carteret County’s Rich Coast Guard History and It’s Continuing Role in Our Community” is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at the museum, 1785 Island Road.

“All U.S. Coast Guard veterans, especially those stationed at Cape Lookout, are invited to spend the day remembering and sharing the stories of Cape Lookout Station during a celebration of the 110th anniversary of the U.S. Coast Guard,” organizers said.

Coast Guard veterans, families and descendants are encouraged to bring photos for a memorial table to remember those who served, as well as photos that can be scanned and added to the museum’s collection.

Throughout the daylong event, there will be a slideshow of photos of Cape Lookout courtesy of Core Sound, National Park Service and N.C. Maritime Museums, and staff and volunteers will be conducting short interviews with those who served at Cape Lookout.

The official welcome is at 11:30 a.m., followed by lunch at noon. Reserve your spot for lunch at coresound.com/uscg.

The informal program begins at 2 p.m. with a roll call and include an update on the ongoing restoration work of the lighthouse with Cape Lookout Foundation, an event sponsor.

Cape Lookout’s Coast Guard history

The first Cape Lookout station was completed in August 1887 and a cookhouse was added five years later. In 1916, a new station was proposed for the original site, and the 1887 station was moved 60 feet away, making way for work to begin. The station was completed in 1917 and inhabited a year later. A boathouse was added in 1924, according to the U.S. Life-Saving Service Heritage Association.

The 1887 station was remodeled in the 1920s and used as living quarters for the Navy’s Radio Compass Station until the end of World War II. When the Cape Lookout Lighthouse was automated in the 1950s, the Coast Guard demolished several buildings in 1957 and sold the 1887 life-saving station building and the 1923 boathouse.

Cape Lookout Station mission and personnel were merged into the larger Fort Macon Coast Guard Station in 1982 and Cape Lookout Station was decommissioned.

The publicly owned buildings and property were transferred two years later to the Cape Lookout National Seashore. The 1887 station and boathouse were privately owned until 2003 when both buildings were turned over to the National Park Service. In June 2000, the Cape Lookout Village historic district was listed on the National Register.

The 1917 Coast Guard station was used in the early 2000s by the Maritime Museum for environmental education, research and conservation. Between 2018 and 2020, preservation and restoration efforts took place, according to the association.

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Ice covers a patch of volunteer vegetation near Michael J. Smith Field Tuesday after an overnight freeze in Beaufort. Cold temperatures are forecast to continue through the weekend, when there’s potential for a coastal low pressure to develop, possibly bringing wintry weather, National Weather Service forecasters said Tuesday. Photo: Dylan Ray

Love horses? The N.C. Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve has an offer for you!

Applications are now being accepted for the Pony Patrol, a volunteer-driven program that helps raise community awareness, protect wild horses and promote compliance with wild horse guidelines at the Rachel Carson Reserve and Shackleford Banks in Carteret County.

Candidates who are selected will receive training in visitor communication, the importance of allowing wild horses to remain wild, and skills required to protect the safety of visitors and horses.

Volunteers serve three- to four-hour shifts patrolling and talking with visitors about ways to respectfully experience the wild horses and their natural behaviors. Volunteers are expected to serve a minimum of three times a month.

Last year’s volunteers conducted 260 patrols and engaged with about 3,900 visitors at both the Rachel Carson Reserve and Shackleford Banks, according to the N.C. Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve, which partners with Cape Lookout National Seashore and the Foundation for Shackelford Horses Inc. to offer the program.

Applicants must be at least 18, a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, and physically able to walk through sandy terrain in conditions to include intense sun, heat, humidity, wind and insects.

Applicants who want to volunteer for Rachel Carson Reserve and Shackleford Banks must apply to both locations.

Positions are limited and therefore competitive.

The online application will close at 11:59 p.m. Feb. 23. Candidates who are selected will be contacted for interviews in late February or early March.

Millions of dollars have been marked for coastal freight rail upgrades and improvements to include tracks, trestles, culverts and port infrastructure.

The projects are part of a total $16.3 million to go toward freight rail infrastructure improvements to a dozen short-line railroads and at the state Port of Morehead City, North Carolina Department of Transportation Rail Division officials announced Thursday.

The Morehead City port will see $177,500 for a rail scale installation and $844,860 for rail replacement and upgrades on the property.

The Wilmington Terminal Railroad will receive $627,000 for rail and switch improvements along its mainline corridor.

“These projects deliver significant benefits to North Carolina’s freight rail network,” said Rail Division Director Jason Orthner. “By working closely with our railroad partners, we are strengthening reliability and resiliency, supporting businesses across the state, and reinforcing the rail infrastructure that drives North Carolina’s economy.”

Other funded coastal projects include $1.23 million to the Carolina Coastal Railway for rail and bridge improvements along its Belhaven and Norfolk Southern Railway lines in Beaufort, Greene, Washington, and Wilson counties, and $712,801 for the Chesapeake & Albemarle Railroad’s bridge and track improvements along its mainline corridor and Edenton sidetracks in Camden, Pasquotank, Perquimans and Chowan counties.

NCDOT officials said the division’s $16.3 million contribution is funded through the Freight Rail and Rail Crossing Safety Improvement program, which the state legislature established in 2014 to support “the health, safety and performance of the state’s rail infrastructure while establishing partnerships to meet the growing demand for rail service.”

In total, the projects will upgrade more than 95 miles of track and eight railroad bridges and culverts in North Carolina to support an anticipated increase in freight rail traffic statewide.

The Rail Division said its grants are matched by investments from participating railroad companies and the North Carolina Ports Authority. The partnerships are putting $41.5 million into projects that improve North Carolina’s freight rail network.

Other awarded projects and NCDOT’s contribution to each include the following:

• Aberdeen Carolina and Western Railway — $4,845,392 in funding for rail replacement and improvements along its Piedmont Division in Cabarrus and Mecklenburg counties.
• Aberdeen and Rockfish Railroad — $771,397 for track upgrades and continuity of service on its mainline in Hoke County.
• Alexander Railroad Co. — $381,797 for track and corridor upgrades near the Alexander Industrial Park in Alexander County.
• Alexander Railroad Co. — $495,026 for track and grade-crossing upgrades on the mainline rail corridor in Iredell County.
• Atlantic & Western Railway — $690,440 for corridor improvements and rail track upgrades on the Jonesboro branch in Lee County.
• Great Smoky Mountains Railroad — $1.68 million for track improvements and bridge repairs along its mainline corridor in Jackson, Swain, Macon and Cherokee counties.
• North Carolina and Virginia Railroad — $979,813 for rail replacement and improvements along its mainline corridor in Northampton County.
• Raleigh & Fayetteville Railroad — $999,586 for rail corridor improvements to the Norfolk Southern and VF lines in Wake and Harnett counties.
• Winston-Salem Southbound Railroad — $1.11 million for rail improvements along its W line in Davidson County.
• Yadkin Valley Railroad — $754,700 for track upgrades and rail corridor improvements along its K and CF lines in Yadkin, Surry and Stokes counties.

Two coastal communities have been awarded grants from the state for stream restoration, water-based recreation and water management projects.

North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources awarded the grants totaling more than $1.5 million to nine local governments, including Morehead City in Carteret County and Windsor in Bertie County, the agency announced Wednesday.

“These grants will boost public waterfront access in unique places around the state, including rare forests along the coast and the Mayo River north of the Triad,” DEQ Secretary Reid Wilson stated in a release.

Morehead City has been awarded $200,000 for the Spooner Creek Conservation Nature Park. The project includes acquiring almost 23 acres of undeveloped land to create a publicly owned nature park that provides public waterfront access and conserve shoreline including rare, maritime forestland.

Windsor was awarded $200,000 to retrofit Hoggard’s Millpond. The project includes reconstruction of a breached mill dam, removal of damaged mill infrastructure and replacement of a naturalized fish passage structure to reconnect more than 50 miles of potential stream habitat and also to store stormwater.

A full list of the awards is online. More details are available on the Water Resources Development Grant program website.

North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division has scheduled four career events along the coast to recruit temporary and seasonal employees to staff its ferries, terminals and shipyard.

Officials said that the seasonal employees are a key part of the ferry system’s service, and they are often the first considered for permanent roles.

“In fact, a majority of last year’s temporary hires transitioned into permanent roles,” Ferry Division Director Jed Dixon said in a statement.

The career events are all from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. on the following dates:

• Jan. 14 at NC Works Career Center, 3813 Arendell St., Morehead City.
• Jan. 21 at Hatteras Ferry Operations Center, 59063 N.C. 12, Hatteras.
• Jan. 28 at Southport Ferry Operations Center, 1650 Ferry Road, Southport.
• Feb. 4 at Pamlico River Ferry Operations Center, 229 N.C. 306 North, Bath.

At the events, applications will be accepted for temporary, seasonal employment at all experience levels, from general utility worker to experienced boat captains.

Those looking for permanent employment can learn more about open positions and how to obtain a Transportation Worker Identification Card or a Merchant Mariner Credential for the application process. 

Benefits of year-round, full-time permanent employment with the division include competitive salaries, health insurance, retirement benefits, and paid vacation, holiday and sick leave.

For a list of the Ferry Division’s current job openings, visit the state jobs website​ to create a profile and apply for permanent positions. For more information, call 252-370-5573.

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” The Carteret County native introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series earlier this year on his website, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken in the late 1930s into the early 1950s of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

In this photograph, we see a long line of fishing nets drying in the sun on Harkers Island, N.C., in the fall of 1944.

It is hard to see them, but there are two men talking in the midst of the net reels.

The photographer’s notes only identify one of the men: Stacy W. Davis, a local fisherman, charter boat captain, and fish dealer. That’s his fish house and dock on the far side of the net reels and fishing nets.

Capt. Stacy had built the fish house just before the war. He and his brother Leslie also owned the S.W. Davis & Brother Seafood Co. in Beaufort, on the other side of the North River.

The shoreline is beautiful, but in a way the tranquility of the scene belies the great upheaval that was happening on the island just before and during the Second World War.

When I was younger, old timers from Harkers Island often told me that it all seemed to start with the great hurricane of ’33, which is a story in itself and one that I think I’ll save for another time.

But not all storms come out of the Atlantic, and what happened over the next few years turned island life upside down more than any hurricane or nor’easter ever had.

Just a few years after the ’33 storm, in 1936, Harkers Island’s first road was paved. The age of automobiles and trucks was coming.

Three years later, in 1939, electricity arrived on the island, delivered via a submarine cable that ran beneath North River.

The stars would never be as bright again.

A year later, in the latter part of 1940, the biggest thing of all happened: workers finished building the first bridge from the mainland to Harkers Island. The bridge opened to the public a few weeks later.

That was on New Years Day 1941. Many a time, I have heard old timers say that it was the best and worst day in the island’s history. More than anything, it marked the end of one way of life, the dawn of another.

Then, of course, the war came. Young men and women went away to fight in distant lands and on distant seas. On the island, families crowded around radios to follow the news from places that few of us had known existed until that moment. Soldiers and sailors were everywhere.

An Army camp was built on the island. Soldiers and sailors seemed to be constantly coming and going.

During the war, untold numbers of islanders also crossed the new bridge and went out into the larger world to take jobs at shipyards, military bases, and defense factories. Some commuted every morning to defense jobs as close as the Naval Section Base in Morehead City; others moved as far away as the big shipyards in Wilmington and Newport News.

The Great Depression had worn people down, but suddenly there seemed to be work for any and all.

A hundred things about the war changed the island, but few things more than the War Department building the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station only 25 miles away in 1942.

Nearly 10,000 men came together at at a remote crossroads on the south side of the Neuse River to build Cherry Point – carpenters, brick masons, ditch diggers, logging crews, railroad builders, and many, many others. Among other things, they laid enough concrete to build what is believed to have been the largest aircraft runway in the world at that time.

Most of those workers were fresh off the farm or right off a fishing boat.

When Cherry Point was finished, people came from all over the country to work there, and most particularly to find jobs at the base’s assembly and repair department, a massive aircraft repair and refitting operation that relied on civilian workers and was usually just called “A&R.”

Those workers included many a Harkers Island fisherman. And when they left their boats and crossed the new bridge, they began a new life in more ways than they possibly could have imagined at the time.

Some of those islanders, my older friends on Harkers Island used to tell me, were saved by that trip to Cherry Point. Others lost.

For the island’s women, the coming of Cherry Point meant, if anything, even more. Because so many men had gone to war, the base employed thousands of women in jobs that would have traditionally fallen to men.

Those jobs ranged from aircraft painters to mechanics, PX and commissary managers to electronics specialists.

My grandmother was one of those women. She lived on a farm in Harlowe, about halfway between Harkers Island and Cherry Point, and she found a job in A&R’s machine shop during the war.

With the opening of Cherry Point, a daughter fresh out of school, perhaps still living with her parents, might suddenly be earning more than her fisherman father and all her brothers put together.

Of course, that changed things. Maybe not right away, but over time.

Likewise, with the coming of the bridge and the war, a lad that had never taken to the water — and there were plenty of young men like that even on Harkers Island — suddenly had a chance for a different kind of life.

I guess what I am saying is that photographs tell some stories, but not others.

Our tranquil scene of fishing nets drying in the sunshine also does not really speak to what had been happening out at sea during the war.

By 1944, things had calmed down out in the Atlantic, but only a couple years earlier, in the first months after Pearl Harbor, the war had seemed much closer to Harkers Island that it did to most of the United States.

Many of the island’s young fishermen had gone into the Navy and Coast Guard, and they were serving all over the world. But the U.S. Navy had also recruited the island’s fishermen for war duty closer to home.

As German submarines torpedoed merchant ships out in the Atlantic, one of the islanders patrolled the beaches out at Shackleford Banks, watching in the surf for the corpses.

Others, when they heard the explosions offshore, had the duty of taking their boats far out into the Atlantic to search for survivors and the dead.

Out in those seas, 15 and 20 miles off Cape Lookout, they often found themselves in a hellish seascape of charred hulls, burning oil slicks and scenes of which few of them would ever speak.

Special thanks as always to my friends at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

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A small gathering watches 2025’s final sunset Wednesday over Taylors Creek from the wooden deck at Harborside Park at 322 Front St. in Beaufort. Here are some of Coastal Review’s most-read stories of the year. We thank you for reading. Photo: Mark Hibbs

The management and operation of Beaufort Town Docks will officially transition to what the town calls an “experienced marina management company” at 12:01 a.m. Thursday.

The company, F3 Marina, specializes in the operation of public and private waterfront facilities along the East Coast, officials said Wednesday in a press release.

“On behalf of the Board of Commissioners and the citizens of Beaufort, I’m excited to welcome F3 Marina Management as the selected company to manage the Beaufort Town Docks beginning January 1,” Mayor Sharon Harker said in a release. “With their experience and proven track record, we’re looking forward to this new chapter and to working together to ensure the docks continue to operate safely, smoothly, and as a welcoming place for boaters and residents alike.”

As part of the transition, the new website, www.beauforttowndocks.org, has launched, to serve as the primary source for details on dockage, rates, policies, amenities, events, and contact information.

“The transition marks a new chapter for the Beaufort Town Docks, with an emphasis on enhancing services for residents, visiting boaters, and the maritime community while preserving the character and heritage of Beaufort’s historic waterfront,” the town said.

Carteret County announced Monday that Emerald Isle Fire Chief William Charles “Billy” Matthias II has been selected to serve as the county emergency services director, effective Jan. 26, 2026.

Matthias, who has been the Bogue Banks town’s fire chief since September 2023, began his firefighting career in 2003 as a volunteer at the Swansboro Fire Department, and later joined the Nags Head Fire Department. Matthias also served as a fire captain and firefighter-EMT with Wildwood Fire & Rescue, now part of the Morehead City department, where he led structural firefighting operations, extrication and marine rescue responses, while mentoring and training personnel in operational safety and accountability. He became a full-time member of the Emerald Isle department in November 2006.

In Emerald Isle, Matthias leads an emergency services operation that includes fire suppression, EMS and U.S. Life Saving Association-certified ocean rescue services.

County officials pointed to his experience overseeing a $3.9 million budget, managing a full-time and seasonal workforce, and responding to more than 1,600 calls annually as positioning him well to lead the county’s Emergency Services operations, county officials said in the announcement.

“William understands what it takes to lead emergency services in a coastal community,” said County Manager Sharon Griffin. “He has hands-on experience, a strong grasp of operations and a leadership style that fits well with our organization. We’re excited to welcome him and look forward to the experience he brings to the County.”

In his new role, Matthias will oversee Carteret County’s emergency management, emergency medical services, emergency communications and the Office of the Fire Marshal. The Emergency Services Department coordinates countywide preparedness, response and recovery efforts for natural, technological and man-made disasters, including pandemic events. The department also provides 24-hour emergency medical response, manages the county’s 911 Emergency Communications Center as the primary public safety answering point, and administers fire prevention, inspections, investigations and life safety education programs throughout the county.

During his time in Emerald Isle, Matthias assisted in improving the department’s ISO rating to Class 3 in 2021, secured grants to enhance staffing levels and modernize self-contained breathing apparatus equipment. He also implemented data-driven deployment strategies that improved response outcomes across the primary service area and strengthened hazard mitigation and preparedness efforts in a coastal environment, according to the announcement.

“I’m thankful for the opportunity to serve Carteret County,” Matthias said in a statement. “Emergency services work depends on preparation, teamwork and trust. I’m looking forward to getting to know the team, listening, and building on the solid foundation already in place.”

Matthias holds a Master of Public Administration in emergency services management and a Bachelor of Science in fire administration from Columbia Southern University, as well as an associate’s degree in fire science. His credentials include North Carolina Fire Officer III, EMT certification, completion of the North Carolina Executive Fire Officer Program, extensive NIMS/ICS training, and U.S. Life Saving Association open water lifeguard instructor certification.

The chairman of the Carteret County Board of Commissioners likely won’t be wishing anyone a Happy Hanukkah.

When asked by a fellow member of the all-Republican commission to include the sentiment in his verbal list of holiday well-wishing at the close of the board’s meeting Monday in the county administration building in Beaufort, Chairman Chris Chadwick replied, “No, we don’t say that.”

His response drew a visible reaction from Commissioner Marianne Waldrop, her mouth agape at Chadwick’s prompt dismissal of her suggestion. 

Other commissioners smiled while chuckles, including those from other board members, could be heard on the video recording of the meeting as Chadwick turned to the audience and said, “I want to wish everybody Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and we appreciate y’all coming.”

As he spoke, Waldrop leaned toward her mic, pulled it closer, and said “And Happy Hanukkah.”

After the meeting adjourned, Waldrop looked at Chadwick and said she was setting “you up for success, not failure.”

When reached by telephone Wednesday, Chadwick told Coastal Review, “Nothing was meant by the comment in any negative fashion whatsoever.”

“I told (Waldrop) after the meeting she could say whatever she wanted, but I said, ‘Merry Christmas,'” he said. “She kind of caught me off guard, and I just said, ‘I say Merry Christmas,’ or ‘We say Merry Christmas.'”

Monday marked the second night of the Jewish Festival of Lights, the eight-day holiday in which Jews commemorate the second century B.C.E. rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabean Revolt.

After watching a video clip of the meeting, Leonard Rogoff, president and historian of Jewish Heritage North Carolina, on Wednesday afternoon said by email, “At a moment when Jews have been slaughtered in Australia for celebrating their holiday, when armed police guard synagogues here in North Carolina as Jews worship, for the county commissioner to refuse to acknowledge his Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens is not in keeping with the spirit of the holidays. How could Jews not take offense?”

Rogoff is referring to the massacre last Sunday on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, where two shooters opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration, killing 15 people and sending more than 20 others to area hospitals.

“Especially at a time when antisemitism is surging — tragically underscored by the murder of 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia — we need our elected leaders to honor the religious traditions of all constituents, not laugh and dismiss the observances of Jewish residents,” Tali Cohen, Anti-Defamation League Washington, D.C., regional director, said in an email Wednesday afternoon.

“We’re reaching out to Chairman Chadwick, and we hope this incident will prompt reflection on the importance of respecting people of faith across our community.”  

As of the time of this publication, neither Waldrop nor any of Carteret’s five other commissioners had responded to calls and emails requesting comment.

The board meeting, as is standard practice, was broadcast live and the entire recording is available on the county website. Videos of the latest meetings are aired at 8 p.m. on the next Thursday and at noon the following Sunday on Spectrum’s local cable channel 10. The meeting videos are archived for one year.

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The Duncan House at 105 Front St. in Beaufort, a structure that dates back to the mid-1700s, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is one of only 11 properties in North Carolina designated as Statewide Properties of Significance, is cordoned off Tuesday after a blaze consumed the unoccupied building on Monday. Photo: Dylan Ray

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” The Carteret County native introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series earlier this year on his website, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken in the late 1930s into the early 1950s of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

In this photo-essay in my “Working Lives” series, I am looking at several photographs that feature workers on a railroad that old timers, when I was a boy, still called the “Old Mullet Road.”

The real name of the railroad was the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad (A&NC). First in business in 1858, it ran from the coastal port of Morehead City, west to New Bern, Kinston, and finally Goldsboro.

Owned by the state of North Carolina, the railroad was usually leased to private operators and it played a vital role in opening the economy and communities of the North Carolina coast to the outside world.

In Goldsboro, at the railroad’s western end, other lines connected the A&NC’s passengers and freight to Raleigh and to distant markets and cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.

Local people referred to the A&NC as the “Old Mullet Road” because of the seemingly endless barrels of salt mullet that its freight cars carried out of Morehead City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

With the opening of the railroad in 1858, the local fishery for striped mullet — what we’ve always called “jumping mullet” — grew into the largest saltwater fishery anywhere in the American South.

Long a staple in local pantries, barrels of salt mullet were soon as common in the country stores of eastern North Carolina as pickled pigs feet and rounds of farmers cheese.

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The construction of the A&NC and the building of the coastal town of Morehead City went hand in hand.

The town’s resort trade, its famous charter fishing business, the state port, the local menhaden industry (one of the largest fisheries in the U.S.), and really the region’s entire wholesale seafood industry — none would have been imaginable without the “Old Mullet Road.”

The same could be said for the truck farming business throughout that whole central part of North Carolina’s coastal plain.

Over the years, the A&NC’s trains became part of daily life in the towns and crossroads through which it passed.

For people who lived along the tracks, the coming and going of the train, its whistle, and the sense of curiosity and wonder about what lost soul might be coming home, or what trouble might be arriving, became measures of time passing as much as the tides and the changing of the seasons.

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Taken in Morehead City or New Bern in 1942, this photograph introduces us to one of the railroad’s employees who was something of a legend in that part of eastern North Carolina.

His name was J. B. Davis, people called him “Captain Davis,” and he was a conductor on the railroad for close to half a century.

On Nov. 30, 1924, the Raleigh News & Observer referred to Capt. Davis and the railroad’s three other conductors as “the most popular quartet in this part of the State….”

The paper went on to say, “They know more people than all the politicians in Wayne, Lenoir, Craven, and Carteret counties.”

A railroad conductor saw the best and worst of humanity. Capt. Davis came to know the high and mighty and the utterly defeated, those that were good, and those that were set on evil, people anxious to get back home, and those desperate to get away from home.

Along the railroad’s path, people often sought him out to get the latest news from other towns. Many a day, he was the first to bring word of births and marriages, shipwrecks, hurricanes and floods.

His own life on the railroad was far from uneventful: Capt. Davis was injured in a derailment in 1933, and he and the train’s brakeman were usually the first to reach the poor souls who were killed on the railroad tracks.

In 1939, when a new company, the Atlantic & East Carolina Railroad Co., took over the railroad’s lease, Capt. Davis was fired for allegedly not collecting fares from some of his passengers.

His discharge made headlines across eastern North Carolina, and he was eventually rehired, but there has to be story there.

Maybe he was just looking out for his friends. On the other hand, times were hard in the 1930s and I like to think that maybe now and then he looked the other way and let a penniless soul or two ride for free.

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I assume that this gentleman was one of the train’s firemen, whose job it was to maintain the fire in the engine’s boiler by shoveling coal and watching the boiler’s water levels as well.

A 1947 newspaper article concerning a derailment mentions an A&NC fireman named Henry Peterson. This may be him, but I cannot be sure.

Judging from the way he holds himself, I might have thought that he was the train’s engineer, but that was not possible in eastern North Carolina in the first half of the 20th century because he was African American.

At the turn of the 20th century, the A&NC’s president was a New Bern banker and real estate mogul named James A. Bryan.

Bryan was one of the leaders of the white supremacy movement that swept North Carolina in the period from 1898 to 1900. To attract New Bern’s white working class men to the white supremacy cause, he promised to discharge all of the railroad’s black employees and give their jobs to white workers.

After the Wilmington Massacre and the victory of the white supremacists in November 1898, Bryan lived up to his promise.

According to documents preserved in the Bryan Family Papers at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection, he discharged dozens of A&NC conductors, porters, brakemen, mechanics, blacksmiths, and other skilled railroad men in 1899 and 1900.

He also fired many of the company’s lowest level black employees, including the night watchman at the company’s rail yard.

In exchange for white workingmen’s support for a state constitutional amendment that took all voting rights from the state’s black citizens, Bryan also pledged to embed white supremacy in the railroad’s labor policies into the future.

In practice, that meant: the A&NC’s managers would hire and promote whites preferentially, regardless of qualifications or experience; would never pay a black worker as much as a white worker; would never employ a black individual in a management role; and would never hire or promote a black man or woman into a job–such as locomotive engineer– that gave them supervisory responsibilities over any white employee.

The railroad’s policies with respect to race were still in place in 1942.

You can learn more about James A. Bryan’s leadership in New Bern’s white supremacy campaign, and see some of the manuscripts related to his firing of the A&NC’s black workers, in my essay, “The Other Coup D’Etat: Remembering New Bern in 1898.”

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Only a few years before these photographs were taken, the railroad had seemed on its last legs.

The private railroad company that had leased the track from the State of North Carolina since 1904, the Norfolk & Southern, had defaulted in 1934, a victim of the Great Depression.

After the Norfolk & Southern’s default, state coffers could not keep up with the railroad’s maintenance and repair needs. Years of neglect began taking their toll: broken railroad ties abounded, embankments needed reinforcement, and much about the old railroad seemed frayed and worn out. Reports of derailments grew more common.

Things began to look up in 1939 however, when the state finally found a new private company to take over the railroad’s lease.

The new company, the Atlantic & Eastern North Carolina, invested in new engines and track repairs, updated at least some depots, and even repainted the cars a perky “Spanish blue” instead of the old dull black.

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Then the war came. Everybody was on the move. Soldiers, sailors, defense workers, and civilians of all kinds.

A new prosperity was in the air, heightening the demand for carrying passengers and hauling the region’s agricultural products and other freight.

Probably most importantly, the federal government began constructing two massive new military installations on the central part of the North Carolina coast in 1941 and ’42. To build the two bases, the railroad’s freight cars would carry enough lumber, brick, piping, and other construction materials to build two good-sized cities from scratch.

The railroad ran a short spur from Havelock Station into the construction site for the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station (originally called Cunningham Field). To the south, the railroad carried construction materials to Camp Lejeune via a track that ran from New Bern to Jacksonville, then along a short spur owned and operated by the Navy.

By the time these photographs were taken, the railroad was making a profit again for the first time in recent memory.

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The war changed the railroad and the North Carolina coast in a thousand ways, some easy to get used to, and some that probably haunted the workers that we have met here — Capt. Davis, the fireman, the mail clerk, the brakeman, and the porter in the photograph above — for their rest of their lives.

More than 25 years ago, I interviewed an elderly woman named Gretchen Brinson in Morehead City.

During the early part of World War II, Ms. Brinson had been a nurse in the burn unit of the town’s little hospital when German U-boats were sinking merchant vessels off that part of the North Carolina coast.

This is an excerpt from that interview:

“I married Bull Brinson in 1937. While my daughter was still an infant, I started working at the hospital. Very shortly, we began hearing depth charges and if they had a strike we could see the fires, the ships burning.

“The debris washed up on the ocean front, and there were several years we couldn’t swim up there because of the debris and the oil slicks.

“We could see the ships burning.

“When there was a strike out there at night, we knew this had happened and that next morning there would be casualties come in. Bodies, corpses did wash in on the beach. And they were brought into the hospital: burns, all manner of traumatic situations. The hospital was full. It was only a 30-bed hospital. They lay in the hall on cots. We were not prepared for the onslaught.”

She continued:

“Many of the young men who came here, son, did not live. When the 3 o’clock train left town, the baggage car doors were most always open, and you could see several coffins in their wooden boxes, being shipped to other places. There was seldom a day for months, maybe a year or more, when there were not one or two or three or possibly more that went out on that 3 o’clock train.”

-End-

My story “Gretchen Brinson: A Born Nurse” originally appeared in my “Listening to History” series in the Raleigh News & Observer on June 14, 1998. You can find a copy of the story here. 

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A siege of herons takes refuge Monday from high winds near Russell Creek in Beaufort. Photo: Dylan Ray

Update 11 a.m. Tuesday: Organizers announced late Tuesday morning that the Core Sound Chow Down set for Friday night has been canceled because of the weather forecast. Ticketholders can submit using an online form their preference to refund the ticket to the event held entirely outside. Options are a full refund, transfer to 2026 or donate the cost to the museum. Festivities on Saturday and Sunday will continue as planned.

Original post:

One of the first signs that the holidays are upon us is when the two-story Christmas tree made entirely of crab pots begins to illuminate the grounds of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

The multicolor glow from the symbol of Christmas — plus all the holiday lights decorating the sizable facility — also means that the Waterfowl Weekend is just around the corner.

The museum, which highlights the heritage of the 13 unincorporated communities of Down East Carteret County, has held the annual celebration the first weekend of December for the last few decades, and are gearing up for this year’s scheduled for Dec. 5-7.

The weekend gets underway Friday evening with the Core Sound Chow Down stew competition, a ticketed event. The doors open to the public at 8 a.m. Saturday and again at 10 a.m. Sunday. During both days, visitors can meet the more than 45 carvers, artists, photographers and crafters set up at the festival.

While winding down Harkers Island Road on the way to the museum, travelers will pass homes decorated to the hilt, and residents selling crafts on the roadside.

They’ll also drive by Harkers Island School, where the Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild’s 37^th annual Core Sound Decoy Festival is taking place. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, the campus will be filled with carvers, vendors and antique decoy exhibits. Carving competitions are scheduled throughout both days, and food will be available for purchase.

When the Waterfowl Weekend was in its early days, the focus was mainly on decoys, but the festival has evolved over the years and is now a part of the holiday celebration for many.

“We have turned what used to be a weekend for decoys to a season of traditions,” Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher told Coastal Review, and a large part of that is the joy and nostalgia that holiday decorations invoke.

“The museum’s Christmas lights are about Core Sound. Celebrating communities and traditions. That’s what we do every day,” she said.

The two-plus-story Christmas tree made of crab pots and the “Gallery of Trees: Telling our Story” are “part of that celebration for sure,” she explained. The Gallery of Trees features crab pot trees that families, friends and area businesses sponsor and decorate. The first was first held in 2020 and has become a special part of Waterfowl Weekend.

Amspacher said that adding the giant tree made of crab pots to the holiday decor was inspired by social media, with the first try in 2010 or 2011.

“Blame it on Facebook. We kept seeing pics from Maine where they were stacking lobster traps and Maryland where they were stacking crab baskets and we said ‘why not?’” Amspacher said. “The first attempts were a learning experience — small and sometimes more square than round — but then Abbi (Davis) and Kenny (Brennan) took on the project, and their engineering skills and a lot of rebar and zip ties made it happen.”

The small team of volunteers spent the last few days of this October building the 2025 tree, including Davis, a Harkers Island native.

Davis began working part time at Core Sound on and off the summer of 2015 and again while she was attending trade school. Now a volunteer, she helps when she can, which isn’t very often because her career keeps her on the road a fair bit, she said. She currently resides in South Carolina where she’s a lineman.

“The museum is such an incredible place,” Davis told Coastal Review.

Core Sound has captured the sense of place “that most people have a really hard time understanding if they haven’t lived it and gave them a glimpse into the culture of Down East. That is something that would have otherwise been long forgotten by the world.”

Though the tree of crab pots was part of the picture before she began working there, Davis started helping out with the tree in 2015, when the lights were powered by a generator that had to be regularly be fueled up.

“I remember I would ride down there to look at it because it was so beautiful but I also worked at the museum so I took on the job of being the ‘gas lady’ whenever I could that year,” Davis said.

There was a pause on putting the tree up for a few seasons because it became harder to borrow crab pots, compounded by the damage to the facility from 2018’s Hurricane Florence that closed the main building for a few years to undergo repairs.  

“In 2020 I started working there again and when I did, we talked about making Christmas big,” Davis continued. “That year I wanted the tree to make a comeback. I remember asking everyone I knew who had crab pots or who had been a crabber in the past, if we could get some for this tree. Everyone I talked to was excited but finding someone that had pots available and the time wasn’t easy.”

The first year that Davis took the project on, her father and sister helped load the crab pots into the back of her pickup truck and in a trailer to haul to the museum. “It took three trips,” Davis said.

Davis explained that the team likes to “joke and say the engineering is a little bit organic because it doesn’t have to be exactly the same to work.” And they’ve been working together for so long, that “at this point we just know what to do.”

Their favorite saying is that “we’re making circles out of squares,” she continued. “We always start with the same amount for the bottom. Make a ring out of pots basically and then fill it in. Each row is done the same way just a smaller number of pots until it gets to the top. The pots are secured through heavy duty wire ties and rebar.”

This year, it took 170 crab pots arranged in 12 rows to build the 23-foot-tall tree.

Once the tree is complete, a glowing handmade star is placed on top.

“The coolest part about this tree for me is what it represents. These pots are actually used by commercial fisherman in the sound. Every year they harvest and haul hard crabs. Knowing that they’re real and not something just bought for decoration,” Davis said.

New this year, the tree is being decorated with buoys hand-painted by local kids, “which is really special,” she said, “And knowing that in every way possible this tree is Down East, makes it absolutely great! It captures the spirit like many things at the museum and it’s put on display so the world can have a chance to see a small glimpse of that.”

“Because everyone loves,” the giant Christmas tree, it is being featured on the museum’s holiday apparel line, Amspacher said. “It has become a symbol of Down East Christmas.”

Waterfowl Weekend details

The fourth annual Core Sound Chow Down and Best Sweet Potato Pie Down East competition starts at 5:30 p.m. Friday. Tickets, $35 for members and $45 for nonmembers, include four cups of your choice from the spread of chowders, soups and stews made by cooks from around the county. Molasses Creek will perform live music.

Competitors returning this year are D’s Island Clam Chowder, Per-Atlantic Crab and Corn Chowder, and Gloucester Mardi Gras Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. New this year will be stewed shrimp, crab-shrimp bisque, stewed scallops, chili, and Cedar Island original lima beans and crab meat. The submissions will be judged by seafood market and chefs from across eastern North Carolina.

Doors open at 8 a.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday, and each day has special programming.

On Saturday there will be live music at 11 a.m. with Asher Brinson and Friends, noon with Mac McRoy and The South Point Band, and 1 p.m. with Molasses Creek. Preview for the live auction is at 2 p.m. and the auction begins at 3 p.m. The online auction is live now through Dec. 6.

On Sunday, a church service is scheduled for 8 a.m. and at 2 p.m. is a World War II Pearl Harbor Day memorial gathering.

Every year, the museum’s “Core Sound Quilt Crew” sew a quilt that is put up for action to raise funds for the nonprofit museum. This year’s theme is “Reflections of Diamond City.” Tickets can be purchased online for the quilt raffle, as well as the Christmas raffle. Winner takes home $5,000.

The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources has a full schedule of holiday events planned at sites across the state, several of which are in eastern North Carolina.

From candlelight tours of historic sites like Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site to programs at state parks, the department that manages, promotes, and enhances the state’s diverse arts and culture, rich history, and natural areas provided a schedule of festive festivities through the next month.

Tree lighting at Historic Bath 6-7:30 p.m. Nov. 29. Enjoy light refreshments, music with soloist David Harragin, and Santa. Free. 

Holiday Pops with the North Carolina Symphony at Riverfront Convention Center in New Bern, 4 and 7:30 p.m. Dec. 2. Tickets start at $50 and can be purchased online or at the New Bern Visitors Center on Front Street.

History of Santa Claus, Patron Saint of Sailors 11 a.m. Dec. 4 at Fort Macon State Park. During this family friendly presentation, N.C. Maritime Museum Associate Education Curator Christine Brin will try to answer some questions about the jolly fellow without taking away any of the magic. Visit ncmaritimemuseumbeaufort.com/virtual to attend the program online.

Yuletide by Lantern at Historic Halifax 4-8 p.m. Dec. 5. Visit homes, public buildings, and taverns decorated for the season with festive, all-natural décor, experience interactive historical vignettes and enjoy a warm fire in the Tap Room tavern. Tickets are required for this event on Eventbrite or at the site.

Holiday Open House: A Colonial Christmas by America 250 NC at the Museum of the Albemarle 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Dec. 6. Watch the Albemarle Express model train stop at each of the 13 counties represented at the museum, and receive a keepsake bell. A petting zoo with farm animals is scheduled for 10:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m., holiday face painting from 12:30-2:30 p.m. and visits with Santa Claus from 1:30-2:30 p.m.

Candlelight Christmas at Somerset Place 4-5:30 p.m. Dec. Take a self-guided tour of traditional holiday decorations illuminated by candlelight inside the historic Collins House in Creswell. Admission is $5 for adults $2 for children.

Friends of the Maritime Museum Holiday Flotilla evening of Dec. 6. Join the Friends of the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort for their annual Holiday Flotilla! Yachts, oars, kayaks and commercial vessels decorated for the season can be seen at 5:30 p.m. on the Morehead City waterfront and at 6:15 p.m. on the Beaufort waterfront. 

Island Jingle at Roanoke Island Festival Park 5:30 p.m. Dec. 6. Free event is follows the annual Town of Manteo Christmas Parade. Music will start at 6:30 p.m. with The Tilet Sisters hosting. Music by That Guy Shane, Doug Dino, The Lion Band, Jeremy Russell, plus the Mustang All Stars and Mustang Kids bands. All proceeds from concessions run by the Friends of Elizabeth II go to support the Mustang Outreach Program.

Somerset Place’s 35th Christmas Open House 1-4 p.m. Dec. 7. Explore the plantation on a self-guided tour with staff members and volunteers available to answer questions. mingle with Saint Nicholas from 2-3:30 p.m. Admission is free but donations are welcome. https://events.dncr.nc.gov/event/somerset-places-35th-christmas-open-house

Holiday Pops with the North Carolina Symphony at Wilson Center at Cape Fear Community in Wilmington 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Dec. 11. Tickets available on the symphony’s website.

A Light in the Darkest of Night at Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site 4-7 p.m. Dec. 12. Self-guided exploration of the ruins of St. Philips Church. The site’s visitor center and gift shop will remain open during the evening for holiday shopping. 

The John Costlow Christmas Train Show at the Harvey W. Smith Watercraft Center in Beaufort Dec. 12-14. The annual train show, hosted by Beaufort Lions Club and the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, offers a glimpse into the past with antique working model trains and model trains of all sizes. Admission is free. Children ages 12 and younger will need to be accompanied by an adult. 

Holiday Hike to the Light at Jockey’s Ridge State Park 5:30-6:30 p.m. Dec. 13. Join Ranger Paul Austin for a fun and festive evening hike to the light. Experience the dunes at night with an educational tour up to the solar powered Christmas tree. Email austin.paul@ncparks.gov to register. 

Santa by the Sea at the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Dec. 13. Games and activities will be stationed throughout the aquarium. Tickets available on the aquarium’s website.

Candlelight at Tryon Palace, Farewell to our Royal Governors 4:30-9:30 p.m. Dec. 13 and Dec. 20. The Governor’s Mansion will be illuminated by candlelight while costumed interpreters present a story that relates to back to the Palace’s colonial history.

An 18th Century Christmas at Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site 1-5:30 p.m. Dec. 14. Participate in an authentic period candlelit service in the ruins of St. Philips Anglican Church from 5-5:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at the gate upon arrival at the site located in Winnabow.

Holiday Pops with the North Carolina Symphony at Northside High School in Jacksonville 7:30 p.m. Dec. 17. Tickets available on the symphony’s website.

Cookies and Crafts: Christmas Open House at CSS Neuse Museum 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Dec. 18. Enjoy Christmas lights, cookies, crafts, and activities at the site in Kinston.

Holiday Cheer at Historic Bath 4-7 p.m. Dec. 20. Visit Bonner Point under the marquee tent to enjoy wassail and hot cider, ginger muffins and festive music. There will be 20-minute tours of the Bonner House focusing on the 19th-century household, and a chance to visit Carrow Cottage that portrays a family of fishermen.

Twelfth Night at Roanoke Island Festival Park 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Dec. 27. Black-powder demonstrations, carols aboard the ship, archery, scavenger hunts, and more activities happening throughout the park in Manteo. Included in cost of admission.

New Year’s Eve Cannon Blast at Fort Macon State Park Dec. 31. Live entertainment starts at 6 p.m., and the cannons will go off at 7 p.m. at the site in Carteret County. Bring folding chairs and a picnic meal. Come early as parking is limited. 

The Indian Woods historical marker at the intersection of St. Francis Road and U.S. Highway 17 in Bertie County is easily missed while cruising at 55 or 60 miles an hour.

Located at the edge of a farmer’s field after the fall harvest of cotton, the sign leans to the north, and hints of the story and its aftermath of an almost forgotten war between Native Americans and colonists in the early 18th century.

It is the northernmost of at least seven signs that are found throughout coastal North Carolina from Wayne County to Bertie County that trace the story of that conflict.

The Tuscarora War was brutal and horrific. Launching a coordinated attack on the morning of Sept. 22, 1711, Tuscarora warriors slaughtered 140 men, women and children throughout eastern North Carolina.

“The Tuscarora devastated white settlements in the Pamlico Neuse region and raised serious fears for the continuance of English occupation in North Carolina,” Thomas Parramore wrote for the North Carolina Historical Review in 1982.

Unable to defend its own people, the North Carolina colony’s general assembly begged Virginia and South Carolina for help.

Virginia refused to send troops, but put pressure on neutral Tuscarora villages in its colony to remain out of the conflict. South Carolina sent combined white and Native forces.

In the end in March of 1713, when the last pitched battle of the war was fought at Fort Neoheroka, which is present day Snow Hill in Greene County, at least a thousand Tuscarora were dead and another thousand sold into slavery in South Carolina.

In North Carolina, as many as 200 colonists were killed and the combined white and Native combatants provided by South Carolina suffered an additional 200 deaths.

Tuscarora lineage

The Tuscarora were part of the Iroquois, whose original lands stretched from New York state into Canada. The migration to North Carolina most likely occurred sometime around the 1500s, Dr. Arwin Smallwood, dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at North Carolina Central University, told Coastal Review.

Smallwood, who traces his lineage to the Tuscarora people, grew up in Indian Woods and has studied the history of the Tuscarora extensively.

“In the 1500s they’d already moved down from (New York) and settled North Carolina,” he said, adding that “they never broke their blood ties to the five nations,” which are the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca.

By the 1580s, when Sir Walter Raleigh’s doomed expeditions landed on Roanoke Island, the Tuscarora were well established in eastern North Carolina and probably were the dominant Native nation of the region. They may have been the ones who decided the colony’s fate.

“Tuscarora oral traditions say they were the ones who destroyed the Lost Colony,” Smallwood said. “They always had large numbers of people who had European characteristics like red and auburn hair, even sometimes blonde hair, but definitely what (Native Americans) called the Tuscarora eye, which was blue-green, kind of a hazel eye, that was prevalent throughout the Tuscaroras and that distinguished them.”

War: Longtime complaints

At its simplest, the Tuscarora War was about long-established complaints of the Tuscarora: Encroachment on lands they had traditionally controlled and unfair and dishonest trading practices.

But, Smallwood noted, there were other factors at play.

It was “trade routes. The Tuscaroras controlled the Piedmont and the coastal plains of North Carolina. They controlled all the major trade routes between North Carolina and Virginia,” he said. “Anyone who needed knives, axes, guns, gunpowder, whatever they had to trade through them, including rum. They had to trade through the Tuscaroras. For the southeastern Indians, it was a way of eliminating them as the people who monopolized trade.”

It is possible that, after at least 60 years of observing the internal politics of the North Carolina colony, the Tuscarora were aware of the internal rivalries that were threatening to tear the colony apart, and that may have played a role in the timing of the initial attack.

Cary’s Rebellion pitted Thomas Cary, the Quaker-leaning former governor of the colony, against Edward Hyde, who the Lords Proprietors had selected to govern the colony. The rebellion exposed the deep political divisions within the colony that led to open warfare with Hyde finally taking the reins of the governorship in 1711.

At that time, the colony was divided into two counties: Albemarle in the north and Bath in the south. Although in 1711 the nominal capital of the colony was Bath. There was no government office there and it’s doubtful if the population of the town ever reached 300 people.

The northern Albemarle colony was dominated by the supporters of Hyde and the resentment from Cary’s attempt to wrest control of the colony permeated the region.

“The Cary Rebellion had pitted Albemarle against Bath and had left the colonists of the two counties somewhat at odds with each other. It was by no means clear that Albemarle would rush to the defense of Bath County and, in fact, it did not,” Parramore wrote.

If there was a proximate cause of the war, it was the settlement of New Bern by Swiss immigrants and members of the Palatine religious sect escaping religious persecution in Europe.

“New Bern was built on what (the Tuscarora) considered to be part of their capital city,” Smallwood said.

Baron Christopher DeGraffenreid, the founder of New Bern, in his “Account of the Tuscarora War,” touched on many of the issues that have been cited as causing the conflict.

“What caused the Indian war was firstly, the slanders and instigations of certain plotters against Governor Hyde, and secondly, against me, in that they talked the Indians into believing that I had come to take their land,” he wrote. “Talked them out of this and it was proven by the friendliness I had shown them, as also by the payment for the land where I settled at the beginning (namely that upon which the little city of New Bern was begun), regardless of the fact that the seller was to have given it over to me free.”

Captured with surveyor John Lawson, DeGraffenreid was able to talk his way out of imprisonment and possible death.

It is possible Lawson could have avoided his fate, but, Smallwood said, “he quarreled with the chiefs. You’re being held prisoner, and you’ve been put on trial, and then you go argue with the prosecuting attorney and the judge who decides whether you live or die.”

Lawson, whose book “History of North Carolina” gave accurate and clear-eyed accounts of Native life in the colonies, was not so lucky, and may have had a hand in his own undoing. Accused by his captors of surveying the Tuscarora land for the purpose of selling it, he was tried and convicted and sentenced to death.

Like the North Carolina colony, the Tuscarora had internal divisions. Parramore described the Tuscarora as “not a nation and probably not even a confederacy though colonial perceptions of them had not traditionally recognized any significant internal divisions.”

Smallwood, however, paints a different picture.

“The whole structure was family based,” he said. “With that being said, they were all united because the whole nation is united by blood.”

Within that nation family, there were specific ways to make decisions that would affect all members for the Tuscarora nation, Smallwood said, describing the decision-making process as “a democracy.”

Smallwood explained that Lawson was convicted after “all of the chiefs met in the war council. In that council, they all agree to execute Lawson.”

War: First conflict

When the war first broke out in 1711, South Carolina sent military aid. Col. John Barnwell left South Carolina with “30 white men and nearly 500 Indians,” the Carolana website states.

Although Barnwell may have included giving military aid to North Carolina in his reasoning, by his actions and those of the men under his command, the profit that could be realized from the bounty on scalps and selling Native Americans into slavery was an important part of why he made the trip.

Thomas Peotta in his 2018 doctoral dissertation, “Dark Mimesis: A Cultural History of the Scalping Paradigm,” at the University of British Columbia, describes how profitable scalps and prisoners could be.

“Virginia and Carolina offered scalp and prisoner bounties to militiamen and allied Indians. Virginia…offered £20 per scalp to British colonists, while uninvolved Tuscaroras on Virginia’s frontier were offered a bounty of 6 blankets apiece…for the scalps of Hancock’s warriors, and market prices for enslaved women and children,” he wrote.

For Barnwell, the scalps had an additionally benefit, Peotta wrote, noting that “scalps and prisoners also offered a way to tally the dead: Barnwell’s forces recorded 52 scalps and 30 captives after (his) victory at Torhunta in 1712.” Torhunta is present day Pikeville in Wayne County.

After a series of battles with the Tuscarora including a 10-day siege at their main settlement in Craven County, Barnwell reached an agreement with the Tuscarora combatants to pay tribute and lay down their arms. After signing the agreement, he invited some of the local Indians, who had not attacked the colonists, into his camp. They were then seized, DeGraffenreid wrote, and sold into slavery

“He thought of a means of going back to South Carolina with profit, and under the pretense of a good peace he enticed a goodly number of the friendly Indians or savage Carolinians, took them prisoner at Core Town (to this his tributary Indians were entirely inclined because they hoped to get a considerable sum from each prisoner) and made his way home with his living plunder…This so unchristian act very properly embittered the rest of the Tuscarora and Carolina Indians very much, although heathens, so that they no longer trusted the Christians,” he wrote.

War: Conclusion

The action reignited the war, with King Hancock again leading the Tuscarora aligned with him. Renewing the conflict may have been justified, but it was not sanctioned by the war council, allowing the northern Tuscarora to remain neutral.

It would take another military expedition from South Carolina, this one led by Col. James Moore to end the war, but it also led to an open rift between King Hancock and the northern Tuscarora.

King Hancock was captured by northern Tuscarora at the orders of Chief Blunt (or Blount) in November of 1712 and turned over to North Carolina authorities who executed him.

The war did not end with Hancock’s death, however.

The agreement with Blunt was that he was to deliver the scalps of key leaders to North Carolina authorities by the end of the year. When he failed to do so, Moore renewed his campaign.

Finally, following a three-day siege at Fort Neoheroka the war came to an end, although there were sporadic raids and fighting until 1715.

Aftermath

For the tribal nations that had aligned with the South Carolina expeditions, their participation sparked “a continental war in the back country,” Smallwood explained.

“Because of the role,” Smallwood continued. “Those Indians in that area played in the war, it set off a continental Indian War. he Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondaga, the Senecas, and (allied tribes) came south, and they completely obliterated the (the southern tribes).”

In North Carolina, the war was a harbinger of extraordinary change. Initially the war’s end brought brought economic hardship to what was then called Bath County, an area that now includes Beaufort, Hyde, Bladen, Onslow, Carteret and New Hanover counties.

“The concentration of Indian attacks on frontier settlements during the war and the continuation of raids after the peace of 1713 stifled economic growth in Bath County and contributed to temporary food shortages throughout the colony,” Christine Styrna explained in a 1990 doctoral dissertation at the College of William and Mary.

But if the initial effect was to wreak havoc on the colony’s economy, the war also “provided certain colonial leaders with the opportunity to reinforce their economic and political power while serving as a catalyst for economic development,” Styrna noted.

Bath and New Bern had taken the brunt of the Tuscarora raids, and there, Styrna wrote, “colonists slowly rebuilt their homes and fortunes.”

The rest of the colony, though, experienced a “boom period” in which coastal and local trade increased dramatically. According to the shipping reports Styrna cites from the Boston Newsletter, “the number of vessels sailing to and from ports in North Carolina ports elsewhere between 1716 and 1720 increased fourfold in comparison to the five-year period before the war.”

If, however, North Carolina was on the road to recovery, the fate of the Tuscarora was one of enslavement and exile, leading to a diaspora of the tribal nation that stretched from North Carolina to Canada.

Most of the southern Tuscarora emigrated north. The largest group returned to the Iroquois in New York, becoming numerous enough that in 1722 the Tuscarora became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy.

As they moved north, some settled in Pennsylvania. There is today, a Tuscarora Mountain in south central Pennsylvania.

Many of them, though, settled in small communities throughout North Carolina and other states east of the Mississippi.

“It’s like you take a plate or mirror and you drop it on the floor and it shatters and shards go everywhere,” Smallwood said. “There’s some big chunks, and then there are lots of little chunks. And those little chunks, are scattered all over eastern North Carolina. They’re at least today, seven different factions of Tuscaroras that are (in North Carolina). And larger groups of them who are in Virginia, and even over into eastern Ohio.”

Coastal Review will not publish Thursday and Friday in observation of the Thanksgiving holiday.

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A Venus flytrap shows off its perhaps little-appreciated blooms, which are often overlooked, as compared with the other, better-known, insect-trapping attributes of this carnivorous plant that’s native only to a roughly 90-mile stretch of the North Carolina coast between Wilmington and Morehead City. Photo: Mark Hibbs

The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries is hosting a public hearing next week on two proposed shellfish leases in Carteret County.

The hearing will be held at 6 p.m. Monday in the division’s Central District Office, 5285 U.S. Highway 70 West, Morehead City, as well as by Webex.

The focus on the hearing will be on the following lease permit requests:

• I. Salts Oyster Co., LLC, Ralph W. Brittingham, Jr. and Ryan D. Salter, who have applied for a 6.08-acre shellfish bottom and water column lease in North Bay (25-007BL/25-008WC).
• Rough Atlantic, LLC, Michael T. Dale, who has applied for a 6.02-acre shellfish bottom and water column lease in North River (25-032BL/25-033WC).

Additional information, including presentation slides, biological investigation reports, the web conference link, and call-in telephone number, are available on the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality’s website.

Anyone who wishes to speak at the in-person meeting should sign up on-site between 5-6 p.m. on the night of the hearing.

Written comments are also being accepted through 5 p.m. Dec. 2.

Online written comments will be accepted through an online form. Comments may also be mailed to N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, Shellfish Leases, P.O. Box 769, Morehead City, NC 28557-0769.

For more information, contact Mitch Melkonian with the division’s Habitat and Enhancement Section at 252-515-5495 or SLAP@deq.nc.gov.

Guest Commentary To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues.

This fall has been one of the wettest in my memory — and yet, we haven’t had much significant rainfall, or a single hurricane or tropical storm make landfall. Still, the water lingers.

King tides have been washing over docks, creeping across yards, and flooding roads that once stayed dry except in the worst storms. For those of us living Down East in Carteret County, it’s a clear sign that something deeper is changing.

I’ve lived in Atlantic for six decades. I’ve never seen the roads hold water like this. The fields don’t dry out anymore. The ditches stay full — they just don’t drain.

When ditches stop working

For generations, Down East communities-built ditches moved water off the land and into nearby creeks or sounds. Those systems were based on one simple principle: gravity. Water flows downhill, and as long as the outlet of a ditch was lower than the land it drained — and the tide stayed low enough — water could flow freely.

But that balance has been shifting. The “hydrologic head,” or the difference in elevation that drives water to move from land to sea, has been shrinking as sea level rises. When the sea surface and ditch outlet are nearly the same height, there’s no longer enough downward pressure to push the water out. Even small rises in tide height or groundwater level can stop drainage altogether.

Today, many ditches are effectively at or just above mean high tide. That means during normal tides, water from the creeks seeps inland through the ditches, instead of the other way around. Even when a ditch still looks dry at low tide, the groundwater beneath it is now closer to the surface, leaving the soil perpetually saturated. Digging the ditch deeper doesn’t help — it only invites more saltwater in and raises the groundwater table even higher.

In short, the plumbing that once kept the land dry is backing up.

Ghost forests: symptom of a deeper change

Drive Down East in Carteret County, and the change is plain to see. Along North River, Core Sound, and the backroads of Cedar Island and Atlantic, stands of gray, lifeless trees rise like skeletons from the marsh — the ghost forests of a drowning coast.

Where there were once loblolly pines, red maples, and black gums, saltwater now seeps through the soil, killing the trees from the roots up. These ghost forests are not isolated patches — they are expanding corridors of dead timber that trace the slow inland march of the tides. They are, quite literally, the frontline of sea level rise.

The loss of these forests shows that this isn’t just a surface flooding problem. It’s the entire groundwater system responding to rising seas — a shift in the coastal hydrology that’s transforming once-productive working lands into wetlands and marsh.

What the future holds

If sea level continues to rise at its current pace — or faster, as most scientists expect — the next two or three decades will bring dramatic change to Down East Carteret County.

• Farming will become progressively more difficult, as fields stay too wet or too salty for crops or equipment.
• Roads will flood more often and for longer periods, isolating communities during high tides.
• Septic systems will fail, as the groundwater table rises to meet the drainfields.
• Homes and businesses built on low ground will face chronic flooding, declining property values, and higher insurance costs.

And yet, all this is happening without a single hurricane this year. The water is simply no longer leaving.

Working with water, not against it

The North Carolina Coastal Federation and many partners are working to restore natural hydrology on thousands of acres of previously ditched farmland and forestland. By filling or plugging ditches and re-establishing wetland systems, these projects allow the land to store and slowly release water — the way nature intended.

Restored wetlands act like natural sponges and filters, reducing flooding, improving water quality, and providing habitat for fish and wildlife. More importantly, they show that living with water is possible — but only if we plan for it, rather than trying to drain it away.

Facing reality

The ghost forests now lining our creeks are not just dying trees; they’re a warning. They tell us that the old ways of managing water — cutting deeper ditches, pumping harder, pushing it away — will not work in a world where the sea itself is rising.

Down East has always lived close to the water and thrived because of it. But if we want our communities to endure, we’ll need to give the land room to breathe again — to let it hold water where it must and adapt to what’s coming.

Because the water isn’t waiting.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

A group of volunteers spent peak visitor season this year under the blistering sun and swarmed by thick clouds of flying insects, all to make sure the wild horses, including the newborn foals, inhabiting Cape Lookout National Seashore and Rachel Carson Reserve were undisturbed by the thousands who make their way to the barrier islands that are only accessible by boat.

The volunteers are part of the Pony Patrol program, which trains the “Pony Patrollers,” as they’re called, to share with visitors how to safely observe the two herds. One herd is on Shackleford Banks, the national seashore’s southernmost island, and the other is on the reserve site that is across Taylors Creek from downtown Beaufort.

The National Park Service, Foundation for Shackleford Horses and reserve staff organize the outreach effort that just wrapped up its third year. The foundation is the federally designated co-manager with the park service of the herd.  

Rich Rehm, a volunteer who leads the program for Cape Lookout, explained that the goal of Pony Patrol for the park service is twofold. First is to make sure guests on Shackleford Island stay at least 50 feet from the horses and keep their dogs leashed. Second, as representatives of the National Park Service, is to answer questions visitors may have about the horses, the island, or the seashore.

Paula Gillikin, stewardship coordinator for the 10 reserve sites, has been the longtime manager for the herd at Rachel Carson Reserve, one of 10 protected sites along the coast managed by the North Carolina Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve, under North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.

“The Pony Patrol plays a vital role in supporting the Rachel Carson Reserve and our partners by helping us educate the public about the wild horse population that makes the reserve such a unique part of North Carolina’s coastal heritage,” Gillikin said. “When the public understands what the horses need to survive and be healthy, they are more likely to give the horses the space they need to thrive. This understanding also keeps our visitors safe.”

Foundation President Margaret Poindexter told Coastal Review that the 2025 season had been the largest “and undoubtedly our most successful,” despite its “very difficult start.”

What made 2025 special, she continued, was the determination and resolve of the close to 50 volunteers.

The rocky start began when the first foal of the year from either herd was born at the Rachel Carson Reserve in early May, Poindexter said.

“Her presence was immediately known — lots of eyeballs in Beaufort are constantly on that herd. Just a few days after her birth, and within days of the Pony Patrol season launching, a group of visitors got too close to the foal, the anxious stallion gathered up his mare to get away from them, and the foal was stranded on the oyster rocks unable to keep up with its mama,” she explained.

Though the reserve staff was able to intervene and reunite the two, the Pony Patrollers “were very disappointed that something so potentially tragic could happen so early into the season, before the real rush of visitors even started,” Poindexter said.

Then, on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, a newborn foal was found alone on the east end of Shackleford, on the oceanside. The foundation “made the difficult decision to remove it in order to save its life. Again, the Pony Patrollers were discouraged, afraid that perhaps human intervention had caused the foal to be separated from its mother,” she continued. 

Another foal on Shackleford was separated from its mother 10 days later, found in the mud on the sound side, likely as the result of a stallion fight. It too was removed to save its life, Poindexter said.

Volunteers Margo Hickman and Laura Palazzolo, both Carteret County residents, agreed it was particularly heartbreaking to see the foals removed from the island earlier this summer. Hickman said it was uncertain if they would survive.

“’The Americas’ TV episode about Shackleford was beautiful, but it drew a lot of attention — and with that came more pressure on the horses,” Palazzolo said. The first episode, “The Atlantic Coast,” of the NBC series dated Feb. 23 began with the wild horses at Cape Lookout.

“There were multiple incidents of visitors getting too close, trying to take selfies, or even attempting to pet the ponies,” Palazzolo explained. “We can’t say for sure why two foals were abandoned on the east end, but human interference could certainly have played a part.”

Poindexter continued that “Shortly after those incidents, a filly was born on the west end of Shackleford, in an area that receives significant visitation because of its close proximity to the ferry drop and the crossover to the beach. The Pony Patrollers committed themselves to ensuring the safety and survival of this little girl.”

The volunteers scheduled regular tours in the area around the pair and reported to each other after their shift about the whereabouts and well-being of the foal and her mother. “They intercepted numerous visitors who were curious about her, moving them away from her so as not to interfere with her nursing and nap times, but sharing insider information about her and her harem to create a unique and enhanced visitor experience,” Poindexter said.

Some of the volunteers that have been with the program since the first season, including retirees Hickman and Deb Walker, have been captivated by the filly.

Walker, who grew up in Newport and returned after retiring in 2015 from several decades as an educator in Mississippi, said a major highlight for her this summer was the newborn filly.

Hickman called the filly’s birth “the icing on the cake” for her. “We all became part of her family as her honorary aunts. We weathered heat and humidity and some god-awful mosquitoes daily to check on her.”

Fellow Pony Patroller Cindy K. Smith, who began volunteering in 2024, was the first of the group to spot the filly.

Smith, a Straits resident, said she was fortunate to be leading a tour that day in June when she spotted the foal shortly after birth. “Her little legs wobbled to steady herself against her Mama.”

Smith is photographer, naturalist and guide who has been visiting Shackleford and Rachael Carson for 30-plus years and joined Pony Patrol because, like so many others, she has a “fascination with the ‘ponies.’”

Smith said once realized the foal was a newborn, she began calling seashore staff and other patrollers.

“We were all elated,” Smith continued, adding that knowing that the Fourth of July week, and the associated influx of visitors, was near, the volunteers knew extra precautions would be needed to keep her safe and at a distance from human interaction.

The volunteers were given guidance from seashore and foundation staff to developed a plan to quietly watch from afar, Palazzolo said, adding they always kept a respectful distance. “At least one Patroller was stationed on the dunes, watching and ready to gently intervene if visitors wandered too close.”

Smith reiterated that the volunteers “went over and above for this little girl, perching on dunes, hiding behind bushes or whatever it took to make sure she would not be approached. Individuals went out on their own and watched over her even when it was not a shift. I think this camaraderie bonded us in a way that made each of us better and as a whole, a more cohesive unit.”

The foal is thriving now, Palazzolo explained, and along the way, “visitors got to experience something really special. We’d share what we’d learned from our reports — her habits, her routine — and people would sit quietly to watch. We’d tell them, ‘If you stay back and give her space, you’ll see her nurse, nap, or maybe even get the zoomies.’ It became this magical moment of connection — respectful and joyful all at once.”

How Pony Patrol began

Poindexter explained that the first year in 2023 was truly a pilot, and began with around 30 participants.

“We only sent volunteers to Shackleford that first season. Rich Rehm, one of the seasoned volunteers at Cape Lookout National Seashore, stepped up and offered to be the program coordinator. Truly, without his willingness to fill that role, the program likely would never have gotten off the ground,” Poindexter said.

Rehm retired as an environmental consultant in the Research Triangle Park area and moved to in 2016 to Merrimon with his wife. He began volunteering with the seashore in 2017.

When Rehm was asked in 2019 to coordinate the program for the National Park Service, he said he passed on the opportunity. Then, the program was put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, he decided he would take up the role.

After that first year in 2023, the seashore “was pleased with the success of the program and we expanded the program to include Rachel Carson Reserve,” Rehm said. “In 2025, we expanded the program again to include the east end of Shackleford Island.”

Though the 2025 season wrapped up in late September, a call for volunteers will likely go out in the coming months from both the National Park Service and Rachel Carson Reserve ahead of the 2026 season. Gillikin, with the reserve, said Pony Patrol applications for both herds will likely be launched in January or February.

Poindexter said that those interested in joining the Pony Patrol should know that conditions are rough. “Walking over dunes, in sand, through mud and marsh, often in extreme heat and humidity, while being besieged by mosquitoes,” she said.

Despite the challenges like the heat, the bugs, the mud, and the occasional rude visitor, Palazzolo said the horses make it all worth it.

“There’s nothing like standing on those dunes, watching them go about their day. It reminds you that wildness still exists — and that it’s fragile,” she said. “I’m looking forward to checking on her this winter — and jumping right back in next summer.”

Rehm added, “If you can put up with the heat, the humidity, the bugs, and the storms by all means you should volunteer.”

Coastal Review will not publish Tuesday in observation of Veterans Day.

I’m now in my 60th year of life. I started fishing before I was even old enough to have a memory of it.

I’ve been fly fishing since I was 10 years old. The math is pretty easy. During that time I’ve lived in North Carolina for 30 of those years, again, easy math. However, it never fails that since I’ve been here, people will say to me, “Flyfishing? Where do you do that ’round these parts?”

Inevitably it leads to awkward conversation and ends up with me trying to explain something that is not easily explained.

First off, all I’ll say, and trying to not sound braggadocious here, but I have caught 71 different species of fish with a fly and fly rod. I’m talking about the smallest thing you can think of up to and including the biggest things a person can catch in sight of land.

In this age you can fish anywhere you dream of, with the only limit being your pockets. I once knew a man in Beaufort who only fished in Montana, and I’ve fished with guys from Raleigh who only fished saltwater. Having said that, let’s talk only about the fish that are readily available along our coastal waters and within 30 minutes of my home in Carteret County. It’s quite a lot as you’ll see.

We’ll start close in and work our way out. There is a book that gives in-depth attention to this very subject called “Fly Fishing the Southeast Coast: A Complete Guide to Fishing Fresh and Salt Water,” if you’re inclined. For the sake of this article, I am going to assume a level of casting competency.

A type of fishing that gets overlooked by fly anglers around here is freshwater bass fishing in ponds. I covered this topic previously, but it’s worth looking at again as a strictly fly opportunity.

The No. 1 concern is access. But if anyone you know has a residential, golf course, any kind of freshwater body, it will have bass in it. The best time is a nice sunset and the best fishing is with a small popper.

Walk the shoreline, cast in an arc and be sure to negotiate any little pockets. It’s a bunch of fun, and while most bass you catch around here will be smaller due to the acid content of the soil, big ones also lurk.

If there is one fish that is readily available to fly fishing regardless of skill and access, I would say it’s the bluefish. They are aggressive, and almost any place that has access to the water will see bluefish coming in and out.

What I’m going to do is lay out a very specific plan to catch a bluefish on a fly from shore. First off, put a 250-grain sink line on your spare fly reel (you have a spare, right?), an 8-weight rod.

Get a stripping basket. Otherwise, you’ll spend more time untangling your line than anything else. Tie a piece of 30-pound fluorocarbon leader material to the end of your fly leader. Attach a Clouser Minnow fly in size 2 tied in chartreuse over white.

Drive to Fort Macon State Park about two hours into the falling tide. Fish on the southwest corner. You won’t need waders until late October. Cast into the current, which should be flowing from your left to right. Retrieve with an erratic action.

I don’t believe that you haven’t caught one already. But seriously, if all is as it should be, they should be there as often as not, and this will get them. Not normally big, but be ready. As a bonus this is also the best way to get a Spanish mackerel from shore, as well. If glass minnows are present, be prepared for anything.

I have not found the open surf to very amenable to fly fishing here for a lot of reasons. Believe me, I’ve tried. That’s not to say it can never be done, but it’s just more work than it’s worth for me. But keep your eyes open for calm days and close fish.

Lights under docks are another great opportunity for the fly angler. As you cruise down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, from time to time you will see lights off the ends of docks. If a light points into the water, it’s worth looking at for fishing opportunities. This is classic night fishing. I’m talking not even heading toward the water until 9 p.m.

The fish we are talking about will vary. Speckled trout are always the preferred targets, particularly some really big ones. In fact, if catching a trout over 5 pounds on fly is one of your goals, this would be the way to go. However, some other guests may be interested.

Toward the Neuse River there may be big striped bass, I’ve caught them up to 10 pounds. As you go south toward the Cape Fear, more ladyfish will be available. Red drum will always be around. If you hit on a school of bigger fish, be prepared to bust fly rods and lose fly lines. A school of 30-inchers cleaned us out a few years back.

The same small Clouser Minnow works wonders. Stick with the 8-weight and a 20-pound tippet helps get away from pilings. Position your boat with the anchor almost as far as your longest cast. If you get to close, you’ll mess it up.

Be quiet too. I’ve had homeowners turn off the lights. Uncool.

Cast a little upstream. Strikes will be quick and often show as big boils under the surface. If you can see the fish popping under the lights, that’s a good sign.

Enjoy the moon, and the view of the planets can be spectacular. The sounds that emanate from the water come vibrating through your hull. Often, dolphins will swim through. It’s a great way to fish, and while sometimes things just aren’t happening, it’s as good a way to spend an evening as I can imagine, and a surefire way to catch fish on fly around these parts.

I have not even mentioned the world-famous false albacore run in the fall or the extremely popular tailing redfish action around the full moons. There is plenty of literature about those, some of it written by yours truly, even in these very pages. There’s plenty to do.

The North Carolina Coastal Counties Fisheries Coalition is scheduled to have its third meeting at 1 p.m. Wednesday to discuss current issues, hear from its subcommittees and consider next steps.

The meeting will take place in the Crystal Coast Civic Center on the campus of Carteret Community College in Morehead City.

Dare County Chairman Bob Woodard founded the coalition this past summer after a proposed rule to ban shrimp trawling in certain North Carolina waters made its way through the Senate. The House decided not to take action on the bill.

The first meeting took place Aug. 5 to establish objectives for the coalition made up of elected officials and staff representing Beaufort, Brunswick, Carteret, Camden, Chowan, Craven, Currituck, Dare, Hertford, Hyde, Onslow, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell and Washington counties.

During the second meeting Sept. 16, the coalition prioritized:

• Consumer marketing and education.
• Catch limits and water quality.
• Transparency from the Marine Fisheries Commission and sharing of data and moving of the director of Marine Fisheries to the Department of Agriculture.
• Testing for restaurants to back up local seafood claims.
• Predation management.

The agenda and more details about the coalition are on the Dare County website.

Stepping through the wrought-iron gate flanked by the First Baptist Church of Beaufort and Ann Street United Methodist Church, the Old Burying Ground offers a quiet respite from bustling Front Street in Beaufort, North Carolina’s third oldest town.

The low-hanging branches of gnarled live oaks tangle above most of the 300-year-old cemetery on the 400 block of Ann Street, casting shadows on the worn dirt paths that meander along the seemingly organized fenced-in family plots next to simple headstones wedged like crooked teeth between the ornate, weathered monuments, obelisks and statues.

There’s an area that appears to be an open space near the corner of Craven and Broad streets under a tree that Carteret County native Bill Lewis has determined is the unmarked grave of 13 of his ancestors, including Thomas Lewis Sr., born 1740 and died 1815.

A lifelong historian and genealogist of the Lewis family, Bill recently retired from the defense industry and splits his time between Morehead City and Virginia.

He told Coastal Review during a telephone interview that he has always known where his family was buried in the centuries-old graveyard. The location has been part of his family’s oral history for generations. 

He decided about three years ago, after his father and aunt died within days of each other, to expand on the family history research he inherited from them, and prove to some skeptics that his ancestors were in those unmarked graves. 

The Old Burying Ground

Beaufort, first known as Fishtown, was established in 1709 and the street plans for the town that were designed in 1713, and are still in use. Around 1724, the town deeded the lot to the wardens of St. John’s Parish, the first Anglican church in Beaufort, for the church and, presumably, a cemetery. Though speculation is that the land was used as a graveyard before 1724, documents state.

“The Old Burying Ground grew up around the building used for sessions of the Court and for reading the service of the Anglican Church in St. John’s Parish,” according to the Beaufort Historical Association, which manages the graveyard.

The property was transferred to the town in 1731 when an adjacent lot was added but was full by 1828. The graveyard was enlarged in 1851, 1855 and again in 1894 by the Baptist and Methodist churches that have stood on either side of the graveyard’s Ann Street gate since the mid-1800s. The Methodist congregation’s first building erected in 1820 now houses Purvis Chapel AME Zion Church, on the corner of the Old Burying Ground at Craven and Broad streets, according to the nomination form. 

The graveyard has around 500 marked graves, with about half from before and during the Civil War, which took place between 1861 an1865, 150 between 1865 and 1900, then a handful of 20^th century markers.

“The whole area with its lichen-encrusted stones shaded by great trees is pervaded by an atmosphere of age, peace, and pleasant melancholia that makes it one of the most memorable spots in one of North Carolina’s most picturesque communities,” reads the National Register of Historic Places nomination form submitted in 1974 for the nearly 3-acre graveyard. “The range of tombstone design is quite remarkable, from the primitive grace of the simple cypress slabs to the sober functionalism of the long brick grave covers to the ornate memorials of the Victorian period.”

Visitors can take self-guided tours using a map provided by the Beaufort Historical Association, the nonprofit that manages the graveyard, to see where the girl is buried in the barrel of rum, the monument topped with a cannon for Capt. Otway Burns, who was an American privateer during the War of 1812, the soldier from the British Navy who was buried standing up in full uniform facing England, the grave of a romance rekindled after decades of separation because her father didn’t approve, or the northwest corner, which is the oldest part of the cemetery. 

“The corner looks empty, however a 1992 archeological survey confirmed that there are many graves in this area. It is probable that some of the unmarked graves contain victims of the Indian wars whose skulls were cleft with tomahawks of hostile Coree and Neusiok Indians. It is recorded that in September, 1711 the area had ‘been depopulated by the late Indian War and Massacre,” according to the association. 

The Lewis ancestors

The Old Burying Ground holds “the history of our family roots, where Thomas Lewis, an often-overlooked progenitor, is buried alongside David Lewis and his wife. My siblings and I were captivated by our grandfather Raymond and father’s tales there. The cemetery was our playground, sparking imaginations with stories about our ancestors, including whimsical claims that Thomas was born a pirate and one of the first settlers in Carteret County,” Bill Lewis notes in his family research.

Bill is a native of the Promise Land, which is a neighborhood from 10^th  to 15th streets on the sound side of Morehead City, and a graduate of West Carteret High School. The Promise Land, Harkers Island and Bogue Banks were settled in the late 1800s and early 1900s by Cape Bankers, pronounced Ca’e Bankers, when these fishing and whaling families moved to the mainland after their settlements on Shackleford Banks experienced a series of devastating storms.

In his research, Bill introduces himself as “a proud descendant of Ca’e Banker and Waterman Thomas Lewis Sr. (1740 – 1815),” and he draws inspiration from his late father, Jerry Thomas Lewis (1937 – 2023), “a steadfast Promise Lander and beacon of strength” and his mother, Edna Faye Garner (1938 – 2013), who “came from a determined Salter Pather squatter family.”

His late father was in the military and traveled extensively, but every time they were home in Carteret County, they would visit the cemetery to put flowers on the unmarked graves. “He would say, I want you and your brother and sister to go out here in this graveyard and find Thomas Lewis Sr. Well, my dad new there was no headstones,” he told Coastal Review.

“We embarked on an exhilarating adventure through time as my father took us to a mysterious graveyard, where history whispered through the wind. He paused by an ancient oak tree, excitement gleaming in his eyes, and pointed to an elongated grave. ‘Can you believe this? This is the resting place of your great-great-great-great-grandfather, a son of a pirate!’ His enthusiasm was contagious,” Bill continues. “We were reminded of our family’s rich heritage in Carteret County, where the earliest Lewises settled between 1635 and 1730, helping to shape the community during its formative years.”

Bill said during the phone call that he pored over documents, records and other resources to corroborate the family lore. Once he had substantial proof, he approached the town with the idea to have a headstone installed marking his family gravesite. 

The Carteret County Historical Society oversees the History Museum of Carteret County, where Bill volunteers, and has been asking for donations to purchase and install the proposed 30-inch by 78-inch ledger, which, in this case, is a piece of stone about the size of an interior door the length of a grave, and the 13 footstones expected to be 8 inches by 4 inches.

He told Coastal Review Wednesday that, so far, they had raised around $1,700 and needed close to $5,000 for the simple marker they have designed, and are still taking donations. Call the society at 252-247-7533 for information.

Town of Beaufort Planning and Inspections Director Kyle Garner said in an interview Thursday that he has been working with Bill Lewis for the last year on the proposed headstone.

Bill “has done extensive research,” Garner said, “it’s amazing what he has been able to find.”

Garner added that the graves could have been marked at one time, but the marker could have been wooden and is no longer there. 

Because the cemetery is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Garner and Bill Lewis have been consulting Melissa Timo, the historic cemetery specialist at the Office of State Archaeology, to make sure the proposed marker wouldn’t degrade the cemetery. 

Timo explained to Coastal Review that the state has limited information on the cemetery and “I don’t believe that the cemetery has been 100% surveyed archaeologically” by ground penetrating radar or similar. 

“There was a limited archaeological survey done in 1991 where they opened shallow trenches in what appeared to be ‘open areas’ in the north-central part of the cemetery,” Timo continued. “No surprise, their work reveal that the area wasn’t free from graves at all. There were dozens of unmarked graves and potential graves,” but the digging was just deep enough to expose the tops of grave shafts and not into the burials or human remains themselves.

Timo said that while this survey doesn’t appear to line up where the Lewis ancestors are, “it is very telling for the possibilities in the section he’s concerned about. I tell people that what’s on the surface in a historic cemetery rarely, rarely matches what’s underground,” Timo explained. “There are probably a great deal more people in that cemetery than we expect. Additionally, since this is an urban cemetery, popular but hemmed in on all sides, we might expect people to be much more tightly aligned than a rural cemetery with plenty of room.”

Beaufort Historical Association Executive Director Michael Tahaney said in an interview that the Beaufort Historic Site is looking forward to including this newly publicized Lewis family heritage and the new headstones on tours of Beaufort’s Old Burying Ground. 

“The watermen and whalers were invaluable to the formation of coastal village settlements that grew into the Carteret County towns of today. I’ve spoken with several of our long-term docent guides who have very little previous knowledge of these unmarked graves. The headstones will be a testament to the family’s legacy,” he said.

The 18.8 million visitors to North Carolina’s nine National Park Service sites in 2024 injected $2.3 billion into the state’s economy, second only to California’s $3.7 billion, finds a recent report.

Of that $2.3 billion statewide, around 4.7 million visitors spent $732.2 million in the communities around the coast’s five National Park Service sites, according to “2024 National Park Visitor Spending Effects: Economic Contributions to Local Communities, States, and the Nation” made available to the public Sept. 25.

Park service officials release the annual report detailing what visitors paid the previous year on lodging, camping fees, restaurants, groceries, gas, local transportation, recreation industries and retail in gateway regions, which are the communities or areas that surround a site. An easy-to-use interactive online tool breaking down the report is on the website.

With the ongoing government shutdown that began Oct. 1, and ongoing at the time of this publication, next year’s numbers will likely show a different story.

Visit NC Executive Director Wit Tuttell told Coastal Review that the report “makes it clear that national parks, seashores, historic sites and trails enrich our state and local economies.” Visit NC is the state’s official destination marketing organization.

The study looked at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and Cape Hatteras National Seashore, all on the Outer Banks, Cape Lookout National Seashore in Carteret County, and Moores Creek National Battlefield in Pender County, and, in the western part of the state, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site.

“Beyond the monetary impact, there’s endless value in preserving our scenic wonders and the experience of what humans as well as nature have achieved,” Tuttell continued. “Travelers come here to channel the Wright Brothers, camp on the beach at Cape Lookout, and view the foliage along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Knowing there’s an economic boost to go along with these priceless experiences makes us doubly appreciative.”

Nationwide, more than 85 million acres make up the 433 federally managed sites found in every state, Washington, D.C., American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The report states that across the country in 2024 a record 332 million park visitors spent an estimated $29 billion in gateway regions at the 404 sites that counted the number of visitors. The previous record was set in 2016 with 330.9 million visits.

Total visitor spending estimates increased by almost 10% in 2024 compared to 2023, which the report authors credit to a 2% park visitation increase of around 6.36 million. Data also shows that more than 55% of parks had an above-average off-season in February-June and October-December. 

Using this report, the National Park Conservation Association estimates that the National Park Service is losing $1 million a day nationwide from fee revenue for each day the government is shutdown.

“Based on the Park Service’s shutdown plan, almost 9,300 people (nearly two-thirds of Park Service staff) are now being put in the scary position of not knowing when their next paycheck will arrive. Additionally, park concessioners and partners now face the prospect of lost revenue and further economic hardship — local economies could lose as much as $80 million in visitor spending every day parks are closed in October,” the association stated on its website.

National Park Service on the coast

On the Outer Banks, Wright Brothers National Memorial saw 407,000 visitors who spent around $28.6 million. The site in Kill Devil Hills “encompasses the spot where Wilbur and Orville made their world-changing first flights, the historic sand dune where they did most of their gliding, and the location they lived while they were experimenting in the Outer Banks,” the park service states.

Fort Raleigh National Historic Site is on Roanoke Island and its 275,000 visitors brough in an estimated $19.3 million to the local economy. The site “preserves and interprets the site of the first English Colony in the New World, is the site of the theatrical production, The Lost Colony, and interprets the historical events of the Native Americans, European Americans, and African Americans who lived on Roanoke Island, North Carolina,” according to the park service.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore saw 2.8 million park visitors in 2024 spend an estimated $650 million. This national seashore is roughly 70 miles from north to south and is made up of Bodie, Hatteras and Ocracoke islands. The nation’s first national seashore, Cape Hatteras was established in 1937 “to preserve significant segments of unspoiled barrier islands along North Carolina’s stretch of the Atlantic Coast,” the National Park Service said.

Bryan Burhans is the director of Outer Banks Forever, the official nonprofit partner of three parks, and a branch of Eastern National, a nonprofit that promotes America’s national parks and other public trust partners.

“The National Parks are a money generator. They generate a lot of tourism dollars for the Outer Banks,” he said, but more importantly, these sites are “such an integral part of the fabric that makes up the Outer Banks, which he called “a unique and special place.”

Outer Banks Forever is the official philanthropic partner and does not receive any federal funding. Its work is funded by local businesses, donors, state and county partners, and through various grants. “And our goal is simple. It is to preserve and enhance the visitor experience of our national parks here on the Outer Banks,” Burhans said.

One of the group’s recent projects is the pathway at Cape Hatteras connecting the lighthouse to the beach. It’s in the second phase of the project and is under contract with a company to build a restroom facility with outdoor showers with hot water. “The restroom facility alone is about a $380,000 investment by Outer Banks Forever.”

Cape Lookout National Seashore in Carteret County brought in 552,786 visitors that spent $28.9 million. The site protects a 56-mile stretch of barrier islands where sea turtles and shorebirds nest, a herd of wild horses roam free, and Cape Lookout Lighthouse and two historic villages are a snapshot into the past.

“People come to Cape Lookout National Seashore to recreate at the beach and end up supporting the U.S. and local economies along the way,” said Katherine Cushinberry, the acting superintendent, in a release. “We’re proud that Cape Lookout generates $32 million in revenue to communities near the park.”

Moores Creek National Battlefield is an 88-acre site in Pender County that welcomed 691,000 visitors who spent about $5.4 million. The battlefield preserves the site of a Feb. 27, 1776, Revolutionary War battle. “Loyalist forces charged across a partially dismantled Moores Creek Bridge. Beyond the bridge, nearly 1,000 North Carolina Patriots waited quietly with cannons and muskets poised to fire. This battle marked the last broadsword charge by Scottish Highlanders and the first significant victory for the Patriots in the American Revolution, according to the website.

“The two leading drivers of tourism are natural resources and history. Moores Creek National Battlefield is rich in both,” Greater Topsail Area Chamber of Commerce & Tourism Executive Director Tammy Proctor said in an interview.

“This national park is a treasure that attracts thousands of visitors each year, not only from the Pender County beaches but from the Wilmington area and Brunswick Isles,” she said, adding that the park and its history “had a significant impact on the Revolutionary War. Those fighting for independence from England experienced their first decisive victory at Moores Creek Bridge.”

Moores Creek is a tributary flowing to the Black River and a perfect kayaking location, with a kayak launch at the park. “The creek is pristine and leads to one of the nation’s most pristine rivers. The trails in Moores Creek provide visitors with an experience of the great outdoors and a walk among historical events,” Proctor continued.

“Regarding Moores Creek National Park staff, I can’t say enough about the educational opportunities, programs, and events this staff orchestrates in collaboration with the Friends of Moores Creek Battlefield Association, the nation’s oldest National Park friends organization,” she said.

National Park Service and the shutdown

As of Wednesday, the United States Government had been shut down for three weeks because, according to Oct. 10 post by the National Conference of State Legislatures, on Oct. 1, “lawmakers failed to resolve a budget deadlock, halting some federal operations and putting approximately 750,000 employees on unpaid leave. Triggered by partisan clashes over funding beyond Sept. 30, the shutdown has created uncertainty for many federal programs.”

The National Conference of State Legislatures was created in 1975 by state legislators and legislative staff to provide research, technical assistance and opportunities for policymakers, according to its website.

During a government shutdown, the organization continues, “the administration retains limited spending flexibility by prioritizing funding for programs that the president deems essential for public safety or national security, such as military operations or emergency services.”

As a result, national parks have remained partially open to the public. Many of the sites advise that some services may be limited on their official Facebook page by way of a reshare from the National Park Service dated Oct. 1, with a link to the Department of the Interior’s “Operations in the Absence of Appropriations” that includes the park service’s contingency plan dated September 2025.

Lincoln Larson, an associate professor of parks, recreation and tourism management at North Carolina State University, explained to Coastal Review that during a government shutdown, much of the park staff is furloughed, “meaning they don’t work and aren’t paid but retain their job and benefits when the shutdown ends. Overall, a shutdown presents enormous challenges for park management, members of the public who want to visit parks, and for the park employees themselves.”

In most cases, the decision to close depends on the park itself, but many park managers want to keep their sites as open and accessible to the public as possible. However, that is difficult to do with limited staffing, he continued.

While basic services such as roads and restrooms are usually open, they are not monitored or maintained at the same level as during regular operations, and other services, including visitor centers, entrance kiosks, campgrounds, websites, programming and permitting systems, might not be available at all.

Most National Park Service staff view stewardship of natural and cultural resources as a major part of their job, but when they’re not available to protect and conserve these valuable assets, many threats arise, including the effects of overtourism.

Threats like littering, graffiti, human waste, and off-trail behavior often increases under these conditions, causing irreparable damage to fragile park resources. “We saw this happen during the COVID-19 pandemic, when excessive visitation and limited staffing created unprecedented challenges for parks,” Larson said.

Limited staffing also creates safety issues, particularly if law enforcement or search and rescue operations are negatively impacted, which led to many parks closing during the pandemic because of concerns about degradation in the absence of enforcement. A government shutdown poses similar problems.

Larson said it’s difficult to quantify the broader economic impacts of park closures or service reductions.

“Although a shutdown clearly impacts operations within a park itself, the negative effects outside of parks can take an even greater and longer-lasting toll on nearby communities,” Larson explained. Adding, in many parts of rural America, including eastern North Carolina, national parks are major economic engines that, through outdoor recreation and tourism, power local economies.

“These gateway communities depend on park visitation to survive and thrive. Many park workers also live in communities near the parks, and their salaries breathe life into these towns. When parks shut down, many of these economic benefits are lost, making life much tougher for people living nearby. If shutdowns happen during peak tourism seasons, the economic impacts can be even more devastating and leave a lasting effect on the social and cultural landscape of an area,” Larson said.

The National Park Conservation Association urged in a Sept. 29 letter that the National Park Service close all parks during the shutdown to avoid the damage to infrastructure, vandalism and sanitation issues, like human waste and trash, many of the federally managed parks experienced during the last shutdown that lasted 35 days in December 2018 to January 2019.

“NPCA will not stand by and watch history repeat itself… We know what happened last time park staff were forced to leave parks open and unprotected, and the impacts were disastrous … If the federal government shuts down, unfortunately our parks should too,” NCPA President Theresa Pierno said in a release.

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” The Carteret County native introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series earlier this year on his website, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken in the late 1930s into the early 1950s of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

This is a photograph of Ms. Neva Adams at work in the stitching room at the Morehead City Garment Co. in Morehead City, 1942.

Chartered in the fall of 1938, the “Shirt Factory” was first located on the second floor of a brick building a block from Bogue Sound. At the time, the Great Depression still lingered. Hoping to attract a textile company, the town’s leaders had invested in the space, the machinery, and a training program for workers.

By the time of this photograph, the company, which was started by a couple from Pennsylvania, had moved to a new building across the railroad tracks. The original building was later home to the Webb Memorial Library in downtown Morehead City.

In a way, the company’s arrival in town was an historic event. The work was hard, the hours long and, in its early years, workers were rather scandalously not even paid the legal minimum wage.

Nonetheless, a job at the Shirt Factory offered a singular opportunity for hundreds of women just before, during, and after World War II. For many, it was their first chance to do what used to be called “public work,” a catch-all phrase for any job not in the home or on the farm.

They came from near and far to the Shirt Factory. Scores of women commuted in the back of farm trucks.

Others walked from the Promise Land, the neighborhood of largely fishing families that bordered the Shirt Factory.

Some women even caught rides on the school bus from Salter Path, a fishing village all the way out on Bogue Banks.

Neva Adams, in this photo, resided in Morehead City, probably in the Promise Land. She was already a grandmother when she started working at the Shirt Factory, but she had lost her husband just before the war and was on her own.

For women like her, the Shirt Factory often seemed a godsend. To a large part, that was because of the income, of course.

But over the years, when I have been talking to women who worked at the Shirt Factory back in those days, they have often told me how much it meant to them to be part of a community of women who laughed a lot, shared stories, and supported one another.

Being with those women, they would say, was a balm for grief and loneliness and all the hurts that happen in life.

–2–

This is Ella Pittman, another of the Morehead City Garment Co.’s machine operators, at work in the stitching room in 1942.

Ms. Pittman was just the kind of woman that went to work at the Shirt Factory during the Second World War.

Born on Cedar Island in 1894, she had grown up in that remotest corner of the North Carolina coast long before bridges connected the local villages to the mainland.

Her father, Francis Marion Goodwin, was a fisherman all his life. A passel of Ms. Ella’s brothers, nephews, and cousins worked on the water as well– many of them on menhaden fishing boats.

Old timers still remember her brother, Capt. Leroy Goodwin, who was killed when a tugboat collided with his menhaden boat, the Barnegat, in 1960.

By the time that Ms. Pittman went to work at the Shirt Factory, she had come a long way in her life.

As a girl and young woman on Cedar Island, she had cooked on a wood stove or over a hearth. She had done laundry in a tin wash pot, salted barrels of fish every autumn, and had been unacquainted with electricity and indoor plumbing.

In all likelihood, she grew up helping her mother in a garden resplendent in collard greens, shallots, and sweet potatoes.

She was quite likely already well acquainted with needle and twine before coming to the Shirt Factory. Many a Cedar Island home had two hooks in the family’s kitchen walls, like the ones you might hang a hammock from, but they were put there for stitching fishing nets.

That way the women in the family could work on the family’s fishing nets In between their kitchen chores.

As a young woman, Ms. Ella married Luther Pittman, a Cedar Island fisherman. Like so many other Down East families in that day, they soon left their island home and moved into Beaufort.

When young Ella and Luther moved into town, they settled in Lennoxville, a community largely of fishing families that was actually a few miles east of Beaufort’s town limits.

Many years later, when Ella Pittman went to work at the Shirt Factory, she was probably in her 50s.

She was a mother of four, and she was likely the first woman in her extended family to do “public work” unless one of her daughters or nieces had gotten a wartime job at the Naval Section Base in Morehead City or at the big Marine Corps installation that was being built near Havelock.

The hours and working conditions at the Shirt Factory would seem grueling to many of us today.

However — and while I hate to make broad generalizations, I’m going to do it here anyway — a woman that grew up on Cedar Island in the early 1900s was used to hard work and long hours.

Even so, combining a daily shift at the Shirt Factory with a housewife’s duties could not have been easy.

Working at the Shirt Factory also posed challenges for many of those women that we might not consider today.

When I was younger, for instance, I often spoke with local women, including some of the women in my own family, who had gone from a fishing or farm life to a job at a factory or other public work during World War II.

For some, and especially older women workers, it took some getting used to, and some never did get used to it and did not last long.

Though accustomed to hard work, many said that it was a whole other thing to work by the clock, to be indoors all day, to do repetitive tasks day after day, and to have a boss with the power to tell them what to do, when to do it, when they could take breaks, and all the rest.

By all accounts, the Shirt Factory had a somewhat tumultuous first year.

Convicted on 25 counts of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, including a failure to pay the minimum wage of 25 cents an hour, the company closed temporarily in May 1939. I am not sure how long the factory was idle, but the closure left more than 300 workers without a paycheck for a time.

Later in the 1940s, the company was also the scene of a bitter union drive.

During the union drive, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the company’s owners had violated the National Labor Relations Act by firing pro-union activists and intimidating workers prior to the union election. A copy of the ruling is online.

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During the Second World War, a considerable part of the company’s production was for the United States Government, including in 1941, a $25,000 contract for military-issue khaki shirts, according to a March 15, 1914, report in the Asheville Times.

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Here we get a more expansive view of the women in the company’s stitching room.

In my younger days, I had several elderly cousins and a great-uncle who had retired from long careers at the Shirt Factory.

I remember that when my cousins, all women, reminisced about their days at the Shirt Factory, they talked mainly about their friends there. They spoke of the feeling of sisterhood at the plant.

Long after they retired, they remained close to those women.

I did not get as much chance to be around my great-uncle Leo Simpson, and I don’t remember him speaking of the Shirt Factory, though he must have. He was married to my grandmother’s sister, Hilda.

However, I know that Great-Uncle Leo began working at the Shirt Factory in the late 1930s, soon after it first opened. For most of his career, he was the head of the factory’s cutting room.

My wonderful cousin Doug, one of Leo and Hilda’s sons, believes that his father likely met the company’s owners while he was helping to build the company’s new factory building in 1939 or ’40.

Doug was around the Shirt Factory from the time he was a small child. And when he got a little older, he had summer jobs there, before he went off and became a distinguished college professor and a leading authority on the great American educational philosopher John Dewey.

When I talked with Doug the other day, he recalled the company’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, as being “kind, gracious people.”

He told me that Mrs. Jackson worked alongside her husband at the factory. She was, he said, a tall, imposing woman who always dressed very nicely.

Cousin Doug was not around her husband as much, but he did remember Mr. Jackson’s fierce anti-unionism.

On the other hand, he also recalled Mr. Jackson’s support for racial integration and his commitment to employing African Americans throughout the Shirt Factory. Such a policy was very out of keeping with the region’s other textile plants, and it was apparently controversial in Morehead City when first implemented at the Shirt Factory.

Judging from these photographs, the Shirt Factory had not yet opened its stitching room’s doors to Black women in 1942.

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In this last photograph from the Shirt Factory’s stitching room, we meet an 18-year-old machine operator named Annie Grace Benton, about whom I also did a bit of research on her background.

I discovered that, in a way, young Ms. Benton represented another kind of woman that was drawn to wartime jobs such as those at the Shirt Factory.

According to my research, she had grown up on a farm in Seven Springs, a rural hamlet 90 miles west of Morehead City.

She had evidently just left home for the first time.

For many young women such as her, a job at the Shirt Factory meant a chance to help their families. Many a time, their wages might even have helped keep their family’s farm afloat or enabled a younger brother or sister to go to college.

For many of the young women, the Shirt Factory and other public jobs were also an opportunity to put the Great Depression behind them and to free themselves from the provincialism of farm life, and most especially from the limited roles for women that had historically existed in the farming communities of eastern North Carolina.

Military boom towns such as Morehead City were particularly exciting during World War II. The town was bustling with a Naval section base that operated there, and Army patrols were in and out constantly.

A busy USO and other local businesses catered to servicemen and women on leave from the many military installations, army outposts, and airfields that were being built on that part of the North Carolina coast in the early part of the war.

The largest were the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, originally Cunningham Field, in Havelock and Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville.

Boardinghouses had sprung up all over Morehead City to cater to military wives and girlfriends, as well as to young farm women like Annie Grace Benton who were away from home for the first time.

Wherever Ms. Benton lived in Morehead City, probably in a boardinghouse, she was also around legions of other young women who had moved from other parts of the country to fill jobs at Cherry Point.

Those women were no ordinary lot either. At Cherry Point, they ranged from aircraft painters to flight instructors, jobs for which women, because so many men were overseas, were welcome for the first time.

Not only did many farm women, including, presumably Ms. Benton, welcome the financial independence offered by that kind of “public work,” but many also relished the liberty of being someplace where everyone did not know them, and the excitement of being liberated, however briefly, from the old mores — economic, social, and sexual — that governed women’s lives back home.

-End-

Post has been updated.

The nor’easter that swept up the East Coast this past weekend stripped ocean beaches of sand, inundated areas with floodwaters and pushed seawater over dunes and roads along North Carolina’s coast.

The Outer Banks suffered much of the brunt of the powerful system that brought wind, rain and coastal flooding.

On Saturday the North Carolina Department of Transportation closed sections of N.C. 12 on Ocracoke. Overwash forced officials to close portions of the road Sunday on Hatteras Island, where crews spent the weekend pushing sand and water from the road and rebuilding the dune line that divides the beach from the road.

As of late afternoon Tuesday, N.C. 12 on Ocracoke was the only road closed and the Hatteras-Ocracoke Ferry service remained suspended, NCDOT’s Assistant Director of Communications Jamie Kritzer said in an interview.

N.C. 12 is closed on the north end of Ocracoke Island between the ferry terminal and the National Park Service Pony Pens.

“This afternoon, we’ve been forced to close N.C. 12 again on Pea Island from Marc Basnight Bridge to Rodanthe, due to ocean overwash,” Kritzer said. “The stretch on Pea Island was reopened at 5 p.m. (Monday) but the wind increased this afternoon and we saw overwash around high tide.”

Kritzer said that NCDOT crews were continuing to push sand and water from N.C. 12 and restore the protective dunes on both islands.

“Our ability to reopen N.C. 12 will depend on whether the dune holds through the next high tide cycle,” he said.

In addition to NCDOT’s highway crews, the state’s Ferry Division played a critical role during the response to this weekend’s nor’easter, Kritzer said.

“At one point, all seven ferry routes were suspended this weekend. However, when the winds subsided, the ferries were able to make a special run to take Ocracoke visitors back to Swan Quarter,” he said. “The Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry have helped transport highway crews and equipment between Hatteras and Ocracoke, so the crews could work on clearing N.C. 12.”

Cape Hatteras National Seashore Superintendent Dave Hallac told Coastal Review early Tuesday afternoon that there has been a lot of coastal erosion in certain areas of the national seashore.

At the time of the interview, the National Weather Service forecast much of the Outer Banks to experience flooding through Wednesday. Hallac said that he expects oceanfront flooding as a result, which could make driving on the highway through the seashore hazardous.

“The beaches continue to remain hazardous, especially the beachfront in the Buxton area and the beachfront in the Rodanthe area due to the waves and high-water levels battering many threatened oceanfront structures,” he said.

Between Sept. 30 and Oct. 2, eight unoccupied beachfront houses fell in Buxton, five of which collapsed within 45 minutes of each other. Another unoccupied house gave way on Oct. 3 in Buxton, bringing the total number of houses that have succumbed to encroaching ocean waters to 21 within the past five years.

As of Oct. 3, nine homes on Hatteras Island have toppled into the sea, “but there are a number of significantly threatened oceanfront structures, and you know, collapse is definitely possible,” Hallac said. “Even if collapse doesn’t occur, pieces and parts of those homes have broken off over the last couple of days, including large structures like decks. So that’s the reason that the entire beach front in the village of Buxton remains closed.”

He recommended travelers avoid taking N.C. 12 during the high-tide window, adding that there’s a likelihood of some minor soundside flooding as the winds are switching more to the north and northwest.

“That could also make some of our access points on the sound side flooded, and also make highway driving hazardous,” he said.

Conditions were less dire further south along the state’s coast.

Carteret County’s Public Information Officer Nick Wilson said that the county didn’t see any significant damage from last weekend’s coastal low.

“Most of the impacts were primarily in the Down East,” he said, where some roads in Cedar Island and a few other areas experienced overwash.

“A couple of our convenience sites were closed on Sunday for safety but were back to normal on Monday,” he continued. “There haven’t been any reports of building damage or injuries. The high tides over the weekend, combined with king tide conditions, did cause some flooding in low-lying spots, but it quickly receded once the low passed.”

Carteret County Shore Protection Manager Ryan Davenport said Wednesday morning that Most of Bogue Banks fared well during the recent storm.

“We did see moderate erosion and some dune escarpments in western Pine Knoll Shores, Indian Beach, and Salter Path, but the impacts were no worse than what we typically expect from a winter storm. We remain on track for the island-wide nourishment project scheduled to begin in fall 2026,” he said.

Town officials from North Topsail Beach in Onslow County to Holden Beach in Brunswick County reported experiencing some erosion and escarpment.

North Topsail Beach officials assessed the town’s little more than 11-mile stretch of ocean shoreline throughout Monday and found most erosion to have occurred along the northern end of town toward New River Inlet.

“We noticed our typical hotspots had erosion,” North Topsail’s Town Manager Alice Derian said Tuesday. “There’s some escarpment there. There was some scarping south, but the dunes are still intact.”

All of the town’s public accesses remain open.

Topsail Beach’s ocean shoreline “held up well except at the very south end,” Topsail Island Shoreline Protection Commission Chair William Snyder said.

He said that there is some escarpment to the natural dunes that front a portion of the undeveloped southern tip of the island.

New Hanover County Coastal Protection Coordinator Bryan Hall said in an email Tuesday afternoon that Wrightsville, Carolina and Kure beaches all experienced some erosion over the weekend. Wrightsville Beach’s ocean shoreline also suffered some escarpments.

“As far as I’m aware, there was no significant public or private infrastructure damage or significant established dune damage, which is a testament to the well-established dunes and the County’s Coastal Storm Risk Management (CSRM) projects,” Hall said.

Officials in Brunswick County beach towns that responded to Coastal Review’s requests for comments also reported minor erosion, including Bald Head Island and Oak Island.

“Honestly, I think we fared pretty well,” Ocean Isle Beach Town Manager Justin Whiteside said Tuesday afternoon.

One end of a privately maintained road that runs through a gated neighborhood at the eastern tip of the island has been partially eaten away.

Whiteside said roughly half of the cul-de-sac within The Pointe, a relatively new development of luxury homes, is gone.

“They’re sandbagging around the perimeter of where the cul-de-sac was,” he said.

“There have not been any reports to us of damage besides some flooding caused by tides and winds,” Holden Beach Town Manager Bryan Chadwick said in an email Tuesday afternoon. “We do feel fortunate because it could have been a lot worse.”

Storm recap

Warning Coordination Meteorologist Erik Heden with the National Weather Service office in the Newport/Morehead City office said that with this last storm, “we wanted to make sure people knew that despite it not having a name,” nor’easters can produce the same winds, flooding and rain as hurricanes.

There have been multiple offshore storms that have beaten and battered areas of the state’s coastline, particularly the Outer Banks, where N.C. 12 on Ocracoke and Hatteras islands has been closed for most of the last few days and Down East Carteret County has experienced high-water levels.

There was also a king tide, which means at certain times of the year the tides come in higher and go out lower than normal, that began early last week, leading to some flooding, which was not storm related, in Beaufort, Buxton and other spots on the Outer Banks, Heden said.

The combination of higher water levels with a king tide, a storm with gale-force winds, large waves and swells, and 3 to 4 inches of rain made everything worse, especially in low lying areas, he said.

Flooding occurred up the Neuse and the Pamlico rivers, pushing water levels in New Bern to their highest since Hurricane Ophelia in 2023.

Down East Carteret County had a “tremendous amount of water on the roads,” but nothing they haven’t experienced before, Heden said. The Outer Banks experienced significant ocean overwash, especially at the March Basnight Bridge southward to the Pea Island Visitor Center, where the man-made dunes are built.

Heden said that while the coast will experience slow improvements and fall temperatures the remainder of this week, some areas will continue to experience issues with water, especially at high tide.

“Today’s Tuesday, and we’ve got this advisory through Thursday, so it’s not going to be worse than it was this weekend. We don’t have the wind, we don’t have the swell, but it takes a while for that water to calm down,” he said.

Featured Image

Barbara Johnson of Morehead City carries a pumpkin Thursday across the grounds of First Presbyterian Church, 1604 Arendell St., Morehead City. Held every October, the fundraising event that benefits the children and youth ministry program is 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday until Oct. 31. Photo: Dylan Ray.

Though not producer in the country, more than 30 million pounds of pumpkins are grown each year in North Carolina. In 2023, more than $18.2 million worth of pumpkins were sold in the state. A symbol of fall, “Pumpkin is a winter squash that is usually considered a vegetable. However, pumpkin is technically a fruit. It is grown from a flower and contains seeds,” according to the N.C. Cooperative Extension.

More than $4.6 million will go to coastal conservation efforts such as property acquisition and living shoreline projects out of $36 million in statewide grants through North Carolina Land and Water Fund, the state announced earlier this week.

The fund gets appropriations from the N.C. General Assembly to support projects by local governments, state agencies, and nonprofit organizations that restore and protect the state’s natural and cultural resources.

“North Carolina is home to remarkable natural beauty,” Gov. Josh Stein said in a release. “These grants will help preserve that beauty.” 

These projects, which “will support North Carolina’s $28 billion outdoor recreation economy,” are broken up into four types: acquisition, stormwater, planning and restoration, the North Carolina Department of Natural and Coastal Resources said in the announcement.

Property acquisition projects selected for the coast are:

• $1.57 million to Kill Devil Hills for land at Nags Head Woods.
• $1.06 million to North Carolina Coastal Land Trust for land at Powells Point on the Albemarle Sound.
• $1.27 million to the town of Leland for the Silver Timber Tract – Nature Park.
• $752,000 to the North Carolina Coastal Federation for land in Carteret and Onslow counties.
• $3.5 million to Unique Places to Save for the St. James — Boiling Spring Lakes Wetland Complex, however this is a provisional award and depends on if the funds are available before July 1, 2026.
• $335,000 to The Nature Conservancy for land in Onslow and Pender counties. One of the three awards is provisional as well.

In addition to property acquisition, the Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, has been selected for just shy of $1 million for the following projects:

• An update to the Oyster Blueprint for Action Restoration and Protection Plan.
• A stormwater plan for the Ocean City Jazz Festival site on Topsail Island.
• The second phase of a living shoreline for Jockey’s Ridge State Park.
• A living shorelines cost-share program.

Sound Rivers Inc. has been awarded $243,200 for a stormwater wetland education site in Craven County and nearly $30,000 for a watershed plan for a section of Slocum Creek.

A North Carolina State University-sponsored program in Onslow County has been awarded $234,241 for a stormwater infrastructure maintenance robot.

New Hanover County has a $75,000 grant for a Pages Creek feasibility plan.

A statewide list is available online.

Previously the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, the fund was put in place in 1996 to protect the state’s drinking water sources. The General Assembly expanded the fund’s mission to include conserving and protecting natural resources, cultural heritage and military installations.

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” He introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series in early August, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken between 1937 and 1951 of the state’s farms, industries, and working people. More of the series can be found on his website.

Like all the photographs in this “Working Lives” series, these next few photographs are also from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives.

However, this set of photographs is more personal for me than most of the other photographs that I have featured here: they were taken at my great-uncle George Ball and his brother Raymond Ball’s potato farm in Harlowe.

Uncle George, as my mother called him, was married to my grandfather’s sister Lizette. Their farm was on one side of the Harlowe Canal, while my grandfather and grandmother’s farm was on the other.

These photographs were taken in November 1942. In this first one, Mr. Raymond is standing on the left in front of a wall of bushel baskets. This is evidently the farm’s curing barn and the baskets are full of sweet potatoes.

According to the photographer’s notes, the other individual is J.Y. Lassiter, who I believe was a county farm agent.

-2-

Here we see two young African American men harvesting sweet potatoes at the Ball brothers’ farm in Harlowe, November 1942.

Old timers have told me that 300 to 350 men, women, and children worked for the Ball brothers at harvest time back in those days.

Most were local people, the large majority of them African American families that resided on the west side of Clubfoot Creek.

The Balls sometimes hired migrant laborers from Florida as well. When I was young, you could still see the ruins of the barracks where they stayed.

During the war, when these photographs were taken, Great-Uncle George and his brother also employed German prisoners of war.

My mother sometimes worked in the farm’s packing shed when she was a girl. She often told me about working alongside the young German men.

Harvesting sweet potatoes was no easy thing, and I have met farm people that would rather do just about anything else.

-3-

The Ball brothers were what in those days were called “progressive farmers.”

According to an article that was published in Carolina Co-operator magazine in August 1939, the Balls first invested in a tractor, an International Harvester Titan 10-20, in 1919.

In a family reminiscence, I learned that the tractor had a top speed of 3.5 miles per hour and made so much noise that locals looked at the “IHC” painted on the front, for International Harvester Co., and said it stood for “In Hell Continuously.”

The Balls were evidently the first farmers in Carteret County to own a tractor.

They were also at the forefront of other local innovations in farming that were transforming agriculture in the first half of the 20th century.

According to the Carolina Co-operator, they were among the county’s first farmers to use manufactured lime to fertilize reclaimed land, instead of burnt oyster shells and hardwood.

Similarly, they were among the first local farmers to build a modern irrigation system, to practice crop rotation, and to invest in farm machinery such as an oil burner for their curing barn and an automatic hay bailer.

By the time of this photograph, they had upgraded their tractor to a big 3-ton machine, but it is nowhere to be seen in these photographs. All we see in them are plow horses and field workers.

In the second photograph above, and in our next photograph, we see plowmen breaking up the ground, then other field hands, called diggers, following behind, often on their hands and knees.

They are digging the sweet potatoes out of the upturned ground by hand, cleaning them off, and placing them in bushel baskets.

-4-

This is another view of the sweet potato harvest at the Ball brothers’ farm in Harlowe, November 1942.

According to the article in Carolina Co-operator, the Ball brothers only grew three crops: white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cabbage.

After the harvest, the Balls cured their sweet potato crop for several months. Then, late in the winter and early in the spring, they trucked the crop to markets in Petersburg, Richmond, and Washington, D.C.

Some years ago, near the end of his life, I sat down with my great-uncle George’s son Billy Ball and talked about his family’s history on that land.

Cousin Billy told me that his father George Ball, his uncle Raymond, and two of their brothers had bought almost 350 acres there on the north side of the Harlowe Canal on credit in 1917.

It was an abandoned farm that had grown up in sweet gum and pine. Before that time, the Balls had been living in South River, a little to the east.

At that time, only 15 acres of the abandoned farm remained cleared. The Ball brothers built makeshift shelters for themselves and their mules, and they, and presumably a great many Black men from North Harlowe, began timbering, grubbing, and clearing the land.

The Balls didn’t make much money farming at first, but they sold the timber to make the payments on their bank loan.

George and Raymond’s two brothers eventually left the farm. Billy told me that it was too hard for them and they wanted a different kind of life.

Billy told me about the days when hundreds of people worked in the fields.  He recalled that his father and Mr. Raymond took trucks to North Harlowe to pick up the workers, then carried them home in the evening.

He remembered the men and women from North Harlowe bringing their lunches in lard pails, often just collard greens and corn dumplings.

-5-

In this photograph, we see my great-uncle George Ball paying one of his harvest workers in scrip.

According to the photographer’s notes, my great-uncle and his brother paid their field workers 5 cents a bushel.

I do not know how or when the field workers redeemed the scrip.  Perhaps they exchanged it for cash at the end of every workday or work week, or even after the harvest was completed.

Before the war, many of my family’s African American neighbors had few other options other than working in the fields.

By the end of 1942, when these photographs were taken, that was beginning to change largely because of the construction of the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station 11 miles to the west.

Thousands of civilians, of all races, found jobs at Cherry Point. To try to compete with the federal dollars, farm wages would have to go up, and many a white farmer that failed to treat his or her black workers with the respect or dignity to which they were entitled soon found themselves short on labor.

-End-

Featured Image

Storm swell associated with Hurricane Imelda and Hurricane Humberto breaks Tuesday along the Bogue Banks shore at Oceanana Fishing Pier in Atlantic Beach. The storm, while moving away from the U.S. Tuesday, still packed a potent punch, forecasters said, and could bring possible minor flooding in areas of onshore winds along the coast in the Southeast. At 11 a.m. Tuesday, the storm was moving to the northeast, toward near Bermuda, but swells and high surf from Imelda and Hurricane Humberto were expected to produce dangerous marine conditions and rip currents along much of the East Coast for several days. Farther north, the N.C. Department of Transportation on Tuesday closed N.C. 12 on the north end of Ocracoke Island between the National Park Service Pony Pens and the ferry terminal due to deteriorating travel conditions and five oceanfront houses collapsed on Hatteras Island. Photo: Dylan Ray

NEWPORT — Duke Energy Foundation has awarded the North Carolina Coastal Federation, based here, a $50,000 grant as part of its effort to support local conservation efforts and environmental impact programs across North Carolina.

The nonprofit organization founded in 1982 works toward and advocates for clean coastal waters, abundant salt marshes, thriving oysters, effective coastal management, and a coast that is free of marine debris. The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

“North Carolina’s natural surroundings are an asset to our communities, our residents and our economic growth,” said Kendal Bowman, Duke Energy’s North Carolina state president. “We’re proud to work alongside local nonprofits to promote our state’s natural resources and build communities that are great places to live, work and play.”

The money will be used to support the Coastal Federation’s new Coastal Leadership Institute, a six-month-long program designed to strengthen leadership across North Carolina’s coastal communities. Led by the Coastal Federation, the institute will “bring together a diverse cohort of emerging and established leaders to explore the complex issues shaping our coast through six monthly sessions exploring topics including applied coastal sciences, growth and economic development, natural resource conservation and restoration, disaster preparedness and resilience planning, and coastal policy and management,” according to the announcement.

The institute is set to launch in 2026 in Carteret County.

Duke Energy Foundation has provided grants totaling $6.6 million to support environmental impact programs across North Carolina over the past five years.

For more information visit the Duke Energy Foundation website.

To learn more about the Coastal Federation, visit nccoast.org.

SEA LEVEL — James “Marc” Hamric, 52, of Atlantic Beach, drowned Wednesday while collecting water samples in Turnagain Bay, the Carteret County Sheriff’s Office reported after responding to the emergency.

The sheriff’s office said at the time of the announcement that no foul play is suspected, but local law enforcement is actively investigating the incident in cooperation with the North Carolina Marine Patrol and the local medical examiner’s office.

While Hamric was collecting water samples, the boat he and his colleagues were working from began to drift away. Hamric reportedly began swimming while wearing waders and went underwater while trying to reach the vessel. He was recovered from the water within minutes by his colleagues, who began CPR, officials said.

County deputies and officers with N.C. Marine Patrol and N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission officers and emergency responders arrived on scene shortly after, but lifesaving efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, officials said.

Hamric had been a marine fisheries technician for 20 years based in the division’s headquarters in Morehead City. He handled local data collection for commercial fishery and field sampling programs while maintaining boats and equipment, according to the division. He was recognized in 2024 with the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality Distinguished Employee Award.

Researchers found in a recent study that, over the long term, bulkhead structures have a “significant negative effect” on marsh habitat size.

Using high-resolution imagery from 1981 of Carteret County’s Bogue and Back sounds and Newport and North rivers, the team measured the marsh extent, or total marsh area, at 45 sites with bulkheads and 45 natural sites, or those without the type of hardened structure. The 1981 measurements were then compared to the data from images collected in 1992, 2006 and 2013 of the same 90 sites.

The study found that all 45 bulkhead sites experienced marsh shoreline erosion during the 32-year study period, with complete marsh loss at 11% of the sites with bulkheads. More than 80% of the 45 natural marsh control sites experienced shoreline erosion, but at seven sites, around 15%, the marsh shoreline accreted waterward. None of the control sites experienced complete marsh loss.

“Our study found bulkheads nearly tripled the rate of marsh loss over a 32-year period. All of the 45 marshes we studied in front of a bulkhead got smaller or disappeared entirely,” Principal investigator Brandon Puckett explained to Coastal Review.

Puckett is a research marine biologist for the Coastal Resilience, Restoration and Assessment Branch in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, which partnered with Duke University and North Carolina Division of Coastal Management on the study.

“At the 45 natural marsh sites without bulkheads, the story was different. While many of them also eroded, more than a third actually held their ground or even grew by migrating inland into upland habitat. Bulkheads prevent marsh migration leading to a process known as ‘coastal squeeze’ whereby the marshes are not only eroding at the front edge, but are also blocked from migrating upland,” the Beaufort-based scientist said.

The study, “Bulkheads Reduce Salt Marsh Extent: A Multidecadal Assessment Using Remote Sensing,” was published this summer in the nonprofit Coastal Education and Research Foundation’s Journal of Coastal Research.

“Think of it this way,” Puckett continued. “Over the 32 years of our study — close to the length of a mortgage — the average marsh in front of a bulkhead lost about 15 feet of width. A natural marsh, on the other hand, lost only about 5 feet of width on average, because it could often make up for erosion by migrating upland.”

Of Carteret County’s 1,530 miles of estuarine shoreline, salt marsh accounts for about 1,270 miles, roughly 87 miles is hardened with bulkheads, and the remaining 11% is a different shoreline type or hardened structure other than bulkheads, like riprap.

The Division of Coastal Management, which is under the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, calls bulkheads the “most commonly used estuarine shoreline stabilization method” in the state “but could have deleterious impacts on the marsh habitats where they are being constructed.”

Factors contributing to the deterioration of salt marsh habitats include sea level rise and coastal development, which often result in hardened shoreline stabilization structures like bulkheads or seawalls constructed to protect against coastal hazards such as erosion, flooding and subsequent property damage, according to the study. “Concurrently, the many ecosystem services salt marshes provide, such as storm surge protection, carbon sequestration, improved water quality, and nursery habitat, are also diminishing.”

Authors state that the study is intended to offer a better understanding of how hardened shorelines like bulkheads “can have a significant negative effect on marsh extent through increased erosion of the waterward edge and prevention of landward migration with” sea level rise.

Why look at bulkheads and marsh loss?

Puckett told Coastal Review that the team decided to pursue the study after they realized they were “watching two powerful trends collide: the decline of essential marsh habitats and the increase in shoreline armoring,” provoking the question “’Is the solution to one shoreline erosion (bulkheads) actually making the other problem — marsh loss — worse?’”

He noted that scientists have long suspected that the hardened structures harm marshes but there wasn’t a lot of long-term data demonstrating these impacts. “We wanted to look back in time to objectively compare the long-term rates of change in marsh loss in locations with and without shoreline armoring.”

To get what Puckett called a “fair, apples-to-apples comparison,” the team “essentially became historical detectives” using the old aerial photographs, which were taken around low tide, when marsh shorelines were most visible. The study area was chosen because the historic aerial imagery was available.

They pored over the 1981 photos to find 45 locations where a fringe of salt marsh already existed with a bulkhead behind it. Then, for each of those 45 bulkhead sites, they located a nearby natural marsh without a bulkhead.

“We were careful to select control sites that were exposed to similar wave and wind conditions so that we were comparing like with like,” Puckett continued. “We meticulously traced the waterward and landward edges of the marsh at each site for each of the four imagery sets. By comparing these digital outlines over time, we could precisely measure both the erosion at the front of the marsh and its migration (or lack thereof) at the back.”

One of the more striking surprises from the study, Puckett said, is that the negative effects of bulkheads are almost invisible over shorter time spans.

“When we analyzed the data in smaller chunks — say, over a seven- to 14-year period — the difference in erosion rates between the bulkhead and natural sites wasn’t statistically significant. It was only by looking across the entire 32-year period that the dramatic, long-term impact became undeniable,” he said. It’s a true ‘death by a thousand cuts,’ and it tells us that short-term assessments can easily miss the entire story.”

The discovery also raises a new question about what’s driving erosion.

“We found that the fastest erosion rates occurred between 2006 and 2013, the period during our study with the highest rate of relative sea-level rise,” he said, “but not the stormiest from a tropical storm and hurricane perspective. This suggests that the constant, daily pressure of higher water levels might be a more powerful force in eating away at marsh edges than the occasional big storm, which challenges some common assumptions.”

‘Study is unique’

Authors state that this study is “the first to investigate the long-term impacts of structures on loss of marsh extent and provide useful information for better understanding the effects of shoreline hardening on salt marsh ecosystems,” which Puckett expounded on for Coastal Review.

“This study is unique for a few key reasons,” Puckett said. “Conceptually, we’ve known that bulkheads can expedite loss of marsh through reflecting wave energy and preventing migration, but this is one of the first studies to provide empirical evidence to support our conceptual understanding.”

The study analyzes more than 30 years of data, enabling the team to illustrate the slow, cumulative impacts that shorter studies could miss. “Environmental changes often don’t happen overnight, and this long-term view is critical,” he continued.

The research specifically focuses on what happens to the existing marsh that is left in front of a bulkhead, as well.

“Many people might think that as long as you leave some marsh, you’re preserving its function. Our work shows that while this may be true in the short-term, this leftover fringe marsh is often living on borrowed time because it can’t easily adapt to rising seas,” Puckett said.

And lastly, the team didn’t just measure erosion at the water’s edge, but also measured the movement of the landward boundary.

“This allowed us to calculate the net change in marsh area and definitively show that preventing landward migration is a critical factor that turns a shoreline erosion problem into a catastrophic loss of habitat. It’s this comprehensive look at both sides of the marsh over such a long period that is a unique component of this research,” he said.

Though disheartening, Puckett said it’s crucial to know that “this isn’t just a story about loss. It’s also a story about resilience and hope. The ‘good news’ from our study is that where marshes had space to move, they did.”

In the 45 natural sites studied, more than a third of the marshes were stable or even grew by migrating into upland habitats, both proving that marshes are naturally resilient and can adapt if given the room and pointing to a path forward to help address marsh erosion and migration.

“First, to combat erosion at the water’s edge, we can use living shorelines. Instead of hard walls, these solutions use natural materials like oyster reefs and native plants to slow wave energy while maintaining the vital intertidal connection between land and water. This helps preserve the marsh’s front edge. However, a marsh still may need room to move inland to adapt to sea-level rise,” Puckett said.

And a “second, equally critical part of the solution is to protect marsh migration corridors through land-use planning and conservation,” he added.

The corridors are undeveloped land set aside to allow marshes to move upland to survive rather than drowning in place.

“It is the combination of using living shorelines to reduce erosion and allowing for landward migration that can reduce the effects of coastal squeeze. We have a chance now to help protect our salt marshes that are the nurseries for our fisheries, our buffer from storm surge, and our natural water cleansers,” Puckett said.

Donate your flounder carcass and you could win a prize.

The N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries will collect flounder carcasses from recreational anglers during the season, which runs Sept. 1-14 this year, for research purposes.

Anyone who donates their flounder carcass and fully completes the required catch-card will be entered to win one of two rod and reel combinations.

Cards and donation supplies are available at year-round donation sites in the following locations:

• Frisco Rod & Gun, Frisco.
• Jennette’s Pier, Nags Head.
• Eastside Bait & Tackle, Washington.
• Cape Pointe Marina, Harkers Island.
• N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries Headquarters, Morehead City.
• Tex’s Tackle, Wilmington.
• Clem’s Seafood, Southport.

Additional temporary donation locations have been established at the following:

• Quarter Deck, 503 Carteret St., Bath.
• Chasin Tails Outdoors Bait & Tackle, 709 Atlantic Beach Causeway, Atlantic Beach.
• Pelagic Hunter, 104 James St., Sneads Ferry.
• Intracoastal Angler, 6332 Oleander Drive, Wilmington.
• Carolina Beach Municipal Docks, Carl Winner Drive, Carolina Beach.
• Ocean Isle Fishing Center, 65 Causeway Drive, Ocean Isle Beach.

Anglers are asked to leave the fish head and tail intact when cleaning and, if possible, the guts/reproductive organs. Fishers on charter or head boats should let the fish cleaner know the carcass will be donated.

The division’s biologist measure each fish, determine the sex of each when possible, and remove the otoliths, or ear bones, to determine the age of each fish. This information will used in future flounder stock assessments.

Recreational flounder season opens this year at 12:01 a.m. Sept. 1 and closes at 11:59 p.m. Sept. 14. There is a one fish per one person per day limit through the season and the size limit is 15 inches total length.

Biologists will gather data from commercially caught flounder at fish houses. Carcasses caught by commercial fishers should not be left in the Carcass Collection Program freezers.

For more information, visit the Carcass Collection Program website or contact Amanda Macek, division sportfishing specialist, at 252 515-5537 or amanda.macek@deq.nc.gov.

MOREHEAD CITY – The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management has awarded more than $2.25 million in grants to fund 10 projects to expand and improve public access to beaches and coastal waterways.

The grants, awarded through the Public Beach and Coastal Waterfront Access Grant Program, will help local governments in the 20 coastal counties acquire land for public access sites and build or improve amenities such as dune crossovers, fishing piers, parking areas, restrooms and kayak launches.

“These state investments will both ensure safe and expanded public access to our coastlines and strengthen the resilience of our communities by supporting infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather,” said DEQ Secretary Reid Wilson in a news release announcing the awards. “As we face increasingly severe storms, these projects will play a key role in safeguarding both public safety and the long-term health of our coastal environments.”

The division on Thursday announced the following awards:

• Atlantic Beach in Carteret County is awarded $115,200 for improvements to the New Bern Street Public Access. The work will entail removing the existing dune crossover and rebuilding 381 feet of the walkway with treated wood, Trex decking and handrails to provide access to the Atlantic Ocean.
• Beaufort in Carteret County is awarded $120,000 for an Ann Street Park water access project. The work will create an access site at the west end of Ann Street featuring an observation deck, greenspace, a picnic area and rain gardens while preserving existing open vistas and improving stormwater drainage.
• Belhaven in Beaufort County is awarded $540,000 for its Harbor Park expansion, which involves acquiring 0.74 acres. Recent site improvements include a new bulkhead and a 200-foot dock.
• Bertie County is awarded $80,000 for the second phase of the Tall Glass of Water Beach Access enhancement and will provide safe, maintenance-free access to the beach by providing a solid surface, accessible 12-foot by 440-foot path to meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements and expanding the existing public beach by planting vegetation to stabilize the base of the bluff.
• Cedar Point in Carteret County is awarded $305,000 for the second phase of the Boathouse Creek Park bathroom facility project. The project is to add three ADA-accessible bathrooms and associated accessible parking to support and enhance usage of the town’s existing water access site at Boathouse Creek Park.
• Nags Head in Dare County is awarded $400,000 to replace the bathhouse and dune walkover at its Hargrove Street Public Beach Access. The project will also remove and replace existing decking, the emergency vehicle ramp, all wooden stairs and walkways, trash cans, fencing, three shower stations and signage.
• New Hanover County is awarded $265,000 to install a new kayak launch, ADA parking, and an ADA sidewalk to the existing pier, along with additional signage at the Trails End Waterfront Access. The work will be completed concurrently with bulkhead repairs.
• Ocean Isle Beach in Brunswick County is awarded $82,500 to replace a non-ADA-compliant dune crossover at the Shallotte Boulevard Beach Access. The new access will be widened to 8 feet and made to comply with ADA requirements. The stairs will be replaced with wheelchair-accessible ramps.
• Swansboro in Onslow County is awarded $127,623 to demolish the Main Street Dock, rebuild an existing pedestrian, fishing, and dinghy day dock at the end of Main Street, along the downtown waterfront area south of the White Oak River Bridge. The new docks will be built within the footprint of the existing facility.
• Vandemere in Pamlico County is awarded $167,700 to build an ADA-compliant fishing pier about 80 to 100 feet long and 9 feet wide. It will be located at the end of North First Street and provide access to the Pamlico River.

The North Carolina General Assembly created the Public Beach and Coastal Waterfront Access Program in 1981 in response to concerns over declining public access by amending the Coastal Area Management Act, also known as CAMA.

The program was expanded in 1983 to include estuarine areas. The program uses 5% of state Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, or PARTF, annual funds to offer matching grants to local governments. It has supported more than 528 projects, enhancing public access for recreation and coastal enjoyment.

For more information about the program, go to the Public Beach and Coastal Waterfront Access website.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation is gearing up for its annual Pelican Awards ceremony and Taste of the Coast Celebration taking place the evening of Sept. 20 in Morehead City.

The Pelican Awards recognize and celebrate the individuals, organizations, businesses and partners who have made significant contributions to the North Carolina coast.

A light wine and cheese social will begin at 5 p.m. followed by the ceremony at 5:30 p.m. Being held at no charge in Joslyn Hall on the campus of Carteret Community College, registration is required because of limited seating.

The 2025 Taste of the Coast Celebration is to follow in the nearby Crystal Coast Civic Center. Doors open at 6 p.m. for drinks on the patio and the celebration starts at 6:30 p.m. where there will be live music, a silent auction, wine, beer and seafood pairings, both raw and steamed oysters, and more.

Attendees can peek at the online auction items using this link before the event.

Tickets, which can be purchased online, are $75 for the organization’s members and $85 for nonmembers.

The Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, is a member-supported nonprofit organization with offices in Wanchese, Newport and Wrightsville Beach that is dedicated to preserving and protecting the state’s coast.

To support either the Pelican Awards or Taste of the Coast as a sponsor, oyster grower, or donate to to the silent auction, contact the Coastal Federation’s Business Engagement Director Catherine Snead at catherines@nccoast.org.

Update 4:30 p.m. Tuesday:

Gov. Josh Stein declared a State of Emergency Tuesday ahead of the anticipated impacts from Hurricane Erin, which was about 650 miles south-southeast of Cape Hatteras and moving at 10 mph at around 2 p.m. Tuesday.

“Hurricane Erin will bring threats of coastal flooding, beach erosion, and dangerous surf conditions,” Stein said in a statement. “North Carolinians along the coast should get prepared now, ensure their emergency kit is ready, and listen to local emergency guidelines and alerts in the event they need to evacuate.” 

Original post 6 p.m. Monday:

Eastern North Carolina should expect to see impacts from Hurricane Erin, including coastal flooding, starting Tuesday.

The center of the storm was predicted to remain off the coast by a couple hundred miles, but “We still expect impacts across eastern North Carolina, specifically coastal areas,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Erik Heden said during a webinar briefing at lunchtime Monday.

Effects will likely include dangerous surf and rip currents, storm surge, damaging beach erosion, major coastal flooding and overwash.

The storm was about 820 miles south-southeast of Buxton, or 810 miles south-southeast of Morehead City, according to the National Weather Service’s 5 p.m. Monday update. The Category 4 storm was moving northwest at 10 mph.

A storm surge watch and tropical storm watch were issued for eastern Carteret County, Hatteras Island, the northern Outer Banks and Ocracoke Island.

From Duck to Cape Lookout, water levels could reach up to 4 feet above ground, and 1 to 3 feet north of Duck and south of Cape Lookout.

“Elevated water levels will likely be accompanied by large and destructive waves,” forecasters said, adding peak storm surge forecast is generally provided within 48 hours of storm surge occurring in the area.

Heden, who is with the National Weather Service’s Morehead City/Newport office, said Monday that meteorologists began watching the storm Friday, and the storm is expected to increase in size in the coming days.

Updates throughout the weekend showed that as of midday Saturday, the storm was a Category 5, which has winds at 157 mph or faster on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. The major storm weakened to a Category 4, then to a Category 3, with winds from 111 to 129 mph, by Sunday evening.

The storm restrengthened overnight Sunday to a Category 4, with 140 mph winds, Heden said. Sustained wind speeds for Category 4 storms range from 130 to 156 miles per hour.

Forecasters said Monday that tropical storm force wind gusts were possible for the coast, with the highest probability for the Outer Banks, but stronger gusts were possible in any passing outer rainbands associated with Erin.

“The earliest reasonable time of arrival of tropical storm force winds for the immediate coastline is sometime Wednesday morning,” forecasters said. “However, the most likely time this area could see tropical storm force winds will be during the evening on Wednesday.”

The main concern with the winds will be the potential for soundside flooding on a north to northeast wind for Down East Carteret County, Ocracoke and Hatteras Island on Thursday.

Coastal flooding could begin as soon as Tuesday, more than 24 hours before any tropical storm force winds arrive, peaking Wednesday into Thursday and slowly easing up later in the week, according to the National Weather Service.

Forecasters also advise that extensive beach erosion could occur because of strong, long periods of wave energy with waves as high as 15 to more than 20 feet in the surf zone. These waves will also make the surf extremely dangerous Wednesday into Thursday, as well as the life-threatening rip currents expected the majority of this week.

Hyde, Dare counties

Hyde and Dare counties have issued states of emergency and were evacuating Ocracoke and parts of Hatteras Island ahead of the storm’s arrival Monday.

States of emergency went into effect for Dare County at 6 p.m. Sunday, and for Hyde County’s Ocracoke Island at 8 p.m. Sunday.

Dare County officials announced Sunday afternoon a mandatory evacuation had been issued for Hatteras Island Zone A, which includes all of Hatteras Island, including the unincorporated villages of Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, and Hatteras.

Visitors were to evacuate by 10 a.m. Monday and residents must begin evacuating beginning at 8 a.m. Tuesday.

The mandatory evacuation order for Ocracoke visitors began at 8 p.m. Sunday and for residents starting at 6 p.m. Tuesday.

“It is extremely likely that Hyde County EMS services will not be available in Ocracoke due to Highway 12 being inaccessible. Please take this warning seriously, especially if you have medical issues or are likely to need special care,” Hyde officials said in a release, adding plans to continue monitoring the forecast and issue advisories as appropriate.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation’s ferry division announced Monday that only residents, homeowners or vendors with an Ocracoke re-entry sticker on their vehicles will be allowed on ferries inbound to Ocracoke, in coordination with the mandatory evacuation order.

“While we don’t expect Hurricane Erin to make landfall on the Outer Banks, there will likely be large waves, ocean overwash and major coastal flooding that impact Highway 12,” said Ferry Division Director Jed Dixon. “We hope everyone will heed the evacuation orders for their own safety.”

No visitors will be allowed access to Ocracoke Island until the evacuation order is lifted.

Priority boarding will be suspended for all vessels leaving Ocracoke, and tolls have been waived for ferries heading from Ocracoke to Cedar Island or Swan Quarter.

The Ocracoke-Hatteras, Ocracoke-Cedar Island and Ocracoke-Swan Quarter routes will run the published schedules until the evacuation is complete.

Service on the Ocracoke Express passenger ferry, which runs between the village of Ocracoke and Hatteras Island, is suspended until further notice.

For real-time travel information, please check NCDOT’s DriveNC.gov and the agency’s social media accounts. People can also receive text or email notifications on ferry schedules and changes through the Ferry Information Notification System, or FINS.  

National Park Service

To be consistent with Dare and Hyde counties, Cape Hatteras National Seashore will be closing beach accesses and facilities, the National Park Service said.

“The Coastal Flood Watch indicates that extreme beach erosion and coastal damage is likely along the oceanside, resulting in a significant threat to life and property. Large, dangerous waves will likely inundate and destroy protective dune structures,” according to the press release. “Severe flooding will likely extend inland where there is vulnerable or no protective dune structure, flooding homes and businesses with some structural damage possible. Roads will likely be impassable under several feet of water and vehicles will likely be submerged.”

Museum of the Sea at Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and the Discovery Center on Ocracoke Island will close by 5 p.m. Monday. 

Cape Point, Frisco, and Ocracoke campgrounds were to close by 3 p.m. Monday and Oregon Inlet Campground will close at noon Tuesday. Bodie Island Lighthouse will close Wednesday and Thursday.

Off-road vehicle ramps were to close by 9 p.m. Monday. To view the status of beach access ramps, visit http://go.nps.gov/beachaccess.

Due to the presence of threatened oceanfront structures, the Seashore will close beach access in Rodanthe from the terminus of Old Highway 12 to the end of the Ocean Drive and in front of the village of Buxton southward to Ramp 43.   

Visitors should stay off the beaches completely and discontinue use of all beach trails and boardwalks beginning Tuesday morning.

Hurricane Erin is forecast to be a potential threat to Cape Lookout National
Seashore, with North and South Core Banks expected to experience the most significant impacts, Lookout officials said, adding that coastal flooding will likely be a long duration issue with impacts lasting late into the week.

Cape Lookout National Seashore officials plan to close facilities starting at noon Tuesday, including the Light Station Visitor Center and the Keepers Quarters Museum, through at least Friday.    

Island Express Ferry Service will cease operations out of Beaufort and Harkers Island beginning Wednesday through Friday.   

Great Island and Long Point Cabin Camps reservations have been canceled for Tuesday through Friday. The closure could extend beyond Friday, depending on the impact on the seashore. 

“I hope Erin will remain off the coast and head out sea, but hope is not a good way forward.  I really hate to impact people’s plans, and we aim to reopen as soon as possible afterwards,” acting Superintendent Katherine Cushinberry said Monday in a statement.

The National Park Service staff will be monitoring ongoing developments with Hurricane Erin and will post updates as needed on the park website at go.nps.gov/stormwatch.

A chance to climb to the top of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse and look over the expanse of uninhabited barrier islands, sounds and the Atlantic Ocean might be in the foreseeable future now that a much-anticipated, multiyear, projected $15 million renovation project is expected to begin this month.

National Park Service officials announced Friday that Stone and Lime Historic Restoration Inc. received the contract and the work that should start soon could take up to three years to complete.

“The Cape Lookout Lighthouse has long stood as a sentinel for mariners navigating the treacherous waters of the Southern Outer Banks. Time and elements have taken their toll on the structure, prompting the National Park Service to initiate a full preservation effort aimed at safeguarding the lighthouse for future generations,” officials said.

The Cape Lookout Lighthouse is a double-walled, 163-foot-tall tower with a spiral cast iron staircase winding through the interior. First lit on Nov. 1, 1859, the structure, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, replaced the 1812 lighthouse that previously stood on the island. The National Park Service established in March 1966 the Cape Lookout National Seashore, which is made up of 56 miles of undeveloped barrier islands in Carteret County.

“This renovation marks a pivotal step in preserving one of North Carolina’s most iconic landmarks,” Acting Superintendent Katherine Cushinberry said in a statement. “The lighthouse is not only a critical aid to navigation but also a symbol of our coastal heritage.”

Cushinberry is in the temporary role following the retirement this summer of the seashore’s previous superintendent, Jeff West.

Chief of Interpretation and Public Information Officer BG Horvat told Coastal Review that the restoration project includes the repair or replacement of the 200-plus metal stairs, handrails, landings, glass panes, windows and doors, plus new paint for the black-and-white exterior, which will allow the original bricks to “breathe,” or allow air to flow throughout the tower, as it was designed.

Stone & Lime has overseen several lighthouse projects for the National Park Service, including the multi-year restoration of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which is suffering from similar structural and cosmetic concerns, the company said.

The Massachusetts-based restoration company in a June 6 press release announced that it had been selected to manage the Cape Lookout Lighthouse project and will “oversee a variety of historically sensitive repairs that ensure the public will be able to have access to the Lighthouse in the future while fortifying it against the impacts of the ocean environment, especially as hurricanes and other meteorological events growth in strength and frequency.”

Horvat told Coastal Review that the restoration company won the contract because “their bid was the most successful based on the needs of the project, their experience in historic preservation work, and what the park’s needs were to get the work done with high quality and historic preservation in mind.”

Safety issues for the structure are numerous, which is why the public climbing season stopped after an annual inspection of the tower in 2021, prompting discussions about a renovation, Horvat said.

The concerns were first noted during a preseason safety inspection early that year. That’s when staff pinpointed compromised structural components such as stairs and handrails. Engineers were then brought in for more in-depth inspections, resulting in a list of things to consider repairing.

“The lighthouse was built in 1859. The iron components of the tower are all original. In many areas it is corroded away, or deteriorating. For example, some of the landings are bowing. The metal doorway to the gallery at the top has a small hole in it. The handrails and stairs are rusty in several places,” he said. “The list is pretty big considering the age of all this metal that acts like the ‘bones’ of the whole structure.”

While the tower is undergoing repairs, “the biggest thing” visitors may notice is the refurbishing the ironwork of the watch, lantern and dome levels at the uppermost section of the lighthouse, Horvat said.

“The whole top of the lighthouse will come off, and a temporary cap will be placed atop of the lighthouse tower until the refurbishment is complete. Then, the top of the lighthouse will be placed back where it belongs, new and improved, adhering to historic preservation standards,” he explained.

Visitors will also notice that the lighthouse exterior will be stripped to bare red brick — the first time since 1873 — and then repainted with a breathable paint to help stabilize the moisture content of the bricks. 

Although the lighthouse was completed on Nov. 1, 1859, with its original red brick tower, back in those days, the Lighthouse Board “decided that each coastal light would have its own day-mark pattern, allowing mariners a way to note their location during daytime, as each lighthouse displays a distinct flash pattern at night,” he said.

The Bureau of Lighthouses, established in 1852, replaced the Lighthouse Board in 1910. The U.S. Coast Guard absorbed the bureau in 1939, caring for the lighthouse until 2003, when ownership was transferred to the National Park Service.

“In 1873, Cape Lookout Lighthouse was painted with its distinctive black-and-white diagonal checkers, or diamond pattern,” Horvat said. “Since then, there have been numerous paint jobs to brighten up the day-mark pattern on the lighthouse,” and for some of those layers, oil-based paint was used, which doesn’t allow the exterior to breathe and damages the masonry.

The more breathable types, such as water-based paints, “work with the original red brick masonry to allow moisture built up in the bricks to move freely, or evaporate rather than create pockets of condensation within the tower. Trapped moisture accelerates the deterioration of the bricks and lends to the corrosive problems on the interior metals as well,” he said.

Also, there have been various types of cements used inappropriately for patchwork over the years.

“Of course, materials like paint and cement have all changed over the last 166 years,” Horvat said.

Money for the restoration comes from a combination of sources, including National Park Service line-item construction funds, Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act revenues and cyclic maintenance funds.

“These resources enable us to enhance and maintain our facilities for the benefit of the public,” Horvat said.

While the lighthouse and the immediate area are closed to the public during the renovations over the next few years, visitors are encouraged to explore the rest of the park, like the scenic beaches, and the cultural historic sites. Interpretive programs and updates on the restoration progress will be available through the seashore’s website and social media.

Cape Lookout National Seashore officials plan to hold its annual duck blind permit lottery through the National Park Service’s official reservations website later this month.

The permit allows duck hunters to place and leave temporary duck blinds in the park from Sept. 12 to March 31, 2026.  Construction of permanent duck blinds is illegal, and the temporary blinds must be removed by the permittee no later than March 31, 2026.

The lottery will open on recreation.gov at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 26, and close at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 28. There is a $10 registration fee to enter the lottery.

Lottery slots are a limited in number. Those who want to enter the lottery are encouraged to create an account before the lottery opens.

After the lottery closes, the lottery order will be randomly selected from the pool of applicants and a time assigned for the required in-person, 15-minute appointment sometime between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 12. Those selected will be notified by email.

During the appointments in the visitor center at 1800 Island Road, Harkers Island, lottery winners will be able to select where their blinds will be located, complete the permit paperwork and pay their permit fees.

Hunters are limited to two blinds. There is a $50 permit fee for the first blind, and a $25 fee for the second blind, or $75 for two blinds. The fees are used to administer and monitor the program. 

Applicants must bring a valid driver’s license or identification card, a North Carolina hunting license, and a signed federal duck stamp or federal e-stamp.

“If you arrive for an in-person appointment without ALL these documents, you will not be issued a permit and will forfeit your scheduled lottery appointment,” rangers said (their emphasis).

Those not selected during the lottery or who can’t make their scheduled appointment time are welcome to go to the visitor center to be seen on a first-come, first-served basis beginning Sept. 17.

Hunting is authorized within the national seashore, subject to State of North Carolina hunting regulations and federal law. 

Hunters are advised that failure to obtain a permit or failure to remove blinds at the end of the permit period may result in penalties, a bill for the cost of removing the blind, and exclusion from the program in future years. Illegal duck blinds found in the park will be removed without notice and the cost of removing illegal and abandoned blinds significantly adds to the cost of the program and may have to be passed on to the hunters in future years.

Commercial hunting or fishing guides must obtain a permit to conduct commercial activities in a national park.  To obtain a Commercial Use Authorization, or CUA, permit, guides should contact park business manager Katherine Cushinberry at 252-838-8899. 

Guides with a CUA permit may advertise that they are an authorized hunting guide for Cape Lookout National Seashore. Those caught guiding without a CUA permit may be prosecuted and lose lottery and hunting privileges for a minimum of two years.

For more information regarding the 2024-25 Duck Blind Lottery at Cape Lookout National Seashore, contact Ranger Evan Knight at 252-838-8929.

MOREHEAD CITY – Keep telling your story.

That was the message to those who attended the first meeting of the North Carolina Coastal Counties Fisheries Coalition held Tuesday afternoon in the Crystal Coast Civic Center.

Dare County Board of Commissioners Chairman Bob Woodard, who initiated the coalition to be a voice for the commercial fishing industry, welcomed elected officials and staff from Beaufort, Camden, Carteret, Chowan, Craven, Currituck, Dare, Hertford, Hyde, Onslow, Pamlico, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell and Washington counties, and 10 coastal legislators or their representative.

“We’ve got a lot of folks here today concerned about this coalition, and this effort,” Woodard said, adding that many of the more than 100 in the audience were in Raleigh to protest House Bill 442.

But the head of the state’s recreational fishing association called the group’s goals “disappointing.”

‘No due process’

First introduced in March to open up the recreational season for flounder and red snapper, the Senate amended the bill in mid-June to include a trawling ban in the state’s inland waters and within a half-mile of the shoreline.

The proposed ban was met with both outcry and support, but when the Senate kicked the amended bill back to the House, representatives chose not to advance the bill. Since June 25, the bill has been parked in a House committee.

Woodard set the coalition in motion July 3 with a letter to the 18 other coastal counties that border bodies of water from which licensed commercial fishermen are required to report their catch, representing 20% of the state’s counties, he explained.

“That should send a clear voice to our legislators, that we got 20% of the entire counties in the state of North Carolina, and hopefully we will grow up more for people that believe in eating the fresh local seafood from clean, clear waters in our state, rather than foreign food that comes into our country. I don’t know about you, but I want to eat fresh, seafood,” he said.

When Woodard began the meeting Tuesday, he told the crowd that he was “appalled to see that (proposed trawling ban) went to the House,” and wrote a letter June 30 to Senate Leader Phil Berger.

Woodard read the second paragraph of that letter aloud: “Our democratic system, established by our forefathers, was designed to ensure that every voice in leadership could be heard-whether in support or opposition. At its core, our Constitution is built on mutual respect and, most importantly, due process.”

Woodard said, “everyone in this room sitting here today certainly knows there was no due process,” and then explained how he pitched the idea to form the coalition to a fellow commissioner.

“I said, ‘Enough is enough.’ I’ve been a chairman in Dare County for the last 10 years. I’ve been on the board the last 12 years,” Woodard said. “Every single year, we have to fight the regulatory agencies. We have to fight the leadership.”

It was time “to come together, not just counties, not just fishermen, but stakeholders all over the south and this entire state. We need to educate those legislators that aren’t living on the coast.”

Once given the board’s blessing, Woodard sent the letter proposing the North Carolina Coastal Counties Fisheries Coalition.

“The goal of this coalition is to bring together county leaders from coastal regions to address these critical issues with a unified voice. By coordinating our efforts, we can better advocate for the long-term health and sustainability of our fisheries, our local economies and our fishermen’s way of life,” Woodard said.

About the coalition

Members agreed that the coalition would be a public body and have its next meeting at 1 p.m. Sept. 16 in the civic center, ahead of when the legislature is expected to convene.

After that, the coalition will meet quarterly in Carteret County because of its central location.

Woodard emphasized he wanted the coalition to be “as transparent as humanly possible,” adding he wanted the “public to be here.”

The coalition adopted a mission statement to support commercial fishermen and fishing communities, protect their livelihoods, preserve coastal heritage, “and safeguard the economic vitality of our working waterfronts. Together, we work to ensure the continued harvest of high-quality North Carolina seafood—feeding families, strengthening communities, and ensuring North Carolina Catch remains a priority for consumers to enjoy throughout our state and beyond.”

During the discussion, Pamlico County Commissioner Candy Bohmert said that the coalition should focus on promoting — rather than stating it’s out to save — the commercial fishing industry.

“We don’t need to save these people. They save themselves. We need to empower them,” Bohmert said. “We really need to kind of change that language. We’re promoting them. We’re promoting our commercial history. We’re promoting all of that because they’re important.”

Bobby Outten, Dare County’s manager and attorney, is to serve as staff to the board.

Outten explained that the intention with the coalition is to act as a governmental body.

“The fisheries groups have for years been working hard to deal with fisheries issues, and what we found is the legislators aren’t listening, and it’s a hard road, and it’s a tough time,” Outten said.

The idea is to get the governmental entities of the affected counties together and “then be the voice for the political side of this,” Outten said.

Fisheries groups will still be the resource to disseminate the information, but the coalition will be “the voice of the political counties.”

From the legislators

There were nearly a dozen coastal legislators at the meeting, including Sen. Bobby Hanig, R-Currituck. Hanig has been a vocal opponent of the trawling ban since it was first proposed at a Senate committee meeting June 17.

“We’ve never had the opportunity to tell our story. Well, guess what God brought us? He brought us H442, and you know what that did? That wasn’t the shot heard around the world. That was the backfire heard around the world. Let me tell you why. Now we have the ability to be on the offense, and we have to keep that ability to be on the offense,” Hanig said.

That bill “is allowing us to tell our story,” he said, adding that it led to the coalition and got 700 people to Raleigh in about three days.

The turnout in Raleigh brought together various aspects of the industry, such as commercial fishermen, packing houses, “everybody. You know why? Because what’s the first thing they went after? The shrimp, right? They’re going after everything,” Hanig said. “Because that’s what they’re after, folks, they make no qualms about it. They’re after our industry.”

In response to an audience member asking who “they” are, Hanig said “Pick someone. The CCA, the Wildlife Federation, certain legislators, you know, their efforts. They’re after this industry. They make no bones about it. They’ve been telling the wrong story, the false story, for too long, and we haven’t stopped that.” The CCA is the Coastal Conservation Association North Carolina.

“I implore you, tell your story. Do not be afraid to tell your story,” Hanig said. “Let them know where you’re coming from, because those stories matter.”

Rep. Carson Smith, R-Pender, told the crowd that people in Raleigh think there’s no fish, no crabs, no shrimp, that “our fishery is completely depleted, because that’s what the Marine Fisheries Commission is telling them.”

He added that this message is what he feels pitted recreational against commercial fishing, and “they think that the shrimp trawl has killed all the fish.”

Smith suggested two resolutions: Ask the “General Assembly to completely redo the Marine Fisheries Commission,” and “tell the Wildlife Resources Commission, ‘hey, stay in your lane.’ You count the trout in the mountains, but don’t use state resources” to try to close the commercial fishing industry down.

Sen. Bob Brinson, R-Beaufort, said the best way to educate folks in Raleigh is by “getting them on your boats, getting them in your oyster beds, getting them in your fish houses, and showing them what it is you do and how you do it.”

Sen. Norm Sanderson, R-Carteret, explained that when the Senate voted on House Bill 442 June 19, four voted against, but 40-plus voted in favor, which he didn’t expect.

He later found out that the votes for the amendment were for the “environmental side because they claim that shrimp trawling was destroying the environment in our sound. That it was going to destroy all kinds of fishing. Well, that’s one of the talking points that the CCA has used for the last 20 years,” he said.

Sanderson said that he was also upset about how the bill was amended in the Senate, “because the process stunk to high heaven.”

He explained that he was co-chair in the Agriculture Committee when the amendment “first came about, and that is the last thing that you ever do to a committee chairman,” he said. “If you’ve got something that’s going to be contentious, if you’ve got something that’s going to cause a lot of outcry or pushback,” you should go to them before the meeting. But Sanderson said that’s not what happened in this case.

“Let’s stay strong. Keep helping us. Keep telling your story, spreading this message across and around this state, so that the next time this happens, there’ll be an outcry from all over this state,” he said.

Response from CCA-NC

Coastal Conservation Association-North Carolina Executive Director David Sneed told Coastal Review in an email that “it is disappointing to read the goal of this new coalition is apparently to create a vehicle only for ‘battling issues that affect the state’s commercial fishing industry’ (fewer than 2,000 people who profit from a public trust resource) rather than acting in the public interest for the 11 million citizens of North Carolina who own our public trust resources and would benefit enormously from a healthy, sustainable coastal fishery.”

The coalition would be better served by recognizing the foundational, bedrock principles established by the public trust doctrine and the state’s constitution. “That North Carolina’s coastal fisheries resources belong to all 11 million citizens of this State and must be managed, preserved, and protected for the overall benefit of those citizens and future generations.  In addition, the coalition’s approach only divides and disenfranchises the not-for-profit fishing public that lives in and visits our coastal counties,” Sneed continued.

“There are more than 91,000 Coastal Recreational Fishing Licenses sold across the state’s 19 coastal counties each year, and it is reliably estimated that more than 300,000 people spend nearly $1.5 billion annually across the three Congressional Districts that encompass these 19 coastal counties—people who not only live in our coastal counties but also people from inland counties who visit our coast and spend money supporting our coastal fishing communities,” he said. “Our hope would be that any efforts by this coalition will be focused on building a true coalition in the public interest—one that will support the sound management of our coastal fisheries resources to achieve the long-term sustainability that all North Carolinians deserve and are entitled to under the law.”

Beaufort officials are looking to the federal government for another $6.5 million to pay for a water infrastructure project that’s running months behind schedule and millions over budget.

The Carteret County News-Times reported that the town board has also acted to replace the contractor handling the U.S. Department of Agriculture-supported improvements to the water distribution system because of the delays.

The Beaufort Board of Commissioners in July 28 gave the town manager approval to apply for the additional USDA loan.

The estimated need is based on the most recent calculations of the cost to complete the project. The town is looking at a 3% interest rate on the loan, which is typically a 40-year note.

The work is to reduce flooding, improve water quality, and repair aging infrastructure.

The town had contracted Sunland Builders of Newport for the water distribution and stormwater work to include laying more than 20,000 feet of water line for just over $6 million.

The company’s contract expired Dec. 24 with nearly three-quarters of the work incomplete, but it will be required to finish the work it had begun on Pollock, Gordon, Marsh and Live Oak streets.

The contract includes repair and replacement of damaged sewer lines, manholes and other work, repairing storm drains and replacing parts of the water distribution system.

Millions of dollars in state funding are being awarded for beach renourishment and dune projects along the North Carolina coast.

Projects in Dare, Carteret and Currituck counties and in Oak Island have been selected by the North Carlina Division of Water Resources to receive more than $9.39 million from the Coastal Storm Damage Mitigation Fund.

Funding will go to the following projects:

• In Dare County, Buxton nourishment, $3.6 million and Avon Beach nourishment, $2 million.
• In Carteret County, Bogue Banks 2025-26 beach nourishment design, $663,537.
• Currituck County’s beach management plan, $120,568.
• Oak Island beach nourishment, $3 million.

The applicants are matching the state grants with more than $44 million in local government funds.

“The coastline is one of our state’s natural treasures and serves as the livelihood of many communities in eastern North Carolina,” Gov. Josh Stein said in a release. “These grants will help preserve our state’s beauty, protect people’s livelihoods, and keep communities safe.”

The North Carolina General Assembly funds the Coastal Storm Damage Mitigation Fund to help with local costs associated with beach nourishment, artificial dunes and other projects to mitigate or remediate coastal storm damage to the state’s ocean beaches and dune systems.

“This funding will help coastal communities protect natural resources that are essential to their quality of life and economies,” said state Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Reid Wilson in the release. “By restoring beaches and dunes, the projects will also make these communities more resilient to future storms.”

The division scores applications on several criteria, including environmental, social, and economic benefits, life of the project, financial resources, and project efficiency.

For additional information about the application process, contact Kevin Hart with the division at 919-707-3607 or kevin.hart@deq.nc.gov.

HARKERS ISLAND — It takes countless hours of work for the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center to fulfill its mission of preserving Down East Carteret County’s heritage.

Located next to Cape Lookout National Seashore’s visitor center on Shell Point, offering on most days a view of the diamond-patterned lighthouse across the sound, the museum spotlights the history and traditions of the 13 unincorporated communities in the eastern part of the county through exhibits, programs and events.

While Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher and about a dozen volunteers were busy setting up the morning of July 3 for the annual All-American Shrimp Fry taking place that Saturday, July 5, she told Coastal Review that “It’s the work that makes this place what it is” and the museum “was built on volunteers.”

From converting an old doctor’s office to the gift shop housed in the facility, clearing land and pulling stumps from Willow Pond behind the museum, to creating beautiful quilts and feeding thousands fresh local seafood and sweet puppies, “Core Sound has always been and still is — and hopefully will always be — grounded in the hard work, talents and dedication of the people of our community,” she explained.

So, when Gov. Josh Stein inducted Amspacher and nine others June 25 into the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest civilian honor in the state, she didn’t tell a soul.

Amspacher, who has been leading Core Sound since it was established in 1992, had been in Raleigh that last week of June with others fighting against a proposed law that would ban commercial shrimp trawling in the state’s inland waters and within a half-mile of the shore. The House chose not to push the contentious bill through.

She was reluctant to accept the award at the time because, she said, it wasn’t only her who had made the museum a success, and didn’t feel like a time to celebrate. Amspacher decided to meet with the governor anyway because it was a chance to speak to him about the proposed trawling ban.

She wrote in a social media post a week later a “confession of guilt for accepting something good that belongs to everybody that I have mommicked all along the way.”

Amspacher thanked everyone for their congratulations, “but know … WE have accomplished NOTHING alone. Since I moved back home in 1982 it’s been quite a journey, thank you to everyone who is still holding on for our fishing communities no matter what it takes,” she wrote, adding that she hopes her daughter, Katie, remembers when she “puts me in the ground on #redhill under those oaks to post a sign somewhere .. ‘Work is love made visible.’ I believe that … I do love ‘my crowd’ … and love means work.”

Amspacher paused between tasks the morning of July 3 to reiterate that she’s truly grateful for all of the volunteers, especially the young ones “who keep showing up to do the work it takes to keep the museum’s work moving forward.”

Her “shrimp boys” Liam Calabria, Nick Davies and Jackson Saunders, were among those setting up tables and chairs. The three best friends grew up together in Raleigh.

Calabria explained during a break that the nickname came from when he and his older brother, who is in college now, began helping at Core Sound about five years ago.

The first few years, “We had to clean all the shrimp, so that was the main focus, and then we would just help out where need be,” Calabria said. “Now we set up all the tables, chairs, water stations, and we’ve helped serve the food recently, and that’s the fun part because we make​ it a friendly competition.”

His family began in 2020 splitting their time between Carteret County and the state capital, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Core Sound decided to hold the shrimp fry again after pausing during the pandemic, Calabria said that his brother, who was in ninth grade at the time, needed volunteer hours and wanted to help the community.

“I decided to tag along with him,” and his family decided to continue to help. “Now, we started dragging our friends along,” Calabria explained, gesturing to Davies and Saunders.

Davies started helping about three years ago. Currently attending Wake Tech Community College, Davies said it’s “a lot of fun” at Core Sound and he gets to spend time with his best friends.

This is the first year for Saunders, who said he decided to join because he needed some community service hours for scholarships, and “thought it’d be fun to hang out with my friends. So I was just like, why not tag along?”

Calabria added, “We just love the community, and we’ve made a lot of friends and connections through Harkers Island over the five years we’ve lived here, so we just like to see them enjoying the time here and meeting up with some friends.”

Nearby, high school senior Thomas Lathan was helping his grandfather Bill Lathan, a board member for more than 20 years, hang banners that thanked the shrimp fry’s sponsors.

Thomas Lathan has helped at past events, but this is his first summer as an intern. He’s been working with a doctoral student to interview residents about their experiences with tropical storms and how the natural disasters affect and change the culture. He plans to present the findings when he’s done.

Bill Lathan, who still works full time as an attorney in New Bern, said he heads to Harkers Island whenever he’s available and decided to join Thomas that Thursday to help.

Amspacher explained in a later interview that many of the youth that help have been volunteering as shrimp cleaners and trash collectors since they came with their parents and grandparents when they were 9 and 10 years old.

“Now they are high school and college students and they are returning as interns and as the ‘power’ behind our events and projects. They care and each of them know they are part of us and always will be,” she said. “Troop 252 of Davis has been part of our events from the first year we were in this building in 1999. Many of them have children who are now Scouts, doing what they did.”

After the event, Amspacher told Coastal Review that the shrimp fry was a success. This year highlighted the Crystal Coast Water Rescue Team who traveled to Black Mountain during Helene response in fall 2024 and welcomed the Black Mountain Fire Department who called on Carteret County for help.

Core Sound has been reaching out to leaders in the mountains since Hurricane Helene caused untold destruction last fall to the western part of the state to help cope with the destruction and heartache.

Recognizing “our water rescue team traveling to help Black Mountain Fire Department was the same story. The shared experience, the bond that tragedy builds, the ever-knowing that we are all one storm away from needing them to come help us was heavy on everyone there. It was a moment that we will all hold dear,” said Amspacher. “The All-American Shrimp Fry is just that: communities coming together to celebrate our homes, our families and the traditions we hold sacred from across North Carolina.”

Organizers of an afternoon fundraiser set for later this month invite folks to raise a glass to growing seafood and meet area aquaculture specialists to learn more about “a growing opportunity.”

Nacho Brewery in Morehead City is hosting the event set for 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, July 26, at 2900-6 Arendell St., in the Morehead Plaza shopping center. All proceeds from beer and food sales will go directly to the Carteret Community College Aquaculture Technology Program.

Organizers said the event will support workforce development and promote the future of sustainable seafood in coastal communities.

According to the college’s website, “Aquaculture is defined simply as the farming and husbandry of aquatic organisms. This can be growing seafood or ornamental specimens for commercial sale, environmental enhancement, research, or education.”

The college says its program curriculum is comprehensive, covering hatchery, grow-out, processing and marketing.

“Students learn practical skills that prepare them for future employment in a variety of industries or for continuation at a four-year institution,” according to the college.

The fundraiser will include hands-on experiences with marine life, marine science trivia and delicious craft beer brewed in Carteret County.

It’s also possible to donate online to support the college program, just select “Aquaculture Program” from the options.

Featured Image

Fishing lines, sunshades and beachgoers crowd an Emerald Isle beach while two seagulls fly overhead, with another in the foreground searching for food. Photo: Robert Watkins

Emerald Isle resident and student at University of North Carolina Asheville, Watkins submitted last week this photo he took in October 2024 because he was thinking about how coastal North Carolina changes throughout the year.

“It is summer now, and the beaches of North Carolina are packed with tourists, especially now with the approach of the 4th of July. Fall will return, and some tourists will go back home, but not all. Some, like the ospreys, gulls, and pelicans, are here for the year,” he wrote in his photo submission.

When he took the photo, he had returned home to Emerald Isle because the university he attends in Buncombe County had shut down temporarily due to the damages caused by Hurricane Helene.

“Coastal North Carolina offered a strange reprieve from the stress and damage that Western North Carolina had been riddled with; I was lucky to have a home here, for many in WNC lost their only home. I sat down on the beach for several hours that day, loving where I was, shocked at the irony of the situation: I was a refugee from a hurricane, yet the refuge itself had been ravaged by a hurricane just six years prior,” he wrote.

Part of a series about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

MANTEO — In the six months since the chaotic and seemingly random cutting in the federal government began, a terrible uneasiness has descended on the northeast corner of North Carolina, where all of the state’s nine national wildlife refuges employ neighbors and family members who live in the rural communities in which they’re located.

At least 10 Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuge Complex staff and five employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional Ecological Services office in Raleigh, so far, are believed to have voluntarily left their jobs, whether nudged by coercion or incentives.

With staff forbidden to speak with media, and ongoing legal challenges and limited public information creating uncertainty, no one appears to know what will happen to their refuges.

“I just found out we should be getting some staffing numbers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the next couple of weeks,” Howard Phillips, the Southeastern representative for the National Wildlife Refuge Association, a nonprofit advocacy and support group for the refuges, told Coastal Review, citing informed but unofficial sources. “The dust seems to be settling a little and (the agency) is starting to get a handle on where they stand.”

But Phillips, who retired at the end of 2020 as manager of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in Tyrrell County, says he fears that serious consequences are already baked into the refuges’ cake, no matter what the government decides to do. The lack of trust engendered by often abrupt, unexplained cuts of staff, research and budgets as well as the “crippling” brain drain of expertise, experience and local knowledge has only made the situation more problematic.

“Could the administration suddenly decide they want to hire everybody back and start doing conservation again?” he continued. “That would take at least six months, probably 12 months. They’d have to be trained.”

The stark reality, he added, is that without knowing the Trump administration’s timeline or goal in the current upheaval, it’s impossible to understand the long-term impacts and impractical to expect much to change, much less improve.

“I mean, they’ve just given no indication that they’re going to do anything that’s going to reverse the trend right now, which is down, down, down, down,” Phillips said.

An unnamed spokesperson from the agency’s public affairs office ignored Coastal Review’s request to authorize or facilitate a refuge staff interview, but responded to several questions about impacts on North Carolina’s wildlife refuges in a May 23 email.

“As part of the broader efforts led by the Department of the Interior under President Trump’s leadership, we are implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency, and government accountability,” the spokesperson wrote. “While we do not comment on personnel matters, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service remains committed to fulfilling our mission of conserving fish, wildlife, and natural resources for the American people.” 

Refuges in the coastal complex encompass nearly a half-million acres of farmlands, swamp forests and pocosin peatlands, intersected by rivers, streams, canals, lakes and sounds within the nation’s second-largest estuarine system.

The nine refuges — Alligator River, Pea Island, Mackay Island, Currituck, Mattamuskeet, Pocosin Lakes, Cedar Island, Swan Quarter, Roanoke River — are stretched along vast swaths of geography in the coastal plain that provide habitat for unique species and globally important ecosystems.

For instance, the critically endangered wild red wolves, the only surviving in the world, roam within a five-county recovery area based out of Alligator River, descendants of Spanish mustangs range free in Currituck, and thousands of migratory birds and waterfowl passing along the Atlantic Flyway overwinter every year at Mattamuskeet and Pocosin Lakes.

Mattamuskeet, the state’s largest natural lake, is undergoing an innovative and intensive watershed restoration project many years in the planning. And Pocosin Lakes, named for the Native American term for “swamp on hill” because of its boggy peat soil, has been studied by Duke University researchers for its ability to remediate carbon pollution. The refuge has also nearly completed an extensive rewetting project to restore the ability of the pocosin peat to absorb carbon dioxide and resist wildfires.

Two major wildfires in and around the refuge in recent decades have burned deep in the ground for many weeks, spewing tons of carbon back into the environment, with one smoldering for six months before it was finally extinguished.

Therein lies the dilemma — and the risk — to the refuges: What happens when there’s no one available to take proper care of the refuges, and to even continue the conservation mission?

Pocosin Lakes, for instance, with the recent retirement of former manager Wendy Stanton, no longer has a refuge manager.

“You know, with Wendy gone now, I don’t know that there’s anybody left at Pocosin Lakes that really understands that hydrology restoration and how it works,” Phillips said.

But it’s more than the upper-level staff, said Bonnie Strawser, president of the Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society, a local nonprofit group that supports all of the eastern North Carolina refuges. It’s also the loss of staff that maintain buildings and trails, she said, as well as the biologists who monitor water and test soil.

Strawser, who retired in 2020 after 40 years with Fish and Wildlife as visitor services manager, said that the project leader for Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuge Rebekah Martin has designated acting managers in each refuge, but that’s in addition to their regular jobs with the refuges.

Martin is based at the agency’s Roanoke Island headquarters but is not authorized to speak to reporters. According to a 2023 article on the coastal refuges website, Martin oversees about 400,000 acres of habitat with more than a dozen endangered or threatened species. At the time, it said, the complex had 35 employees and more than 400 volunteers.

“We are currently down to 10 staff, and this is regular O and M — operations and maintenance — funded by general funding, refuge funding,” Strawser said in a recent interview. “Now that does not include firefighters or law enforcement, because they are funded through different programs.”

Strawser said that there were no probationary employees in eastern North Carolina, so no one had been outright fired. Some staff who agreed to resign under one of the agency’s two rounds of the deferred resignation program, she said, were quickly shut down and put on administrative leave for varied periods of time while collecting their salaries.

Cuts in both the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service will also hamper the agencies cooperative response to wildfires and disasters, including with the national interagency incident management teams. Strawser is a member of one of three teams in the southern area.

“I don’t know what in the world we’re going to do when fire season comes,” she said. “They stood down our team. It’s not going to be available, they said, at least until after July.”

As Strawser noted, a lot goes on behind the scenes to keep the refuges humming, including procedural processes to keep records and run programs, as well as have sponsors to maintain the “casual hire” personnel to respond to emergencies.

“But the Fish and Wildlife Service, because they lost so many people in the administrative positions, they don’t have anybody to handle the payments and the travel, so they can’t sponsor” for a team member, she said.

For the time being, the public many not notice much difference when they go to a refuge, Strawser said.

“The visitor centers are run by volunteers,” she said. “The public programs are conducted mostly by volunteers.” But there’s only three maintenance people for their nine national wildlife refuges.

“There’s been no talk of closing anything, but it’s just common sense there will problems if there’s nobody to grade the roads, if there’s nobody to do the mowing on the road shoulders, she said. “And if there’s no ‘daylighting’ of the roads, they’ll get overgrown, the sun won’t reach down, and the mud doesn’t dry out and the road is destabilized and before you know it, they’re not drivable.”

Mike Bryant, who was succeeded by Martin, had served as refuge manager for 20 years, from 1996 to 2016, and he witnessed decreasing support for the refuges from the federal government, he told Coastal Review in an interview. After retirement, he had also served as consultant for the National Wildlife Refuge Association, and was former president of the Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society. Although he said he keeps in touch, he is no longer directly involved with either group.

Since about 2010, Bryant said there has been a steady decline in staffing.

“You have refuges where there were multiple people, and with some of them, there’s just one person left, and so that’s part of the story,” he said. “So it had nothing to do with the past 60 or 90 days, whatever it is now.”

But it’s not just mandated reductions in staff that threaten the refuges, he said. The management challenge is also an aging workforce that may not be replaced.

“You got over half a million acres of National Wildlife Refuge in multiple counties, and spanning across North Carolina to the Virginia border, with all kinds of infrastructure and management mandates and no staff to get those mandates done,” Bryant said. “They’re just wondering, how are we going to meet our responsibilities if we’re the only ones left? It’s a morale buster.”

After being fully staffed around 2003, he said it seemed as if the Department of Interior stopped prioritizing conservation and Congress slowly began losing interest in supporting the refuges.

“The Fish and Wildlife budget has so many facets to it, so many other responsibilities under various laws, endangered species and ecological services and all these other entities within the agency, fisheries and all those things, are all important,” Bryant said. “But Congress was never convinced to budget specifically for operations and maintenance of national wildlife refuges.”

Meanwhile, scores of new refuges came on line in the last 25 years. And rather than hiring more personnel, more work was heaped on less staff.

“I was hired in 1996 to manage Alligator River and Pea Island,” Bryant said. “Two years later, when the manager left Mackey Island and Currituck refuges, the regional office called me and said, ‘Hey, we want you to manage those two.’ All of a sudden, I had four refuges.”

Two years later, he was told to hire and supervise a new manager at Pocosin Lakes. Then staff was reduced, forcing him to share staff between the refuges. Next, Roanoke River was added to his responsibilities — along with the 90-minute drive each way. During all those years, he was bumped up just one pay grade.

Bryant said he gets why people get frustrated with the inefficient, cumbersome aspects of the federal government. But he remembers back when the Clinton administration had reduced both staffing and regulations, and not only succeeded, but ended up with a balanced budget.

“We went through all of those things without ever feeling like the sky is falling,” he said. Rather than taking rational steps to achieve efficiency, the interest now seems more in “just destroying the government, constantly degrading it, and yes, crafting corruption.”

“There’s a few bad actors, no doubt, always, in every organization everywhere, no matter what the enterprise,” Bryant added. “There was a rational process to deal with bad employees, grounded in policy. And the policy was grounded in regulation, and the regulation was grounded in law.”

The first official unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System was Pelican Island in Florida, established for conservation in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Today there are 570 refuges and 30 wetland management districts on more than 150 million acres entrusted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services and enjoyed by 69 million visitors.

Bryant is rooting for not just survival of the struggling refuge system, but its revival.

“I think we’ll recover,” he said. “I’m optimistic about that. But we’ll be deeply scarred.”

As with any interest or hobby, gardening has its own vernacular.

Plants have unique names, sometimes specific to localities, such as the shrub we around this part of the coast call “myrkle,” otherwise known as Southern wax myrtle.

That’s where the scientific names for plants come in handy. Whether you call it “tallow shrub,” “bayberry,” “candleberry” or “myrkle bush,” the scientific name is Morella cerifera.

Plants can be named for where they originated, i.e. Chinensis means China, while Japonica indicates Japan. Some plants are named for the person who found them and made them garden staples. Some plants are named for their distinguishing characteristics.

For instance, our own beloved blanketflower, or Gaillardia, is named for a famous French botanist, Maître Gaillard de Charentonneau. Visitors to the Cape Lookout National Seashore may have seen it blanketing the sand around the lighthouse.

There are numerous different varieties of this flower, but most of them have a vibrant orange or red center with a bright yellow ring around the outer edge. Very attractive to pollinators, these tough plants are drought-hardy, salt-tolerant, deer-resistant and they thrive in sandy soil, making them ideal for coastal gardens. Gaillardias can be annuals or perennials, depending on the variety.

Wait, what? That’s a whole lot of gardening gibberish!

Gaillardia pulchella is the scientific name for the blanketflower most common around here.

“Attractive to pollinators” is self-explanatory — big words for nectar-rich flowers that attract bees and butterflies and sometimes moths or beetles.

“Drought-hardy” means these plants can survive with minimal rainfall or water.

“Salt-tolerant,” well, that’s another one that’s self-explanatory.

“Deer-resistant”… one can only hope blanketflower tastes horrible and eating it gives them a severe bellyache. Deer seem to devour everything else quite happily and with no qualms, and it seems like the more expensive the landscaping is, the better they like the human-provided buffet.

“Tolerant” and “resistant” are somewhat iffy descriptions. Neither means immune. “Salt-tolerant” means a plant can take more salt, either spray or windblown or around its roots, than more delicate plants that salt can burn. “Resistant” means less likely to be eaten but it’s not a guarantee. “Resistant” can also mean that even if the deer eat all the leaves off the plant, it has a better chance of rebounding.

“Annual” means the plant has to be planted every year, or annually.

“Perennial” — longer word = longer life span — means the plants come back on their own year after year.

Annuals tend to bloom over a longer period, while perennials usually only bloom for a short while. A good mix of both will insure a longer season of bloom time.

Just like flowers, vegetables have differing terms. Annual vegetables like tomatoes have to be planted every year, while perennials like asparagus only have to be planted once and then a well-tended bed can last and be enjoyed for decades.

Some descriptors for tomatoes are “determinate” and “indeterminate.” “Determinate” means a big flush of tomatoes and then the plant is pretty much done. Determinate tomatoes, while perfectly acceptable for eating, are especially great for canning or freezing.

Indeterminate — again, the longer word is a great memory jog — bear fewer tomatoes at a time but over a longer season than determinate varities.

Determinate tomato plants tend to stay relatively smaller, while indeterminate get sprawly-crawly, since they bear fruit on new growth.

Green beans can be bush or pole varieties. What difference does that make, other than one you don’t have to cut poles for and for one you do?

Bush beans, like determinate tomatoes, bear a big crop all at once. They’ll have a few more, maybe even another crop, depending on the weather.

Pole beans, on the other hand, need something to climb. While they don’t bear as many beans at one time as bush beans, they bear over a much longer season.

Another interesting gardening tidbit: Maybe you’ve heard the older folks talk about planting by the moon. What difference could the moon make? We’re not planting on the moon!

Within our insular homes, cocooned by year-round heat and air conditioning as well as electric lights, many humans barely notice the night sky, much less what stage the moon is in.

You have to figure that anything capable of moving all the water on the planet four times a day must also have an effect on everything else, so …

… while it may sound silly to let the moon tell you when to plant or harvest, it actually makes sense.

Phrases like “by the dark of the moon” or “on a growing moon” were once commonplace and people back then innately understood the references.

Savvy farmers would only plant on certain dates, knowing that planting at the right time resulted in better yields with less insect damage. Usually reserving days with a waxing, or growing, moon for above-ground crops, while a waning, or shrinking, moon was deemed better for root crops. Time between the new moon and the full moon is considered to be waxing, while between the full moon and the new moon is waning.

Not only that, but harmful insects often hatch out in greater numbers around the time of a full moon, so dusting or spraying your crops beginning a few days before the full moon and keeping them dusted or sprayed until a few days after the full moon can significantly dent the insect population.

Oftentimes, if there’s going to be cold or inclement weather, it’s also usually around a full moon.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which is getting harder and harder to find in print form, has long been a staple for information about moon phases and cycles. Benjamin Franklin, considered the father of the modern almanac, published his lunar calendar in order to help farmers.

In earlier times, some people would only set eggs to hatch, or get a haircut, or even start building or dig a hole on the right moon. While some moon-tales reek of hoodoo, a great deal of moon lore is spot-on.

While many of us plant whatever whenever the ground is ready and we have a minute, or a day off, paying attention to the kind of plant you’re installing and where the moon is in its cycle at that time can help you reap unexpected benefits.

A committee of the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries will hear oral arguments next week from petitioners challenging the approval of two proposed shellfish leases in Carteret County.

The division’s Shellfish Cultivation Lease Review Committee is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Wednesday to consider three third-party hearing requests challenging the division director’s April 15 approval of the proposed leases.

The first hearing was requested by Thomas Peralto, who is challenging C.I. Salts Oyster Co., LLC’s proposed lease for a 4.22-acre bottom and water column lease in North Bay.

Jacob Milchuck’s application to lease a 6.17-acre bottom and water column leases in Adams Creek will be discussed in two hearings, one requested by Merleon Creech and the other by Corey McMahon.

The division hosted a public hearing in March for each of these leases.

The committee is expected to deliberate and vote on each challenge after hearing oral arguments from the petitioners, division staff, and lease applicants.

The in-person hearing will be held at the division’s central district office, 5285 U.S. 70 West, Morehead City. There will not be an opportunity for public comment.

Honor those who serve by serving yourself a plate of local shrimp and all the trimmings at this year’s Core Sound shrimp fry on Harkers Island.

The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center is hosting the community gathering July 5 to honor active-duty service members, veterans, first responders, including fire and rescue personnel, law enforcement, and teachers and school staff, healthcare workers and linemen.

Complimentary plates will be available to these individuals.

Everyone else may buy a plate for $20.

The event is scheduled from 4-7 p.m. “under the oak” at the museum and heritage center at 1785 Island Road.

The U.S. Marine Corps stage band will perform at 5 p.m. There will also be guest speakers, special tributes, children’s activities, a bake sale and silent auction.

Preorders and plate reservations are strongly encouraged.

Orders, reservations, and plate and event sponsorships may be placed online, at 806 Arendell Street, Morehead City or the heritage center on Harkers Island, or by phone at 252-728-1500.

Preordered plates will be available between 4-5:30 p.m. After that time, plates will be offered based on availability.

Airman Leonardo Torrescuret, a 2024 West Carteret High graduate, joined the U.S. Navy less than a year ago and now serves as a student rescue swimmer at the Aviation Rescue Swimmer School on Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.

The Aviation Rescue Swimmer School, or ARSS, which teaches students lifesaving techniques, how to conduct a helicopter rescue, and CPR qualification, is “where the next generation of Aviation Rescue Swimmers (AIRRs) are taught to execute life-or-death rescues in the most extreme conditions imaginable,” according to the Navy.

“I’m one of the few that made it to the aircrew school to be a rescue swimmer,” Torrescuret said. “My main focus is getting through ‘A’ school and then going to the fleet.”

Torrescuret, Morehead City native, said he joined the Navy because he wanted to start a career and to travel. “I come from a military family and wanted to continue that tradition.”

He said he learned lessons in high school that he has been applying to his time in the Navy.

“My wrestling coach would always push us to be better,” Torrescuret said. “I find myself remembering that lesson every day in the Navy.”

Torrescuret said his military service gives him a career that he can be proud of, “I wanted to save others and fight for others so they would be able to come back home to their families.”

He said he will probably reenlist, and then possibly make a lateral move to the Coast Guard.

Torrescuret extended his gratitude to his parents, who he said call him every day and to his teacher, Navy Chief Brisco. “When he first heard that I wanted to join the Navy, he mentored me and gave me a lot of advice on military life.”

Coastal communities are inundated more often than previously believed, and floodwaters take longer to recede in rural areas than in urban areas, according to a new study.

The study, published Monday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, also found that the way government agencies gather data used to predict floods fails to truly estimate how frequently water may get pushed over land.

“To capture the burden on coastal communities and to capture what people are really seeing on the ground, it’s so important to measure flooding on land,” said Dr. Miyuki Hino, a co-author of the study and assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

What people living in Beaufort, Carolina Beach and Sea Level, an unincorporated area of Carteret County, told researchers they are seeing is that it floods “all the time,” said corresponding author Dr. Katherine Anarde, an assistant professor of coastal engineering at North Carolina State University.

“People know where it floods and a lot of people can put numbers to how frequently it floods, but as scientists, we just had no idea what ‘all the time’ meant,” she said.

To find that answer, researchers installed a network of in-house, custom-designed water level sensors in storm drains in Beaufort and Carolina Beach. Sensors were installed next to ditches cut along roads in Sea Level, a rural community about 28 miles northeast of Beaufort.

Each sensor measures when water rises and spills onto a nearby road.

The frequency at which that occurred during the course of the one-year study stunned researchers.

From May 2023 through April 2024, Beaufort experienced 26 days of flooding. Carolina Beach flooded 65 days.

And, “all the time” in Sea Level equated to 128 days of flooding. That’s one-third of the year, or once every three days.

“That was really shocking for me and I think for Miyuki too, just the sheer magnitude of flood days,” Anarde said.

It’s a reality in low-lying coastal areas where flooding is being driven more often by a combination of ingredients rather than large storm events.

The major ingredient, Hino said, is sea level rise. Rising seas strain storm drain systems and infrastructure designed decades ago when the ocean was much lower than it is today.

“And so while that highest tide 50 years ago, 100 years ago, might not have been high enough to get onto the road, now it is,” Hino said.

Sea level rise is exacerbating normal variations in water levels from tides and wind, which play a huge role in flood frequency.

If, for example, it rains on a day when a community’s storm drains are inundated with water from the tide, the rain that would normally drain into that system is pushed out across nearby roads.

But Mother Nature is not solely to blame.

Coastal areas have seen a population boom that has all but erased any semblance of what were once small fishing villages.

“Development definitely plays a role,” Anarde said. “Water has to have somewhere to go, and if the landscape is covered in impervious surfaces — roadways, buildings – then water is just going to sit on top of the road and on top of those impervious surfaces and create deeper, longer floods.”

Even in rural, low-lying areas that have fewer buildings and roads, water is not being absorbed into the ground at the rate it once was because sea level rise is elevating the groundwater table in the coastal plain.

One of the big motivations for installing the water level land sensors was to study how the different ingredients combine to cause flooding and, if you measure flooding from all of those sources, how the information gathered from those sensors compares to that taken from tide gauges.

Forecasters have widely relied on tide gauges to predict flood occurrences. The problem is, that is not what tide gauges are meant to do. And, there are many areas of the coast that are not close to a tide gauge, which are maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“They do a great job at what they’re supposed to be doing, which is measuring water levels in oceans and bays,” Hino said. “But we knew that they’re not designed to measure flooding and that some of the other forces that influence flooding, like rain and local infrastructure, weren’t being captured there and so we wanted to know how accurate those tide gauge-based indicators are and how well they match up against what people living there are experiencing day to day and year to year.”

Over the course of the past five years, 11 land sensors have been installed in coastal areas of the state.

The information these sensors provide can help guide a community’s plan for a future expected to be only further impacted by sea level rise.

“We get asked a lot about how to fix this problem of more recurrent, chronic flooding in coastal areas,” Hino said. “There are solutions to the problem. They’re going to be different from place to place and many of them are going to involve difficult choices and so having more input from the affect people into what those choices are is really important.”

Jeremy Hardison, Carolina Beach’s director of Community Development, said in an interview last month that the study has “definitely” been a benefit to the town.

“We’ve kind of monitored how much water was in the street before, but not in the storm drains where the water is actually coming up during high tide events,” he said. “I don’t know that we would have come up with flooding sensors within our storm drains to monitor how much water is in our drains. We want to continue planning and we want to do some implementation and try to see what we can do to mitigate the problem so we’re working in that direction.”

Cape Lookout National Seashore’s first Horse Sense and Survival tour for the year is slated for the morning of Saturday, June 21.

Leading the tour is seashore’s Resource Manager Dr. Sue Stuska, who will explain the relationships, behavior and survival of these wild horses on Shackleford Banks.

“This is an excellent opportunity for visitors to witness and begin to understand the wild horses,” Cape Lookout Superintendent Jeff West said in a release. “The Shackleford horses are truly a unique aspect of what makes Cape Lookout National Seashore a special place.”

The program is free, but space is limited to 20 participants. Reservations are required and can be made at CALO Wild Horse Reservations. For reservations and to ask questions, call the park at 252-728-2250, ext. 0.  

After reserving a spot with the park, reserve a ferry tickets, which are $24 for adults and $17 for ages 3 to 11, at www.islandexpressferryservices.com or by calling 252-728-7433.

Participants will need to gather at the Island Express Ferry Service depot in Beaufort by 8:15 a.m. June 21. The ferry will depart at 8:30 a.m. and head toward the soundside shore of west Shackleford Banks to walk a moderate-level trek off the beaten path to find horses to watch from a distance. The ferry will return around 12:30 p.m.

Seashore staff recommend visitors arrive prepared for a day in the sun, climbing dunes, walking through brush, and navigating in deep sand. Shoes that protect your feet and stay on in the mud are required. Participants should bring water, snacks, bug repellent, sunscreen, sun hat, binoculars, and camera with a telephoto lens in a daypack or shoulder bag.

Additional tours are scheduled for July 20, Aug. 3 and Sept. 20. October and November programs will be announced. For more information, including meeting places, times, and ferry costs on the tours planned for later this year, see http://go.nps.gov/horsewatch.

The North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores made a splash Friday when it unveiled its newly revamped, comic-style gallery that uses vibrant panels, colorful sculptures and hands-on experiences to illustrate the facility’s coral conservation and aquaculture efforts.

The North Carolina Aquarium Society, which is the nonprofit group that supports the state’s aquariums, welcomed 180 members for a sneak peek of the vibrant “Future Waters” gallery before the facility opened to the public that morning.

The gallery features interactive displays, a 1,500-gallon saltwater coral reef habitat called “Conservation Cove,” and two working labs that highlight the aquarium’s sustainable aquaculture efforts and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Florida Reef Tract Rescue Project.

The Pine Knoll Shores aquarium is one of 20 holding facilities in 14 states taking part in the Florida Reef Tract Rescue Project. The network focuses on the rescue, housing and future propagation of Florida corals affected by stony coral tissue loss disease. The goal is to eventually reintroduce the corals to the reef.

The aquarium’s Coral Aquarist Andrew Feliton told Coastal Review that the aquarium is currently cultivating 10 species of coral, all of which have been in captivity since the rescue project began in 2019. The corals came from SeaWorld Orlando and the Florida Coral Rescue.

“We work closely with the Florida Wildlife Commission because these are technically their animals,” Feliton said.

Husbandry Curator Trent Boyette was standing with Feliton near the entrance of the exhibit as a steady stream of visitors made their way through the exhibit.

To date, Boyette said, “we have successfully aquacultured about 23 different species since we first started in 2016.” Aquacultured means that fish, shellfish and other marine plants and animals were bred and raised in water, similar to farming on land.

The aquarium participates in species survival plans, Boyette continued, such as the lined seahorses on display in the exhibit’s working lab.

As the hum of visitors milling about the gallery filled the space, the aquarium’s Communications Manager Shannon Kemp told Coastal Review that staff have spent the last few years working on the gallery, creating about 90% in house, with an emphasis on making the exhibit interactive.

“This is one of the most tactile exhibits we have in the aquarium,” Kemp said, adding the education curator was interested in using a comic book theme “because it’s a different way of presenting information.”

Boyette noted that building the gallery was a major undertaking, to create almost all of the gallery in-house, from constructing the walls to acquiring the coral and fish.

“We spent probably the better part of two years just constructing all this,” Boyette said.

N.C. Aquarium Society President Liz Baird said the nonprofit support organization managed the $240,808 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and donations to build the gallery.

“Funding from public and private sources fits a real need to help communicate with the public, and aquariums and informal cultural organizations are a way to reach people that’s quite different than going to school,” Baird said. “An investment into an exhibit like this reaches a whole new audience in a whole new way, and has been proven effective. So we’re really grateful for that support to help bring this to life.”

Baird served as director of the Pine Knoll Shores aquarium from 2019 to 2023 before transitioning to the nonprofit, and was part of the planning process when the exhibit was first conceived.

 “We really wanted a way to highlight the work that goes on behind the scenes, particularly in conservation, and to help people understand how they play a role in conservation,” she said as she greeted visitors and staff while enjoying the sunny morning on the front patio.

Baird said that they went with the comic book theme to draw visitors to the exhibit.

“When you think about the way that you want to engage with guests, be them young kids through grown adults, people learn best when they are self-directed, and find things that sort of catch their eye or tweak their imagination,” she said.

Though corals are really important for conservation, corals growing don’t catch the eye like the otters or sharks.

“By having this really fun theme,” Baird explained, people are drawn to the exhibit and want to learn why the corals are growing.

The aquaculture work has been taking place for several years, “and we’ve been highly successful at raising these fish, but that happens upstairs, behind the scenes. And again, it’s one of those things that’s not necessarily engaging unless you know the story behind it,” she said.

“These are organisms are really important to our oceans health, and the aquariums are helping take the lead in protecting them,” Baird said.

The aquarium is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. For more information or to book tickets in advance, visit www.ncaquariums.com/pine-knoll-shores or call 252-247-4003.

Visitors to the Rachel Carson Reserve in Beaufort are being reminded to keep a safe distance from wild horses that call the reserve home after human disturbance led to a foal being separated for hours from its mother earlier this month.

A 6-day-old foal was separated May 10 from its mother “following disturbance by humans on foot and boats,” according to a North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality release.

Several days after the foal was reunited with its mother, the young, wild horse and its social group were coaxed by a visitor on the reserve.

“Although these visitors likely did not mean harm, their behavior is illegal and can be dangerous for both the horses and visitors,” Paula Gillikin, the division’s horse herd manager for reserve, said in the release. “In particular, survival of foals can be compromised by disruptions to their natural behaviors such as nursing and resting. The first few years of a wild horse’s life are critical to their long-term survival.”

Visitors to the reserve should maintain a lawful distance of at least 50 feet away. More distance is recommended when a foal is present. Similar rules apply around wild horses roaming Shackleford Banks.

“We realize visitors and boaters are excited about seeing the new baby, but we need your help to ensure it can survive,” the reserve posted on social media.

Beaufort also has an ordinance prohibiting the harassment of wild horses and coming within 50 feet of the animals.

“While these instances are occurring more and more and being posted to social media, the most effective way to immediately address this situation is to contact my staff by call 252-726-1911,” Beaufort Police Chief Paul Burdette said in the release. “Timely identification is critical in not only protecting the horses, but for effective enforcement up to and including the issuance of citations.”

The presence of horses on the Rachel Carson Reserve goes back to the 1940s, when a local resident brought the animals to the area, where they eventually became wild, living primarily on saltmarsh cordgrass. They dig for fresh water.

Coastal Reserve staff and volunteers continually monitor the wild horse herd. Locals help protect the horses by reporting harassment, educating visitors, and participating in the volunteer Pony Patrol program.

Visitors who witness a violation on the Rachel Carson Reserve or Shackleford Banks are encouraged, if it is safe, to take a photo of an incident, including boat registration numbers, and report to the Beaufort Police Department.

Pamlico Sound ferry routes linking the two mainland terminals and Ocracoke Village will remain on its spring schedule of six daily departures until a dredging project planned for the end of this month is complete.

North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division officials said Tuesday that the Army Corps of Engineers had scheduled the emergency project because of shoaling in the Bigfoot Slough ferry channel near the village’s Silver Lake Harbor.

“Our boats are ready, our crews are ready, but the Bigfoot Slough channel is too shallow and narrow to operate our largest ferries safely there right now,” Ferry Division Director Jed Dixon said in a release.

The Corps is responsible for maintaining the channel and has scheduled the emergency dredging project to begin in late May. Weather permitting, the project is expected to take about a week to complete, according to NCDOT.

Once the channel is considered safe, both the Cedar Island-Ocracoke and Swan Quarter-Ocracoke routes will expand from their spring schedules of six daily departures to their summer schedules of eight daily departures.

Officials had initially planned to adopt the expanded summer schedules May 20.

For real-time text or email updates on weather or mechanical delays, sign up for the Ferry Information Notification System at www.ncdot.gov/fins. 

A gaggle of excited students and staff stand at the seawall, peering across the Beaufort Channel. Chatter ebbs and flows as people come up with possible explanations of what they’re seeing. Is it a sea turtle? A log? A lump of plastic? Finally, the silhouette moves, revealing its true identity. Excitement rushes through the crowd — it’s definitely a seal! 

While commonplace in the Northeast, this seal was 600 miles south of Boston in Beaufort, North Carolina. The animal, a harbor seal, was repeatedly sighted in the Beaufort area the week of March 24, swimming in Taylors Creek and hauling out at the Rachel Carson Reserve. 

Miriam Sutton, owner and director of Science by the Sea Eco-Tours, heard about the seal and set off on her paddleboard to catch a glimpse. She knew the seal was in the area but didn’t know it was so close. Sutton turned around and, “it just kind of caught me off guard,” she said. 

Ava Kocher, a sophomore at the Duke University Marine Lab, was part of the gathering that spotted the seal from the seawall. “It was a time where I wished I could have walked on water so I just could have gotten a little closer,” Kocher said. 

Luckily, Brantley Acree, chief mate aboard the Marine Lab’s R/V Shearwater, pulled up to the seawall in a skiff and offered to take students closer to the seal. Mindful to keep at least 50 meters, or 164 feet, between themselves and the seal, students took photos of the seal and noted its behavior. 

The seal was big news. “There was a lot of talk from the people who had been at the Marine Lab for so long, for so many years, and had never seen one, that if they hadn’t seen one in all of their time here, there must be something wrong with this one and you must be like a penguin in the North Pole, seriously lost,” Kocher said. 

Sutton has lived in the Beaufort area for 31 years and had yet to see a seal. “That’s the first one I’ve actually seen … certainly not this far south,” she said. 

Originally from Massachusetts, Kocher noticed a big difference in how people talk about seals here. “I’ve seen so many harbor seals, and when you see them on Cape Cod, you’re not even excited about the seals. You’re thinking about, ‘Oh, there’s seals on the beach. There must be sharks in the water’ … And so then to go from that to here in North Carolina, where that harbor seal is so much more rare and of an occurrence, then that suddenly was a huge anomaly.”

“It was exciting to see that something that was commonplace in one region of the world could be groundbreaking or indicative of a pattern in another place, and it just feels like you’re not learning what’s going on in the world. Because if the world is always changing, there’s always something new to be learned,” Kocher said. 

While seals are rarer in North Carolina than in Massachusetts, this one wanderer is closer to an established harbor seal colony than you might think. Harbor seals have been hauling out in Oregon Inlet, on the Outer Banks, for at least 10 years. 

As for when the Outer Banks population first popped up, “we don’t know a lot about its origins and when harbor seals were first seen regularly there,” said Dr. Andy Read, Stephen A. Toth Professor of Marine Biology, director of the Duke University Marine Lab and co-author of a scientific article about the Oregon Inlet harbor seal population. 

Read said we’re likely to see more harbor seals in this area “because the population of harbor seals has been protected since 1972 as the result of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and has been protected largely in Canada now, but also as a result of habitat exclusion by gray seals, which were also recovering and maybe squeezing harbor seals out of their former range.” 

Seals may have been in the area historically. A harbor seal specimen from the North Carolina Museum was found in Ocracoke Inlet in the 1930s, and there is some evidence that they’ve been seen in the intervening decades. 

Read is one of the leaders of a Duke Bass Connections Team that will attempt to dig into this in the next academic year. The team of doctoral, master’s and undergraduate students will pore through stranding records, newspaper articles, archeological information, scientific literature and other sources to reconstruct the timeline of harbor seal abundance in North Carolina. 

Dr. Vicky Thayer, the North Carolina Aquarium’s Marine Mammal Stranding coordinator and adjunct professor for North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine, has gotten many calls about seals in the area over the years. North Carolina has the highest diversity of any state in the country when it comes to strandings and sightings of marine mammals with four species of seals, 35 species of cetaceans, and manatees reported stranded or seen off of the coast. 

“We get the northern limit of the tropical species and the southern limit of that temperate species. And it’s such an exciting place to work. We learn so much from stranded specimens. We never know what species, will wash ashore next,” Thayer said. 

Thayer received numerous calls about the recent harbor seal in the Beaufort area. Procedure dictates that the stranding team gives seals for 24 hours before responding because they need to haul out and rest.

“As long as the seal is resting in a place that seems that people will not harass it or obstruct its access to the water,” Thayer said, “then we attempt to educate people and let them know that observing from a distance is fine. We post volunteers and set up a perimeter if the seal is in a heavily trafficked area.”

On March 28, Jillian Daly of Beaufort was kayaking in Taylors Creek after work when she saw a “large gray lump” in the marsh. 

“I’d heard there was a seal hanging around the Rachel Carson Reserve, so I quickly realized that’s what I was seeing,” Daly said, “I zoomed in with my camera and saw bile pooled around it’s open mouth, a cut under its neck, and noticed it didn’t seem to be breathing.”

It was the same seal, now dead. 

Daly reached out to Thayer and with her location and photos of the seal. 

“It was so sad,” Daly said, “I’ve never seen a seal in Beaufort and I wish I’d seen it alive and well. However, I’m glad I was able to locate it before animals or other folks came across it so Vicky could retrieve it and perform a necropsy.” 

Thayer, N.C. Aquarium Veterinarian Dr. Emily Christiansen, and Bonehenge Whale Center Director Keith Rittmaster were able to recover the seal that night and perform a necropsy, an animal autopsy, a few days later.

The initial necropsy report found that the animal was a thin out-of-habitat subadult harbor seal. The seal had a cataract in its left eye, lesions on its tongue, and was missing a tooth, all of which may have made foraging difficult. There were also parasites in its stomach, intestines, lungs, and airways, which also could have contributed to its thin condition.

Even though there’s now a colony in North Carolina, this seal is still considered a straggler, out of its habitat. “The weather here isn’t really great for them …The climate is too warm and getting warmer, and so it’s not a good option for long term survival, for high numbers,” said Thayer. 

“The climate is shifting and the prey and the population numbers are changing, and so that’s causing species to expand their ranges, maybe, and it’s not always good for long term survival of individuals.”

We might never know why this seal was down in Beaufort, adding yet another question to the long list of things we don’t know about seals in North Carolina. “What are they doing here? What are they eating? How long are they staying? What’s their body condition? Like, what age and sex classes are here? Are they interacting with human activities like fisheries?” Read asked. 

Harbor seals are a conservation success story; they beat the odds and recovered from extirpation across their range. But without answers to these questions, the perception of seals might not be so positive. However, the unknown is also exciting; there’s so much left to discover. 

If you see a seal in North Carolina, stay at least 50 yards away. “The seals need to rest, and you shouldn’t obstruct their path to the water and stay away from them, because they carry diseases and they can bite,” Thayer said. Please call 252-241-5119 to report live and dead seals and manatees, and stranded whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

“If they’re not stressed, they can fight off disease better. People approaching them can stress them, and if they are sick, but might be able to recover with rest. People may be preventing their recovery by approaching them too closely and they carry diseases that can be transmitted to humans and dogs,” said Thayer.

Thayer and Read both expect to see an increase in the number of seals in the Beaufort area in the future. Only time will tell if this lone seal was a random occurrence or a harbinger of the future. 

Hear from local, state and federal representatives about what to expect during hurricane season before it starts during Carteret County’s annual Hurricane Preparedness Expo.

The expo will be held 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday in Morehead City’s Crystal Coast Civic Center on Arendell Street.

There is no charge to attend the family-friendly event that organizers say offers a “comprehensive resource event for hurricane preparedness ahead of hurricane season,” which is June 1 to Nov. 30.

Carteret County Emergency Services, Carteret County government, and the U.S. National Weather Service’s Newport office are coordinating the expo.

“Preparing for hurricane season is a community effort,” County Emergency Management Coordinator Aaron Stryker said in a release. “This expo provides residents with the tools and knowledge they need to protect themselves and their families.”

The expo will feature information booths and presentations starting throughout the event from meteorologists, emergency managers, county staff, and key community organizations, such as the Salvation Army and local volunteer groups.

Warning Coordination Meteorologist Erik Heden will kick off the talks with his presentation, “Preparedness for Hurricane Season 2025,” at 9:30 a.m., and will speak again at 10:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.

Contact Stryker at 252-222-5841 or email aaron.stryker@carteretcountync.gov for more information.

A Carteret County town known for its waterfront is looking for help from the state to repair its town docks and replace the bulkhead and the boardwalk.

Sen. Norm Sanderson, R-Pamlico, who also represents Carteret, Chowan, Dare, Hyde, Pasquotank, Perquimans and Washington counties, is the primary sponsor of the bill filed March 25 titled “An act to appropriate funds to the Town of Beaufort for upgrades and repairs to the town’s Boat Docks.” If passed, the bill would appropriate $12 million from the general fund “to provide a directed grant to the Town of Beaufort as title indicates. Effective July 1, 2025.”

The next day the bill was sent to the appropriations/base budget committee, where it remained as of Thursday, when he bill was still not listed on the legislative calendar.

There was no mention of funding for the town in the most recent edition of the Senate’s proposed budget passed April 17. The House is currently working on its draft. The North Carolina General Assembly has until June 30 to finalize the budget.

Beaufort Public Information Officer Rachel Johnson said the funds would be used for the needed infrastructure upgrades to include, but not limited to, the town’s bulkhead, boardwalk, and docks work, according to an April 20 article in the Carteret County News-Times, which first reported the proposed bill.

Beaufort, which “has a residential population of about 4,000 with a high influx of visitor traffic during the warmer months,” has had a “Waterfront Improvement Project” in the works for the past handful of years, according to the town website, to prepare for when Beaufort Waterfront Enterprises no longer manages or maintains the docks, which it has done for several decades. Their lease originally set to expire Dec. 31, 2024, was extended in August 2024 to Dec. 31, 2025.

Sierra Club North Carolina‘s Croatan Group has several outreach events planned for this spring.

The environmental organization is to host an Earth Day celebration this week at Carteret Community College, as well as two hikes to see carnivorous plants on nationally protected lands, and a talk on native plants in early May.

Earth Day Learn and Play is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Bryant Student Center on the Morehead City campus. There will be hands-on activities and information booths, a time to “talk trash,” review native plants, and view the living shoreline.

Talks are scheduled on the hour during the Earth Day program, starting with “Wind Energy in NC” at 11 a.m., “Rooftop Solar 101” at noon, “Solar Users’ Experiences” at 1 p.m. and “Training the Workforce of Tomorrow” will close out the day at 2 p.m. Visit the Sierra Club’s website for a full schedule. The college’s Energy and Conservation Committee is partnering with the Croatan Sierra Club on the event.

The nonprofit group is offering the first of two walks to see carnivorous plants in the Croatan National Forest from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, April 26. The second walk is from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, May 24, both starting off N.C. Highway 24 in the Newport area.

“This area is dominated by pocosin bogs and large tracts of well maintained longleaf pine forests and savannas, an ecosystem that once covered millions of acres of the Southeast but has now nearly disappeared because development, logging and fire suppression,” organizers said.

The trip will consist of short, easy walks from various parking sites.

Attendees will be able to see at least 13 species of carnivorous plants, including the Venus flytrap, a variety heaths, orchids and other rare wildflowers, “We are holding two such excursions a month apart, as we expect to find different suites of wildflowers in bloom each time,” such as pitcher plants, organizers continued.

There is no cost to participate but participants must sign a waiver. Participants should wear long pants and substantial footwear. Nonmembers are welcome to join the walks. To register, contact Ralph Tramontano at rrtramon@gmail.com. Specific instructions on how to get to the first site will be given to participants when they sign up.

Gardeners wanting to incorporate native plants will have a chance to learn how from a master gardener starting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 6, at the Unitarian Universalist Church at 2900 Bridges St. in Morehead City.

During “The Power of Native Plants,” Carol Peoples is to talk about how to create a more welcoming habitat for birds, butterflies and bees. in addition to being a master gardener in Carteret County, Peoples is a co-leader of the Central Coastal Plain Chapter of the North Carolina Native Plant Society and serves with the Coastal Landscapes Initiative, a public-private collaboration led by North Carolina Sea Grant.

Featured Image

A calf lies in a field of spring flowers near the Haystacks area of Morehead City in Carteret County. Photo: Dylan Ray

Carteret had 22 farms raising cattle and calves mostly for beef production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2022 county-by-county farm census, up by three from the 2017 count. The 2022 figure accounted for about 400 head of cattle.

Among coastal counties, Onslow leads in the number of cattle farms with 84 and about 1,900 head in 2022, down from 95 farms and nearly 2,100 head in 2017.

North Carolina had nearly 15,000 cattle farms in 2022 with just shy of 719,000 head, down from more than 18,000 farms and more than 776,000 cattle in 2017, but numbers rebounded last year to about 750,000 head, according to a 2024 USDA document.

By comparison, the state held steady at around 2,400 hog farms during the 2017-25 period, but the hog inventory during the 2022 census had decreased by about 700,000 from about 8.9 million in 2017.

About 32.3 million hogs were sold in 2022, compared to just over 11,300 cattle and calves sold that year.

Volunteers are needed to help clean up Carteret County this month.

The Litter Free Land and Sea initiative is hosting its annual countywide cleanup day 9-11 a.m. Saturday, April 26, at sites across the county.

“The event offers a chance for residents to give back, connect with neighbors and coworkers, and help protect the environment,” organizers said.

Check-in begins at 8:45 a.m. at any of the following cleanup sites:

• Atlantic Beach boardwalk, 201 West Atlantic Blvd.
• Carteret Community College’s EDC Building, Morehead City.
• Eastern Park in Smyrna.
• Emerald Isle Western Ocean Regional Access, 9803 Louise Ave.
• Fort Benjamin Park, 100 McQueen Ave., Newport.
• Grayden Paul Park, 718 Front St., Beaufort.
• Peletier Town Hall, 1603 Highway 58, Peletier.

Gloves, trash bags, safety gear and cleanup tools will be provided while supplies last. Refreshments and snacks will be available but volunteers are encouraged to bring their own water and wear comfortable shoes. The cleanup is rain or shine.

To ensure enough supplies, individuals and groups must register by April 24 at www.litterfreelandandsea.com.

Volunteers participating in the cleanup will be eligible for prizes, including Litter Free Land and Sea merchandise and eco-friendly gifts. Winners will be announced at each site.

The county government, Crystal Coast Economic Development, Carteret County Sheriff’s Office and community partners collaborate on the program the promotes litter prevention, public education and environmental stewardship.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

From Cecelski: This is the 26th photograph in my photo-essay “Working Lives”– looking at the stories behind the photographs in the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection (1937-1953) at the State Archives in Raleigh.

In this photograph, we see workers slaughtering and canning sea turtles at a cannery in Marshallberg, N.C., September 1938.

According to a story in the Raleigh News & Observer that was published a year earlier, March 21, 1937, the cannery’s owner, Carroll Crocket, hailed from Crisfield, Maryland, one of the busiest fishing ports on the Chesapeake Bay.

In the 1890s, Crockett’s father, A.R. Crockett, was among a group of Crisfield oyster dealers that began coming south in search of new oystering grounds. He was drawn above all to Core Sound and particularly to the stretch of quiet bays and marshlands between Harkers Island and Smyrna.

In or about 1897, he established an oyster cannery at Marshallberg, a village located on that part of Core Sound.

The village sits on a a peninsula shaped by Core Sound, a lovely bay called Sleepy Creek, and a body of water called the Straits that runs between Marshallberg and Harkers Island.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Crisfield fishermen also played an important role in bringing the soft-shell crab industry to Marshallberg. In the late 1930s, when this photograph was taken, soft-shell crabbing was still a big business on Core Sound and Marshallberg was home to the state’s busiest soft-shell crab fishery.

A.R. Crockett’s oyster cannery does not seem to have lasted very long. However, following in his father’s footsteps, Carroll Crockett opened his cannery in Marshallberg in 1937.

At that time, Marshallberg was a threadbare but bustling little village. If you had visited that part of Down East in those days, you would have found a cluster of homes, a highly regarded boatyard, a crowd of fish houses, a crab-packing plant, two or three general stores, a pair of churches, and a school.

In the 1930s, Marshallberg was also an important shipping point for local truck crops, especially sweet potatoes.

A generation earlier, the village had also been the site of an important preparatory school called Graham Academy. Launched by northern missionaries after the Civil War, the Star of Bethlehem Church, most often just called the “Star Church” by locals, got its early support from women associated with the Methodist Missionary Society of Boston in 1874.

Founded 12 years later, in 1888, the academy was renown for providing a classical education to the children of oystermen and fisherwomen, as well as to the well-heeled from many other parts of eastern North Carolina, and for turning out some of the the region’s finest teachers.

The academy also had a lasting impact on Marshallberg. Again and again, old-time Marshallbergers have told me how the school’s teachers, the influx of students from other parts of eastern North Carolina, and the cultural events held at the school shaped them and gave the village a somewhat different air than other villages Down East.

Though Marshallberg remained a busy fishing port in the 1930s, the Great Depression was still hard in the village, as it was on all of Down East. For many people, soul-cripplingly hard.

To learn more about Marshallberg’s history, be sure to visit the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island. The museum’s webpage also includes a special section on Marshallberg’s history.

In addition, in 1938 many local people were still just getting their feet back on the ground after the great 1933 hurricane.

The ’33 storm had laid waste to much of Marshallberg. According to news reports, the hurricane washed away docks, fish houses, and boats by the score and destroyed or seriously damaged some 30 homes.

When the cannery opened in 1937, Carroll Crockett announced that he expected to employ some 150 seasonal workers. Given the hard times, the Marshallbergers must have welcomed the cannery’s arrival.

In addition to the cannery in Marshallberg, Carroll Crockett established at least half-a-dozen other canneries on the North Carolina coast in the 1930s and ’40s: a shrimp cannery in Wilmington, oyster canneries in Beaufort and Washington, and canneries focused more on tomatoes and other truck produce in Kinston, New Bern and Windsor.

* * *

According to the News & Observer, the Marshallberg cannery’s workers canned tomatoes in the summertime.

Then, in the fall and winter, they shucked and canned oysters and clams.

Shucking clams and oysters was cold, wet work, hard on the body and not infrequently debilitating. Many a time, when I was younger and more of them were still with us, the men and women who used to do that kind of work in Down East canneries told me how it made them feel old before their time.

On the other hand, Marshallberg’s people were no strangers to hard work, and times were hard. Few turned down a job because it wasn’t easy, if only because there were no easy jobs to be had.

Evidently, when they had neither clams nor oysters, nor tomatoes or other truck crops, they at least occasionally turned to canning sea turtles.

* * *

I am not aware of any cannery on the North Carolina coast that focused primarily on sea turtles.

In the late 19th century, such canneries did exist for a short time in the Florida Keys and in a few places on the Gulf of Mexico, where the most desirable of sea turtles for making turtle soup — green turtles, (Chelonia mydas) — were far more abundant than on the North Carolina coast.

Those canneries in Key West and the Gulf Coast did not last long. Even by the 1890s, the mass killing of sea turtles, as well as the harvesting of their eggs, had driven them close to extinction in many parts of the Florida and Texas coast.

As early as 1900, the sea turtle fisheries in Florida and other parts of the Gulf Coast had, with one or two exceptions, shut down. From that time on, the harvesting of sea turtles was done almost exclusively for local consumption or when sea turtles were caught as “by-catch” by fishermen engaged in other fisheries.

The highly prized green turtles were also found in North Carolina’s coastal waters, but far less frequently than in more tropical seas.

Loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) were far more common on the North Carolina coast.

Though their meat was darker, oilier, and considered less desirable than that of green turtles, loggerheads were still sold to be used in turtle soup. I can’t be sure, but I assume that loggerheads made up the bulk of the sea turtles caught on the Outer Banks and other parts of the North Carolina coast.

The luxury market for turtle soup was always the driving force behind the sea turtle fishery in the United States. However, the oil of sea turtles was also put to use at least occasionally. According to an article called “The Origin, Evolution, and Demise of the U.S. Sea Turtle Fisheries” that appeared in NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Review in 1994, the oil of loggerhead turtles was sometimes sold as a leather softener and fishermen in some places coated the bottom of their boats with loggerhead oil in order to discourage worm damage.

Compared to Florida or the Caribbean, a far smaller fishery for sea turtles had existed on the North Carolina coast since at least the 1880s.

In 1885, for instance, according to the June 9, 1885, issue of New Bern’s Daily Journal, a man identified as “Mr. K. Willis” was “the champion turtle hunter” on the waters around Swansboro.

The newspaper reported that Mr. Willis used a 20- or 30-yard-long, wide-meshed net to capture  29 “large sea turtle” over a two-day period.

More than likely, he was the kind of man that did a little bit of everything around the water, a “progger,” they would have called him on some parts of the North Carolina coast.

However, on most parts of the North Carolina coast, a fisherman or woman might make a turtle stew now and then, but they were unlikely to make much profit from catching them.

* * *

That could be seen on Hatteras Island in 1901. According to a visitor to the island that winter, the keeper at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse spied a dozen sea turtles just offshore a couple weeks before Christmas.

Writing in the Baltimore Sun March 31, 1902, the visitor recalled that the lighthouse keeper used some kind of meat as bait to catch three of the turtles with a hook and line.

The Sun’s correspondent asked the lighthouse keeper what he had done with the sea turtles.

According to the article, “he replied that there was no market there, and the lighthouse crowd didn’t eat turtles, so he sent them as a present to the Cape station of life savers, where they were acceptable.”

I think that was quite typical on the Outer Banks, where, to my knowledge, there were never any canneries that handled sea turtles.

Of course at that time, there were also no restaurants on Hatteras Island that might have been interested in putting turtle soup on their menu. There were no restaurants at all on the island. For that matter, no bridges to the island had yet been built and no roads on the island had yet been paved.

Now and then, an Outer Banks waterman might stow a live sea turtle in a shipment of salt mullet or shad and make a few dollars if it found a buyer at the docks in Norfolk or New Bern or Elizabeth City.

But overall, at least on the Outer Banks, sea turtles were generally one of the sea’s creatures that the islanders kept for themselves and, even then, partook of only every once and awhile.

* * *

On the Outer Banks, that did not seem to change later in the 20th century. On April 7, 1929, for instance, a correspondent of the News & Observer reported that Ocracoke Island fishermen had recently captured “dozens of sea turtles weighing from 200 to 500 pounds.”

The turtles, he said, were bound either for local kitchens or cast back into the sea.

“Here the natives bring the turtles ashore and make soup or hash from them, or if they are not in a turtle eating notion they throw them overboard as there is hardly any market for this species of turtle.”

There were canneries just to the south, though.

Even in the late 1800s, canneries operated in North Carolina’s larger coastal towns, including Morehead City and Beaufort, but now and then also in some of the more remote fishing villages along Core Sound.

For a few years, for instance, a Long Island, New York, company operated a clam cannery in Atlantic, called Hunting Quarters then. Smyrna was home to an oyster cannery, and there was even a cannery or two at Diamond City, out on the island called Shackleford Banks, prior to all the villagers leaving the island in the late 19th and early 20th century.

How often, if at all, those canneries handled sea turtles, I do not know. Their real business was elsewhere — in oysters, above all — but perhaps like the cannery in Marshallberg, they may sometimes have slaughtered and canned sea turtles on a small scale when the turtles were available and the cannery workers did not have anything more profitable to do.

As was always the case with catching and butchering the sea’s larger creatures — whales, dolphins, sharks — sea turtle canning was a grim business.

A casual visitor with a weak stomach or a soft spot for the welfare of wild animals was bound to be alarmed by a visit to any of those enterprises.

In September 1938, the same month this photograph was taken, such an individual did visit the cannery in Marshallberg.

That individual’s name was Edward Peyton “Ted” Harris, and he was a playwright and theater actor originally from Greenville.

I do not know how Harris came to be in Marshallberg. Judging from the timing of a letter that he wrote to the Raleigh News & Observer, he and the photographer who took this photograph very likely visited the cannery together.

I only know about Ted Harris’s tour of the cannery because the News & Observer published his letter. In that letter, he expressed outrage over the treatment of the sea turtles at the Marshallberg cannery.

He had seen the holding pen in which the sea turtles were kept until it was time to slaughter them. That was standard practice: sea turtle canneries typically kept captured turtles alive until the workers had enough to make it worth their while to slaughter and can them. In some cases, that was days, but in other cases they were held in captivity for weeks or months.

Of the turtles’ living conditions at the cannery, Ted Harris wrote:

“Yesterday… an attendant showed us a dozen sea-turtles penned up for slaughter. Boxes hedged them about on a dry concrete floor. There was  no provision for feeding them or giving them the water they need worse than food. One had already died. The workman assured us … that this one would not become the main ingredient for some unsuspecting purchaser’s soup. However, those that remained alive could not be in good condition when the ax ends their suffering.”

In his letter, Harris indicated that he wanted to bring the sea turtles’ living conditions to the attention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as well as to the local health department.

He also noted, by way of a coda, that the worker that was his tour guide at the cannery had told him, on the side, that “he himself would never eat canned turtle, having watched the canning.”

 * * *

The Status of Sea Turtles Today

In a 1994 article titled “The Origin, Evolution, and Demise of the U.S. Sea Turtle Fisheries,” a NOAA marine scientist named W. N. Witzell wrote:

“Commercial fisheries, habitat destruction, and pollution has had a devastating impact on both U.S. and world sea turtle populations. The U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973 and subsequent amendments has provided the legislation needed to prevent the extinction of these magnificent animals in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean [including the North Carolina coast].”

Today, with the aide of the N.C. Wildlife Commission’s NC Sea Turtle Project, more than 20 different community groups are monitoring sea turtle nesting and stranding activities on the North Carolina coast. (You can find a list here.)

At the same time, state and federal agencies are increasingly working hand-in-hand with the commercial fishing industry to protect sea turtles from being accidentally caught in fishing nets.

Through their efforts, sea turtle populations have begun making a significant comeback in recent decades.

Much progress has been accomplished in the last half century. However, recent political developments in the U.S. have put into doubt the future of sea turtles and all other endangered species that rely on the protections of the Endangered Species Act, the vitality of the Environmental Protection Agency, and/or the ongoing research work of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, all of which have played key roles in the preservation of sea turtles here in the U.S. and around the world.

A special program about surfing and its history in Carteret County is set for noon to 2 p.m. Saturday, April 26, in Morehead City.

Taking place in the History Museum of Carteret County, Lisa Pelletier Harman will host the talk featuring surfers David Sledge of Atlantic Beach and Dr. Ty Roach, the McCurdy Visiting Scholar at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort.

Harman is the brother of champion pro surfer Buddy Pelletier of Atlantic Beach, who was 44 when he died of cancer in July 1995. He was inducted into the Surfing Hall of Fame in 2000.

Cost with lunch is $15 for museum members and $20 for nonmembers. Without lunch, cost is $5 for museum members and $7 for nonmembers.

Call the museum at 252-247-7533 to make a reservation by April 22.

Two University of North Carolina Wilmington professors are collaborating this semester on a documentary celebrating community resilience, adding a new perspective to the overall effort of the Down East Resilience Network.

The network, often referred to as DERN, evolved in the years after Hurricane Florence ravaged coastal North Carolina in September 2018. It’s a project of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, which was hit particularly hard by the slow-moving Category 1 storm.

Museum Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher coordinated the network of government agencies, researchers, residents and nonprofit organizations.

The idea was to connect similar and overlapping research on flooding, saltwater intrusion, infrastructure damage and other risks associated with rising sea levels in the 13 Carteret County communities, and to offer resources to navigate the changes.

“Our DERN partners continue to work in the Down East area with mapping projects, continued flood monitoring, along with journalism and documentary students during spring semester and the 2025 class of interns this summer,” Amspacher told Coastal Review.

The network holds meetings a few times a year to discuss the research and projects that are carried out year-round. The most recent gathering was in late January on Harkers Island.

UNCW’s Jennifer Biddle, associate professor of environmental policy, and Laura Dunn, film studies professor, attended the Jan. 31 meeting — their first.

Biddle told Coastal Review that she and Dunn attended the meeting to identify how they “could plug in,” and after listening to the research and types of projects, she really appreciated the intention of the network, “to help the local people and local communities adapt to all these changes.”

The next morning, during a roundtable discussion, Biddle and Dunn recognized that their original plan to use a short documentary to help raise awareness had been done.

So, they worked with Amspacher on finding a new perspective, to identify what was missing, “and what was missing is the voice of the future — younger people’s voices. What have they heard and learned from the elders that they want to carry forward? And how do they do that in a changing political and economic society, as well as a changing landscape?”

The documentary became about the community’s resilience. It has “weathered a whole lot of big storms. This is just another big storm,” Biddle said.

The spent February organizing the trip then headed to Down East March 3-7 to film interviews. They stayed in a vacation rental on Harkers Island, where it “was so amazing was to be immersed in the community,” and the week provided a chance for the students to bond and meet people, Biddle said.

The 10 students divvied up into three teams. “We affectionately called them Nature, Culture and Resilience,” Biddle said.

The Resilience crew focused on what’s happening in the area, and how the people are resilient, with a focus on the Core Sound museum.

“The museum itself is a kind of hub of social activity,” Biddle said, adding that one morning there they had seen preschoolers learn about commercial and recreational fishing.

While observing a high school shop class build a skiff, Biddle said they asked the students what they saw for themselves for the future.

“They all had an answer. A lot of it was things they wanted to do, but maybe couldn’t do full time, like shrimping and building boats, because there wasn’t a lot of money there.”

Some said they wanted to work at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point and shrimp in the summers, or be a chef and build boats on the side. “They had these cool, but very realistic plans in terms of how they could make a livelihood,” she said.

On the Nature crew’s first day filming, Biddle said they stumbled upon an oyster farmer who had just pulled in bushels of oysters. He explained how he had grown the oysters, and then opened up a few. “We all got to cheers over half-shells that were really delicious.”

Residents and transportation officials talked to the students about the status of the roads, and a scientist gave an interview about visible signs of change, such as ghost forests and marsh migration, Biddle added.

The students met a father-son team and mother-daughter team of decoy carvers. Witnessing the “passing on of these beautiful traditions and the bonds it builds was really touching.”

Biddle said she joined the Culture crew for an interview with a shrimper and his daughter. The old-timer had described how his kin dated back to the 1700s in Carteret County and are a multigeneration commercial fishing family.

“What was really cool, especially for my policy students to hear, was he described how they self-regulated,” Biddle said. “Up until the ’80s, they were self-regulating their catches” by being assigned a night to catch certain fish, and the fish houses would only buy so much.

The man’s daughter had spoken “eloquently but passionately about her love of gigging flounder and how she would go out at night with her sister to spend time together and how impactful the moratorium” on flounder fishing has been, Biddle said. The state has limited or canceled flounder season altogether over the last few years because of overfishing and being overfished.

Seeing how policy affects people is why she takes students out in the field, to witness how rules can have unintended consequences, especially to those being the most impacted, she said.

Coastal and ocean policy graduate student Kennedy Huntsman is part of the documentary team who visited Down East. She said that policy and documentary film “share intrinsic goals.”

They “both serve as powerful tools for translating complex issues, like science, into accessible and meaningful information for the public. But effective science communication requires a deep understanding of the intended audience. Too often, the communities most impacted by these issues are left out of the conversation, their perspectives overlooked,” she said.

Being able to put this into practice Down East “was an invaluable experience, one that simply couldn’t be replicated in a classroom,” Huntsman said.

Abigail Schindler, a senior in the film studies department, said her favorite moment Down East was the boat ride on the last day of filming.

“This was a truly unique and impressive group of people who love the place they live,” she said, adding they had seen the wild horses, “which was such a cool experience.”

Her biggest takeaway from the experience was understanding why the people Down East love their home so much.

“It’s not just about one thing — family, nature, tradition — it’s everything combined about the place. I heard the phrase ‘why would I want to live anywhere else’ several times and by my last day I finally understood. It’s a place with so much natural beauty and land without hotels and chain restaurants covering its landscape,” Schindler said.

The next step for the documentary is to edit.

“We have probably 150 hours of footage,” Biddle said.

The documentary will likely be a series of vignettes focusing on commercial fishing, boatbuilding and decoy carving. The plan is to give the recordings back to the community and the documentary will be available to the museum.

The project is funded through the Seahawks Advancing Interdisciplinary Learning, or SAIL, program to integrate policy-rich content into short documentary films to help educate and raise awareness about the threats facing coastal communities and what can be done to help them adapt.

Another new face at the Jan. 31 meeting was Jenny Adler, who was getting ready for a stint as a visiting professor at the Duke University Marine Lab on in Pivers Island in Beaufort.

“Having never lived in North Carolina, I knew I had a lot to learn before teaching a course in Science Journalism at the Duke Marine Lab this spring,” Adler explained. “I felt confident I could teach the journalism part of the course and help students report on science, but it was unsettling moving to a place where I had no community connections.”

While writing a grant proposal to fund the students’ stories, she said she came across a ton of coverage in Coastal Review and also quite a few pieces by visual creator Ryan Stancil and photographer Baxter Miller, who are both members of the network and have worked extensively Down East.

Adler said she contacted the two, who then told her about the network meeting.

“So, a week before I started teaching, I drove to Harkers Island from Massachusetts and walked into a meeting where I knew nobody,” she said, and the next eight hours “were informative and inspiring.”

She said the connections she made that day held strong.

“Karen (Amspacher) and several other members I met that day have spoken with my class, been interviewed by my students, shared local knowledge, and provided guidance and stories that have made training the next generation of journalists in a new place such an incredible experience,” Adler said.

Haven Cashwell, a postdoctoral research scholar for the State Climate Office at North Carolina State University, has been coordinating communications for the network.

Over the last few months, she and other members have been working on a website. It wasn’t quite ready at publication, but those attending the Jan. 31 meeting had a sneak peek.

“The goal of the website is to have a place where community members and those interested in the Down East Resilience Network can access information about areas of concern,” which include saltwater intrusion and sunny day flooding, Cashwell said in an interview.

Plans for the website include providing resources, such as how to navigate Federal Emergency Management Agency, raising your home, obtaining a fortified roof, and updates about the network.

“We are currently asking researchers about information they think should be included on this website that community members should know about. We hope this will be used in the future by both community members and DERN members,” Cashwell said.

Dr. Kiera O’Donnell, another member of the network, is a postdoctoral associate at Duke University and is working on a study to better understand coastal water quality concerns in North Carolina.

Residents are being asked to fill out a survey “to help us understand the water quality concerns for surface and ground water throughout Carteret County. We are currently taking surface water quality samples to get a snapshot of the water quality throughout Down East and the surrounding areas,” O’Donnell said. “But we are looking for local perspectives and water quality concerns to help inform us about the current issues locals are dealing with and what they care about when it comes to water quality.”