Ms. Doris Creecy has been a familiar face to locals on Roanoke Island for a long time.

This 90-year-old “Senior Delight,” the official title she is called by one of the several organizations she supports, is known by many. She is a frequent presence at events, especially programs close to her heart and those that include youth.

Standing tall, typically wearing a beautiful hat, a colorful outfit, and with cane in hand, this elegant lady cannot easily be missed. She and her daughter, Coquetta Laverna Conyers Brooks, are frequently seen. They are an often-noted twosome at community, church, and school events,

Ms. Creecy is not letting her age slow her down. She is always ready to encounter new experiences, learn more, and to talk about history, a topic she loves.

Born Aug. 1, 1935, in Wilmington, and a graduate of Clifton University in South Carolina, she was licensed to teach in four states: South Carolina, Virginia, New York, and North Carolina. On Roanoke Island, where she moved after teaching in Wilmington, she taught third and fourth grade students and served as a reading specialist at Manteo Elementary School from 1977 to 1990.

Thousands she taught in her lifetime have become educators, entrepreneurs, first-time homeowners, musicians, pastors, nurses, fishermen and so much more. The pivotal role Black educators played in Wilmington and the surrounding area during challenging historical times influenced her decision to teach.

She is a lifelong and proud member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. (AKSA) the first intercollegiate historical Black sorority. She has been a former board member of several organizations, including presently serving as an honorary board member for our organization, the Pea Island Preservation Society Inc.

Ms. Creecy can most easily be found at church each Sunday morning, sitting faithfully in her favored spot, front-row pew and left side of the sanctuary at Haven Creek Missionary Baptist Church. There she serves as a deaconess and as a Sunday school and vacation Bible school teacher.

This church is connected to the story of the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island, where thousands sought freedom and a safe haven during the Civil War. Her faith and love of God have always been primary in her life and teachings.

Ms. Creecy is perhaps best known as the founder of the Echoes of Heritage, or the shortened Echoes they are called, an a cappella singing group she formed shortly after moving to Roanoke Island. She is the directress and leader of the group.

Originally 12 singers, the Echoes have had three different sets of singers over time. Over the years they have performed at countless events under her guidance.

Ms. Creecy is the heart and soul of the group known for singing spiritual songs. Once she and a singing partner even had a regular Tuesday spot on a local radio station. Although the Echoes are not as active or big in number as in the past, still today at 90 years old, Ms. Creecy continues to receive requests to perform.

Today she and her daughter Coquetta, typically with two, three or four additional singers, occasionally delight audiences at selected events with spiritual songs. In recent years, they have performed at several events. This includes events held at the College of the Albemarle – Dare campus and other locations for programs sponsored by our organization, Dare County, and the Town of Manteo. Many of the programs she attends result in her warmly greeting adults who were former students.

As a born educator, she especially enjoys sharing her own experiences, including the joys, challenges and difficulties she faced as part of her own personal journey.

In recent years she and her accompanists have performed at three of our five annual Juneteenth “Sounds of Freedom” celebrations held at the Pea Island Cookhouse Museum, where the story of Keeper Richard Etheridge and the surfmen he commanded at the historic Pea Island Life-saving Station is told.

Ms. Creecy is a devoted supporter, always ready to raise awareness of this history. On several occasions theEchoeshave performed at the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Day celebration held on Roanoke Island.

These events are two of her favorites. Seeing and watching her so passionately sing songs that serve as living history and which reflect her own personal journey is touching. It is also an important reminder of how the music inspires and unites.

Past members of the Echoeshave included many with roots on Roanoke Island. The late Dellerva Collins, who served as mayor pro tem and as a Manteo town commissioner for years, was part of the original 12. Likewise, the late Virginia Tillett and Naomi Augusta Collins, both pioneering community leaders and educators on Roanoke Island, sang with the Echoes.

Images showing women joyfully singing along with her who were known advocates for voices most often not seen or heard. Several through the years, past and present, are the descendants of those who lived on the Freedmen’s Colony or who are part of Ms. Creecy’s beloved church community.

When asked the most important lesson her mother has taught her, Coquetta quickly says, “to choose kindness always in spite of others.”

Her son Damian, a Manteo High School and Elizabeth City State University graduate, and who currently is pursuing a master’s in the computer engineering field, is someone Ms. Creecy is especially proud of.  She and her grandson are very, very close, Coquetta adds. 

When asked what lesson his grandmother has most taught him, Damian says, “never remain stagnant and to pursue improvement daily,” two lessons that also reflect the guidance Ms. Creecy has passed along to her many students over the years.

All are encouraged to help celebrate Mother’s Day this year by sending Ms. Creecy (or Ms. Pledger as some know her by her late husband’s last name) a special card. She has no idea of this request so please also help us to keep it a surprise! Without a doubt, the avid reader she continues to be, she will greatly enjoy reading these special cards on Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day or any greetings may be sent to: Mrs. Doris Creecy, P.O. Box 1068, Manteo, NC 27954.

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.” 

Jean Beasley was one of those people seemingly born to lead, happy to work in the trenches with a fervor and tenacity that magnetized others to her.

It was her charisma, her penchant to teach others about sea turtles, her drive to protect the iconic ocean dwellers, and her determination to carry out her daughter’s vision that led to the founding of the beloved Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center on Topsail Island.

Beasley died early Tuesday morning “in the company of loved ones,” according to a center Facebook post. She was 90.

As word has spread of her passing, the center has received an outpouring from former interns expressing how Beasley’s passion and guidance shaped not only their career paths, but also their lives.

“I can attest to that because my life was completely changed after I met her,” Terry Meyer, the center’s deputy and conservation director and Beasley’s longtime friend, said Wednesday morning.

Meyer was introduced to Beasley in 1995 at Topsail Beach’s annual Autumn With Topsail Festival. Tucked somewhere among booths featuring handmade arts and crafts was Beasley’s stand, where she explained the Topsail Turtle Project Nesting Program to any interested passersby.

“She mentioned that there was a nest in front of her house if we wanted to go look at it. She lives about a block away from my house so I did walk down there, and she came charging out of the house in a very protective mode, which I would later learn the turtle people do,” Meyer said.

Those initial, brief encounters would later prompt Meyer to attend a volunteer meeting of the Topsail Turtle Project.

“She’s so charismatic. When I left that meeting, I thought protecting sea turtles was the most important, noble thing I could do with my life. I mean, she’s just, it was like three hours of brainwashing, and I never looked back,” Meyer laughed.

By that time, Beasley had long established a home in Surf City.

The native North Carolinian grew up in Henderson, a small town a little more than 40 miles northeast of Raleigh. She was awarded a full scholarship to Duke University, where she earned a degree and received her teacher certification in 1958.

She first moved to Topsail Island with her husband, Fred, after he received orders to Camp Lejeune, according to a 2005 report in the Wilmington Star-News.

The couple lived on the island two short years before Fred Beasley got out of the Marine Corps and took a job in Ohio, where they lived for 20 years. There, they raised sons, Barney and Kevin, and daughter, Karen.

Each year, the family would vacation in Topsail Island. Jean and Fred returned to Topsail Island to live full time in the early 1980s after he retired.

Less than 10 years after their move to Surf City, Karen, 29, died in 1991 from leukemia. Jean picked up the torch and carried forward Karen’s plans for the turtle project.

Within five years of Karen’s death, Jean struck up a deal with Topsail Beach to lease a small, waterfront lot nestled along Banks Channel and just behind town hall for $1 a year.

The new sea turtle hospital opened in 1997.

“A lot of groundbreaking, excellent work went on in that 900-square-foot building and that’s where our heart was,” Meyer said. “When I tell people we literally fished off the end of the dock to feed the turtles, that is a true story. Those are our humble beginnings. It was all running on a dream and it was running on Jean’s charisma.”

Beasley “had a big smile, and she had a hug for everybody, but she also had an iron will and she ran the program from a position of strength,” Meyer said.

Patient demand pushed the hospital to capacity, and then some, on a recurring basis, and, in 2013, a new, 13,000-square-foot center was opened on Surf City’s mainland.

“Our success over the years and being in this building today is because of Jean’s stewardship and leadership and our ability to properly manage our funds while saving hundreds of turtles,” Meyer said.

As of Wednesday, the hospital had cared for “at least” 1,701 turtles, she said. Of those, 1,290 had been rehabilitated and released.

In its Facebook post announcing Jean’s death, center officials thanked her “for sharing your dreams with us.”

“You inspired us to create a better world – for the turtles, for Mother Ocean, and for all. We will do our best to carry forward your legacy. Swim in Peace.”

Beasley was awarded Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sea Turtle Society in 2017.

She stepped down as the center’s executive director in 2021 and later moved to Tennessee to live with one of her sons and daughters-in-law, Meyer said.

Up until this year, Jean would return in the summers to visit the center.

“It was very important to us and to her to have her meet with our interns and just impart some stories and some history,” Meyer said. “We followed her because she demonstrated every day what it took to save sea turtles because she did the work. She was down and dirty doing the work every day, and she didn’t shy away from any task. I watched her – from medical treatments on sea turtles to gluing PVC together, to repairing a pump – she did all things and she led by example. You know, it’s like she was our beating heart.”

Petty Officer 1st Class Kyle Jefferson, a native of Jacksonville, says his proudest accomplishment in the Navy is graduating from the P-8A Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course.

“The goal of the course is to train aircrew to become experts in using the P-8A’s weapons systems and sensors and to lead complex military operations involving the aircraft,” Jefferson said in a recent hometown news story published by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Heidi Cheek with the Navy Office of Community Outreach.

Jefferson graduated from White Oak High School in 2019, joined the Navy six years ago and serves as a naval aircrewman (operator) assigned to Patrol Squadron (VP) 26.

“Growing up in a military town taught me a respect for service, discipline and community,” Jefferson said. “That environment instilled in me a sense of responsibility and pride, values that are essential in the Navy. Understanding the lifestyle and mindset of military life helped make the transition smoother for me.”

The squadron flies and maintains the Navy’s P-8A Poseidon multimission maritime aircraft. The aircraft provides long-range maritime patrol capability, and according to the report, “the P-8A has transformed how the Navy’s maritime patrol and reconnaissance force will train, operate and deploy, according to Navy officials. P-8A aircraft deploy around the globe to monitor the world’s oceans wherever they are needed.”

Jefferson said that both his grandfather’s and his father’s military service inspired his decision to join the military. “My grandfather served in the Army in Vietnam, and my father served 12 years in the Marine Corps, and it seemed like a great idea to continue the legacy of military service.”

The Navy is celebrating its 250th birthday this year, and Navy officials are promoting its defense of freedom and protection of a maritime nation. Navy officials said that with 90% of global commerce traveling by sea and internet access relying on undersea fiberoptic cables, the nation’s prosperity is linked to recruiting and retaining talented people from across the country.

“The hard work and dedication of our sailors have been the driving force behind our squadron’s success, enabling us to remain mission-effective and ready at all times,” said VP-26 commanding officer, Cmdr. Taylor Barros in the report. “Their relentless commitment has shaped a forward-leaning team that consistently meets challenges head-on and excels in every operational environment.”

Jefferson said that he was grateful to others for supporting him in his Navy career.

“I would like to thank my wife, Salah, for supporting me through multiple deployments, missed birthdays and holidays,” Jefferson said. “Having a loving wife to come back to makes it a little bit easier.”

He was a lawyer, Vietnam veteran, military judge, retired Marine Corps colonel, commercial fisherman, photographer, volunteer, mentor, advocate and, to some, an adversary.

Above his extensive resume, above all else, Rick Dove was a family man, one whose devotion to his wife, children and grandchildren ran as deep as the waters he fought decades to protect.

Dove, one of the first Riverkeepers in the Southeast and the original Neuse Riverkeeper, died Aug. 22. He was 86.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at Cotten Funeral Home in New Bern, the riverfront city Dove called home. Visitation will be held an hour prior to the service.

In professional circles, Dove was regarded as a no-nonsense, straight shooter who unabashedly took on any industry, whether it was concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, or wastewater treatment plants, responsible for polluting the Neuse River.

Advocating for water quality protections is a hard job, he would say. Polluters are powerful, well-connected and well-funded, he advised. Fighting for clean waterways requires thick skin and unyielding tenacity, he stressed.

“One of the things I remember most about Rick is that he did not sugarcoat things,” said Coastal Carolina Riverwatch Executive Director Lisa Rider. “He said exactly how things are and that was incredibly beneficial for the folks who worked alongside him. We have a lot of tough Riverkeepers out there today because of how he taught.”

His connection to the water spanned back to boyhood, when he dreamed of being a fisherman.

Dove’s shot at doing just that came in the mid-1980s when he retired after 25 years in the Marine Corps.

He wasted no time tucking away his spit-shined shoes for what he described in a Sound Rivers publication as “the dirtiest clothes I could find and became a commercial fisherman.”

“Things were great until about 1990,” Dove said.

That was the year he and his son, Todd, who fished with him, started to notice their catch sick with sores.

Dove got out of the commercial fishing business. He couldn’t justify selling sick fish, he’d later tell people.

He returned to practicing law, opening R.J. Dove and Associates offices in Havelock and Jacksonville in 1991. Two years later, a job listing advertised in a local newspaper caught his eye.

It was a newly created position called Neuse Riverkeeper. In 1993, Dove became the first to bear that title, one he carried until 2000 when he became the Southeastern representative for Waterkeeper Alliance.

Larry Baldwin distinctly recalls his first impression of Dove after taking the job of Lower Neuse Riverkeeper in 2002.

“I first got to know Rick and it’s like, dang, this guy’s going to be tough to deal with,” Baldwin said. “At that point he still had a lot of the Marine in him. Not that that was bad, but it was just different and, with Rick, it was either you’re going to get into this full-speed ahead or you might as well not get in it at all. Rick would take you at face value, but you also had to prove yourself. You couldn’t just tell him, ‘This is what I am.’ He wanted to see it and he had a way of seeing it, even when you didn’t know he was looking. He could really kind of sense who you were. If you came at Rick trying to overly impress him, you were fighting a losing battle.”

But the sometimes gruff-speaking mentor quickly became a friend, and Baldwin got to see a side of that Dove perhaps revealed only to those whom he was closest.

Dove was a prankster at heart. He was, not surprisingly, also a good arguer.

He was a private man, reserving conversation about his family unless and until he was asked about them. He rarely spoke of his time as a Marine, but faithfully met with a group of fellow Marine Corps veterans well into his golden years.

If he loved you, you knew it. He and his wife, Joanne, shared 60 years together.

“His top priority was the love of his life, Joanne Dove,” Rider said. “His commitment to his family was incredibly important to him.”

They raised two children, Todd, who preceded them in death, and a daughter, Hollyanne.

“Everything for Rick came back to family,” Baldwin said. “That was his reason for being. He loved his family and seeing him and Joanne together, you could tell they just had fun.”

Dove was a “very warm” person, one who was as tenacious on the racquetball court as he was a waterkeeper, Baldwin said.

“I am a blessed individual for having spent almost 23 years with him,” he said. “I’m not sure it has hit me yet. Never has there been somebody in my life that impacted me the way Rick impacted me, and still does. There’s never been one like him and I don’t think there ever will be. In my point of view, we have the obligation to continue what Rick started and what he continued to do. That’s my promise to not just him, but to myself, that we’re not going to let his legacy end just because he’s not here.”

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.”

Dewey Hemilright has spent more than 30 years on the water as a commercial fisherman. Along the way he has become an outspoken, sometimes harsh critic of how commercial fishing is regulated in the United States.

He is forceful in expressing his opinions, his language sometimes colorful, but the knowledge is deep, insightful and earned through a lifetime in the commercial fishing industry.

“I started in the fish house, unloading the boat. That’s the lowest tier on the totem pole,” he recalled.

He moved up the totem pole to working in a fish house, “packing, laboring long hours, nights, winter, cold, all that other stuff.” And when he turned 21, he headed to Ocean City, Maryland, to go fishing.

“My first two weeks, I lost 15 pounds from being seasick and throwing up. But the first trip we went fishing, we caught a big bluefin tuna, and I thought it was the most unreal thing. And from then on, I’ve been going my own route,” he said, adding, “but I never thought when I got started into it, that (the industry) would end up where it is today.”

He’s a longliner, fishing from his 42-foot-long boat, the F/V Tarbaby. The name, he explained, came about because it’s a smaller version of the 48-foot Tarheel, a charter vessel owned by John Bayliss and built by Ricky Scarborough.

He doesn’t get out to sea much at all any more. The combination of his advocacy, bad knees and years spent on the water have taken their toll, although the Tarbaby still heads out from Wanchese with a father-and-son crew he’s worked with for years.

Hemilright resides in Kitty Hawk with his wife Sara Hallas, education and outreach director for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review.

Dwindling numbers

Longlining has become the least environmentally harmful method of commercial fishing, although “25 years ago, it wasn’t, but for the U.S. now, we’re the Mother Teresa,” Hemilright said describing the improvements regulators demanded and the changes the fishing industry made — or at least the changes have been made in the U.S. fishing fleet, which is one of Hemilright’s biggest complaints.

As to what remains of the domestic longline fishing fleet — Hemilright estimates the numbers from Maine to Texas total fewer than 50 active vessels — is forced to harvest fish in an environmentally safe way, but other nations aren’t, yet they have the same access to American markets as he does.

“You would want the U.S. standard of the harvest in these quota (for) these other (nations) in the Atlantic to be doing the same method. Or if they’re not, they don’t get our marketplace,” Hemilright told Coastal Review.

Hemilright’s concerns are wide-ranging. Asked about regulations and whether they are necessary, his one-word answer is “absolutely.” His answer, though, comes with a caveat: Stock assessments are based on models that use data selected by the scientists working on the assessment.

“That model performs by the data you interject into it,” he said.

A lot of studying

Hemilright was an indifferent student — at best — in high school, he said, telling Coastal Review, “If I would have studied this much in school, I wouldn’t be fishing today.”

The studying he does now has taken him to Majorca, Spain, for the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) in an advisory role in 2019. From 2012 until 2023 he represented North Carolina on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, and served as the liaison to the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

And it requires a lot of studying.

“You got to know the politics, you got to know the council, you got to know the stock assessment. You got to know this whole different picture,” Hemilright said describing what is needed to be an effective advocate.

Hemilright has stepped back. “Twenty-five years of bitching, complaining at fishery meetings, to where I’m coming down the backside of the hill and aging out,” he explained.

Yet, he is still passionate and highly critical of fisheries management describing the science behind the regulatory structure as trying “to put a roof on the house, and we don’t even got pilings for the foundation.”

“You would not run your life, your business, or anything, by the way that accounting is taking place,” he said. “The folks at the table would not want their livelihood, their household income, or anything based on this MSC.”

The MSC, or Marine Stewardship Council, is an international organization that rewards “efforts to protect oceans and safeguard seafood supplies for the future.” Its fisheries certification program is a widely used standard to establish whether a fishery is sustainable. The MSC awards its blue label only to fisheries that the organization determines meets its standards.

Hemilright said the organization is inconsistent in how it uses data to award blue label certifications, particularly sample sizes and margins of error.

“Some of them have a lower decision of standard of error. Some of them have a higher standard error,” he said.

The MSC has been criticized in recent years. The U.K. charity Shark Guardian published a 2023 study by the advocacy group On the Hook that concluded, “the MSC’s drive for growth and income has come at the expense of the Standard’s effectiveness and scientific credibility.”

Hemilright is particularly critical of recreational fishing. The criticism is not directed at the men, women and kids throwing a line in the water, rather it’s how what is caught gets counted – or doesn’t. He described recreational catch limits as pieces of a pie, “and you whack this pie up here, and you whack this pie up here — there ain’t so much of a pot of a resource out there.”

Commercial fishing is highly monitored with cameras on boats and inspectors taking trips with fishing craft to ensure compliance with catch limits. Recreational landings are self-reported and fisheries biologists use a small sample size to estimate how many fish are being caught.

Although recreational landings are estimates, they are often given a larger share of the pie than commercial fishing interests. Hemilright is critical of a recent North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission decision to consider increasing the amount of southern flounder allocated to recreational fishing to 50% and reducing the commercial portion by 10% of what had been previously allocated. The reallocation plan came despite acknowledgement that the recreational catch was 14,000 pounds over the 2024 limit. Commercial landings were within 1.6% of allocation.

“You’re taking it from one that’s accountable for its catch, and you’re giving it to the other side that’s not that’s not accountable to the methodology that’s been placed upon them,” Hemilright said.

Recognitions

Hemilright  has received numerous awards for his advocacy. In 2015, the Coastal Federation awarded him its Pelican Award for “outstanding contributions to education and outreach on behalf of the federation.”

The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council presented him in 2024 with the Ricks E Savage Award “given annually to an individual who has made exceptional contributions to the management and conservation of fishery resources in the mid-Atlantic region.”

Looking back on his career, Hemilright laughed at how it unfolded.

“I did it for North Carolina, that’s where I’ve been advocating, and my community and my town. I never thought when I got started into it, that it would end up today, not just what I’m doing, but the industry, because the world evolved where the technology changed, things have changed,” he said.

What do you think would happen if you took a young guy who grew up as a fishing nut in western New York State and transplanted him to eastern North Carolina?

If you said that he would turn into a crazy fishing adult, just in a different place, you would be correct.

Justin Manners grew up in a small town, west of Rochester, New York, and just south of Lake Ontario. This meant he had access to some of the finest trout and salmon in the East.

“I grew up fishing creek mouths at the lake for king salmon, steelhead, and brown trout. This was seasonal, but definitely what we looked forward to every fall,” Manners said recently.

It was a family experience with everybody pitching in to help each other learn the best way to go about things.

“I grew up fishing with my dad, brothers, uncles and cousins,” he said. “It would be difficult for me to single out one person that was my biggest influence.”

In case you didn’t know, there is a huge variety of fish to catch there.

“Growing up we would fish for anything that would bite. Depending on the season, we would fish for largemouth and smallmouth bass, catfish, northern pike, carp, walleye, perch, trout, and salmon.”

Of all his family members, Manners said that the fishing bug bit him hardest.

“I am the middle child of five boys,” he explained. “All of my brothers fish occasionally, but I wouldn’t call it a passion for any of them like it is for me.”

Manners moved to Kitty Hawk in 2017 and immediately became enamored of the fishing surrounding his new home on the Outer Banks.

“My favorite fish to target are red drum and speckled trout. I am learning a lot and there are still plenty of other fish.”

Manners relocated to Richlands in 2022 to set up shop for an HVAC business.

“I worked my way up in the trade, from helper, installer and technician, and recently became the regional manager for Pro-Serv Food Equipment,” he said of the New Bern-based commercial kitchen service firm. This new relationship was formed through a mutual love of fishing with Jared Shepherd, the owner of the company, but it’s deeper than just fishing. Manners sees a future for himself in the industry.

“I truly enjoy my career in the HVAC field and greatly appreciate the opportunities that I have been given,” Manners said, adding that, since everybody around here needs air conditioning a big part of the year, “I think that’s probably good advice for a lot of young guys looking to get started.”

When he’s not helping people stay cool, you’ll find Manners out on the water somewhere.

“My favorite way to fish is to come up with a game plan for red drum or speckled trout and try to execute that,” he said.

That means he’ll go with a friend or by himself, and doesn’t mind either.

“One of the benefits of being solo is that I can really focus on specific spots and pick them apart,” said Manners.

Whether the fishing is hot or cold, there’s always something to take home from the day.

“I have found that I learn more on the slow days than when they bite anything. The key to consistently catching fish is to learn every time you’re on the water,” he said, noting that fish don’t come and go just for the fun of it — they’re always looking for water that provides them safety, food and comfort.

“More times than not when you find the fish there is a reason why they are where they are: bait, structure, depth changes, grass beds, moving water, etcetera” he explained.

As a proponent of making a plan before heading out, Manners often quotes the old adage often attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

He never wants to be out fishing without an idea of what he’s going to be doing beforehand.

“The most important thing to having a successful day is taking all outside factors into consideration and coming up with a plan,” he said.

For now, Manners said he is planning on staying in the HVAC business because he likes what he’s doing, but he also wants to continue learning and pass his love of fishing as well as his experience and knowledge, on to others. He recently got his Operator of Uninspected Passenger Vessels, or OUPV, license from the Coast Guard, permitting him to operate as a fishing charter captain with no more than six paying passengers.

“I took OUPV/Six Pack course last fall through Carteret Community College and got my Captains License,” he said. “Since fishing is a passion of mine, I would love to make a career out of it in some fashion in the future. I have not put a timetable on it yet, simply because I have a responsibility to give my best effort in my current position.”

In the meantime, look for Justin Manners on social media. He likes to live stream his fishing trips online as Salty Toad Fishing. It’s pretty entertaining.

“Salty Toad Fishing is to share my experiences on the water and help others learn from them, good or bad,” Manners said.

That includes this tip: “It is vitally important to understand why certain spots hold fish. That is the difference between catching fish on a slow day or going home with a cooler full of clean ice.”

When he was young, newspaperman and avid fly fisher Rip Woodin didn’t fish at all.

Instead, he used his talents on the tennis courts of the North Carolina junior circuit, eventually finding himself on the B squad at the University of North Carolina. There he found out that the talent level seemed to stretch on without him.

“I was on the freshman team at Carolina but never got to play a match because I was on the bench picking up leftover balls,” Woodin said.

How does a young man, who is a decent tennis player but doesn’t fish at all, become a lifelong fly fisherman and ardent conservationist in his later years?

Woodin’s life has seen him move three-quarters of the way across the continental U.S. and eventually return to North Carolina. Now he’s fishing waters and doing the kind of work that he never dreamed of back when he was smacking tennis balls across the net.

After graduating from UNC in January 1969 with a double major in journalism and English, Woodin joined the Marine Corps where he enjoyed a pleasant six-week vacation at Parris Island, South Carolina. Later, he spent six years working in Greensboro while also serving in the Marine Corps Reserve.

That’s when, in a twist, Woodin received an offer to join the Air Force and go to flight school.

“(I) probably would have been sent to Vietnam and met John McCain,” Woodin theorized, but instead he stayed in Greensboro until 1976.

“I worked various reporting jobs for the Greensboro Daily News,” he said of the Guilford County paper.

Then in 1976, he moved to Jackson, Wyoming. He became editor of the Jackson Hole Guide and met his wife Jane.

“I was living in the basement apartment of a condo while three women lived upstairs. The other two moved out and Jane moved downstairs,” Woodin said.

Jackson was where they stayed until 1986 and where many of the events that would shape much of Woodin’s later life took place.

“We were married in 1979 and two of our three children were born there,” Woodin said of Jackson, which is also where he first learned to fly fish.

“Paul Bruun was my boss when I first moved out there, and he gave me a fly rod,” Woodin said.

Bruun would go on to be inducted into the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame in Roscoe, New York, in October 2021.

Bruun’s was an opportune gift because, “Jackson is all about fly fishing for cutthroat trout,” Woodin said.

Woodin, with an eye for newspaper design, quickly found that the thrill of fly fishing was the visual aspect.

“The thing that really appealed to me was seeing the fish come up and take the fly,” Woodin said. “When a nice cutthroat trout comes up to hit a hopper, he just rolls up on it slowly, opens his mouth and takes it back down. Then you lift the rod and you’ve got an 18-inch fish.”

There was also an opportune real estate purchase that would come to shape Woodin’s later years.

“We purchased a piece of property that we never developed and when the kids got older and we had moved away, we decided to sell it. Real estate values in Jackson had risen dramatically over 30 years, and after using the money to help pay for the kids’ colleges, we were able to buy a duplex in Atlantic Beach,” he said.

By that time, after having jobs at different newspapers in various states, the move back to North Carolina came with a new title, publisher at the Rocky Mount Telegram.

The Woodins quickly took to the coastal life and they decided if they were going to be spending a lot of time at the beach, they needed to have a boat.

“I went to Jerry at Fort Macon Marina and bought the boat I still have today,” he said.

He found that the variety of marine life and saltwater fishing was something he really liked, and he got into it quickly.

“I bought a saltwater fly rod and starting fishing around here pretty quickly,” he said.

As Woodin progressed with his fly fishing, he started traveling to some pretty far-flung places where he tangled with a lot of different fish.

“The most challenging is the permit because it’s the hardest to catch and the hardest to hook,” he said. “They fight hard and they’re rare. You don’t go out and get 10 shots on permit in a day, you’re usually lucky to get two or three.”

One of the most thrilling species, however, is the tarpon, Woodin said.

“Obviously, because they jump so much,” he explained.

Closer to home, Woodin loves to fish for false albacore.

“The hardest fighter is false albacore. They fight better than bonefish (and I’ve got some big bonefish). But fight wise, nothing compares to a false albacore,” he said.

In recent years, Woodin has blended his experience as a newspaperman and his love for the saltwater environment and fish and applied it to becoming actively involved in conservation with the Coastal Conservation Association, an organization of recreational anglers focused on protecting the marine environment.

“For a while we put out a newspaper, which I edited, and because of my background in writing I wrote press releases and stories,” Woodin said. “I still advise them on good PR strategy.”

He’s also on the board of CCA-NC and an active participant in the state chapter’s activities.

Woodin’s fishing advice?

“The key is practicing your casting and being able to hit your target, but more important is keeping your emotions under control so you are able to concentrate and don’t basically screw it up when staring at a big fish.”

In the end, Woodin said, “If you take care of the fish, the fishing will take care of itself.”

KILL DEVIL HILLS — It speaks to the storytelling talent of National Park Service interpreter and historian Darrell Collins that audiences listening to his talk about the Wright brothers’ aerodynamic breakthrough of roll, pitch and yaw would often have tears welling from their eyes by the end.

Collins, who won numerous national and international awards during his four-decade career with the agency, died in his Manteo home on Dec. 24 at age 69.

As sons of a preacher, with lives absent scandal or even romance, Wilbur and Orville Wright’s story of first flight might seem heavy on aviation physics and difficult to translate in an engaging way, Scott Babinowich, acting deputy superintendent with the National Park Service Outer Banks Group, said during a remembrance for Collins held Saturday at Wright Brothers National Memorial.

“But Darrell had a gift to take those challenging concepts and craft them in a way that’s relatable to everybody,” he told the audience that filled the park’s Flight Room, where Collins had given his talk “thousands of times to hundreds of thousands of visitors.”

“He found a way to blend science and history and art to paint a picture that resonated with everybody that entered this building.”

Babinowich noted that in an agency as large as the park service, “it is rare to find a park ranger who had such a lasting impact in a single park” the way Collins did. With his easygoing approach, Collins had a way of enabling listeners to see themselves in the Wrights’ story, but also to give them a reason to “care and cherish the monumental achievement,” Babinowich said.

After four years of experiments on the Outer Banks, the Wrights achieved the first powered and controlled manned flight on Dec. 17, 1903, at what today is Kill Devil Hills.

A video of a brief portion of a Flight Room talk played during the remembrance shows Collins, wearing white conservator gloves and dressed in his olive-green and tan park service uniform, standing next to a full-size model of the 1903 Wright Flyer. Speaking in a soft Southern accent, he demonstrates how the pitch of the plane was controlled with a stick, which he then starts moving back and forth, accompanied by rhythmic squeaking as parts in the front of the aircraft respond.

Much of Collins’ mastery of his presentation was in his understated style that both moderated and modulated his speech and body language, building from an even cadence and simple demonstrations with his hands to closing with an intensified voice, soaring language and dramatic, sweeping arm gestures. Like a natural storyteller, he never faltered as he spoke. He employed gentle humor. And he used space between words and sentences to create the rhythmic cadence of a preacher.

“The elevator controls the pitch,” he says on the video, pausing as he slowly raises his right arm, “of the machine.”

“Take off and landing.” He slowly drops his arm.

“This motion of an airplane in flight …” he pauses as he moves his arm up faster, “is controlled by the elevator.”

As part of his typical 20- to 30-minute talk, Collins would bring the audience, almost imperceptibly, to seeing the Wrights’ feat in the context of humanity: the men, their family and their country.

He would talk about the intense competitive nature of aviation and science at the turn of the 20th century; of the contributions from the Outer Banks community; of the brilliance, fortitude and ingenuity of the brothers; and of the loyalty the brothers had to one another and their family.

He attributed the Wrights’ success to their willingness to persist, even after numerous disappointments, as well as their high character and extraordinary dedication to solving the mystery of flight.

At this point, Collins would start speaking a bit louder and faster, telling of how dramatically the two publicity-shy brothers from Ohio changed the world that day in 1903 at the sandy outpost on the Outer Banks. Visitors in the Wright Brothers Flight Room could see the exact spot right outside the large windows where the Wrights’ plane first found lift.

Indeed, as Collins would say in closing, it took just 66 years from the brothers’ first 12-second flight until the Apollo landing on the moon. That fact alone makes the Wrights’ invention Earth-shattering. But that’s not all, Collins would remind his rapt audiences.

“Folks, just about everything that flies — satellites, missiles, rockets, space shuttles — use the same fundamental principles,” Collins said in the 2014 Flight Room talk.

“You see,” he would add emphatically, his voice rising, “this is the immortal legacy of the Wright brothers.”

Often, people in the audience would sit quietly for a moment after Collins finished, dabbing their eyes.

Dave Hallac, superintendent of the park service Outer Banks Group, recounted after the remembrance how he had been at an agency event out of the area shortly after arriving on the Outer Banks when he mentioned his connection to the Wright Brothers park. The person he was speaking to responded that she had heard a talk there that had left her in tears. Hallac, who had not yet seen Collins’ presentation, apologized for the ranger upsetting her. But he had misunderstood.

“She said, ‘It was one of the most inspiring talks I’ve ever heard,’” Hallac recalled, adding about Collins: “He’s a legend. His ability to tell the Wright brothers’ story was unparalleled.

A native of Manteo with family roots dating back to the 1863-1867 Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, a community of formerly enslaved people and free Black people, Collins graduated from Elizabeth City State University with a bachelor’s in geology and history. In 1977, he started work as a seasonal park ranger on the Outer Banks and set his sights on securing a permanent position as a history interpreter.

Early on, Collins had told interviewers that he was influenced by Paul Garber and Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith, both well-known aviation historians and celebrated speakers. Although Collins soon gained acclaim for his speaking skills and as an expert on Wright brothers history, his fame shot up to international levels in the lead-up to the Centennial of First Flight in 2003.

Collins’ secret was that he was just “doing what he loved,” his wife Tonya Collins said after the event.

“It was just his passion for the Wrights, for choosing this place when they did,” she said. “He had a sense of pride in this place and its people. He was proud of the people here and that he was part of these people.”

According to his obituary, Collins was considered as one of the top three Wright brothers historians in the world. Even after retiring in 2017, he continued traveling to give lectures on the Wrights for five years. He was also a regular speaker for 35 years at the “Speakers’ Showcase Series” at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual Oshkosh Fly-In in Wisconsin.

His many awards include the Experimental Aircraft Association’s President’s Award, the Freeman Tilden Award as the park service’s top interpretive ranger in 1990, and in 2003, both the Order of the Long Leaf Pine by the North Carolina governor, and the Paul Tissandier Diploma by the National Aeronautic Association.

Collins also served for 18 years on the Manteo Board of Commissioners, filling the same seat on the town board that his mother Dellerva had held for 26 years before her death in 2005. In addition, he was the founder and president of the Pea Island Preservation Society Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to the Pea Island Lifesaving Station, the only all-Black station in the nation.

Collins, who had family connections to Pea Island, had taught the story of Keeper Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers to Dare County fourth graders.

Tonya Collins, who was married to Darrell for 22 years, said that her husband’s modest and friendly demeanor was genuine. Similar to his mother Dellerva, he never got angry, she said.

“He was truly raised by a kind person,” she said. “He came by it quite honestly.”

Reid Wilson does not disagree with those who tell him he had the best job in state government.

He loved being secretary of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

It’s a role he said he’s going to “miss terribly” when he steps in Monday as head of the state Department of Environmental Quality, a position appointed to him by Gov. Josh Stein.

“But I think now is a time of important opportunities and challenges in terms of public health and environmental protection and moving to DEQ brings me back to some of my roots,” he said in a recent telephone interview.

His is a storied environmental career spanning more than a quarter of a century. He’s been an environmental advocate, national political director of the Sierra Club, held three different titles during his tenure of nearly eight years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clinton administration, and a public affairs consultant to national environmental groups.

Outside of work, he’s a husband and father of two adult children. He declares himself the least musically talented in his family. His brother played the French horn in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for more than 30 years.

Wilson enjoys everything from classical to bluegrass to rock.

And, he loves to do his laundry.

“I don’t trust anyone else not to shrink something,” he said.

Wilson and his wife left the nation’s capital for Raleigh almost 22 years ago, lured by a job he said his wife was doubtful he would get.

She figured the Conservation Trust for North Carolina would not be interested in out-of-state applicants, Wilson said. He applied anyway.

He would go on to lead the statewide nonprofit as its executive director for 14 years. During that time, the organization’s budget nearly doubled and its success in educational outreach to youth in conservation became a national standard.

Wilson has been with the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, or DNCR, since 2017, first at the department’s chief deputy secretary. He was appointed secretary in 2020.

Today, he is grateful to call Raleigh home. Sure, he misses the friends he made in Washington, D.C., but not life inside the Beltway.

He relishes the fact that William B. Umstead State Park is a 15-minute drive from his home.

There’s a particular spot just off Company Mill Trail where Wilson often goes when he needs to think through something or make a big life decision.

Sometimes he goes there to not think at all and breathe in the tranquility he finds in the sound of water cascading over boulders and rock slabs in a creek that cuts through the park.

“It’s just a very peaceful spot for me to sort things out. It’s just perfect for sitting and watching the water in the creek go by as it tumbles over some very small falls,” Wilson said.

He is a self-described lover of hiking. Nature is his refuge.

And whenever he gets the opportunity, he indulges in both, which married well with his position as DNCR secretary because it afforded him opportunities to hike when he visited a park or preserve on official business.

He knows the terrain he’ll be visiting as DEQ secretary will be a tad different. He’s looking forward to visiting as many of the department’s coastal reserves as he can.

“I do think one of the things I want to do is get out more, to leave Raleigh and see what’s going on with DEQ work around the state and especially with all of the challenges associated with Hurricane Helene,” Wilson said. “I want to see those challenges for DEQ firsthand.”

Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend on Sept. 26, 2024, and charged north through western North Carolina, demolishing communities and killing more than 100 people in this state alone.

Wilson did not see the areas hardest hit by the hurricane when he visited portions of western North Carolina with former Gov. Roy Cooper last fall.

“But I did get a good sense of the amazing challenges ahead and the incredible work being done by people in those communities,” he said. “There are piles and piles and piles of debris still in the affected areas. There are water quality issues in lakes and streams. There are challenges with water and drinking water structure that continue so there will be lots of work that DEQ will be doing to help communities in western North Carolina recover from Hurricane Helene. I think it’s important to see that work to understand it so that, back in Raleigh, we can do everything we can to efficiently help those communities. One thing I’ve learned over and over again is you understand an issue so much better if you actually go there and see it and talk to the people involved.”

He knows the work related to water quality issues will not be isolated to those areas of the state ravaged by the storm.

Tens of thousands of North Carolinians living everywhere from unincorporated, rural communities to towns and cities, including those within the Cape Fear Region, have been grappling with the knowledge their drinking water sources are contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

PFAS are chemical compounds that are used in the manufacturing of a host of consumer goods from food packaging to water resistant clothing.

While research is ongoing into possible human health effects of these chemicals – there are anywhere from 12,000 to upwards of 15,000 – some have been linked to cardiovascular disease, weakened immune function, various types of cancer and decreased liver and kidney function.

Wilson underscored what he said is a firehose of information that is only starting to trickle in as he takes his new role.

“At this point I have a lot more to study on that issue so that I can speak with a deeper knowledge base,” he said. “Having said that, these are dangerous chemicals that settle in the environment. EPA has set drinking water standards for them that local water utilities must meet to protect their customers.”

The state Environmental Management Commission appears to be moving forward with establishing health standards of PFAS in groundwater, but for only three of eight chemical compounds suggested by DEQ.

The commission’s proposal has been met with a flurry of public backlash as residents demand more protections for their drinking water sources.

“I know there’s conflict about the best next steps to protect people from them, but my hope is to be able to bring together different viewpoints and figure out a way that’s equitable, that protects people from these forever chemicals,” Wilson said.

He has an outline in his head of how he wants the first month to go. There will be meetings with staff, briefings, working with members of the North Carolina Senate on the state confirmation process, and making sure he understands the intricacies of big decisions that will need to be made in his early days with DEQ.

Looking back, Wilson said he’s proud of the dramatic expansion of state park land, trails and other outdoor recreational access in the state park system under his tenure.

The department continues to work hard updating old exhibits at history museums, historic sites and other facilities that share history, expanding their online content, and making sure those exhibits include more perspectives.

He’s particularly proud of the Dueling Dinosaurs exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. If you haven’t seen it, you must, he said.

The one thing he’ll miss most about DNCR secretary? Introducing bands that perform at the big music festivals DNCR sponsors in the state.

“Let’s just put it this way, introducing The Avett Brothers three years ago at MerleFest was a big highlight,” Wilson said. “That’s not going to happen anymore. But I am excited about (DEQ’s) mission, which is to protect public health by protecting air quality, water quality, our land and soils and that mission is also critical to strengthening our state’s economy.”

This story has been updated to include funeral arrangements.

Avid birder, wildlife enthusiast and conservationist John Oliver Fussell III, 75, of Morehead City, is being remembered for his decades of contributions to raising awareness of often-overlooked environmental issues affecting the North Carolina coast, particularly its plants and animals, of which he had a deep understanding.

Fussell, who studied zoology at North Carolina State University, died Friday, Dec. 27, 2024, at home. His fellow environmental advocates and scientists have shared their fond remembrances in the days since Fussell’s death.

Paul Branch Jr., who retired last year from his role as park ranger and historian at Fort Macon State Park, shared some details with Coastal Review on Fussell’s early work.

Fussell first held an internship at the park in summer 1974, studying the Theodore Roosevelt Natural Area and its resources and doing preliminary work to lay out a nature trail.

Then, in fall 1975, he was hired under the Comprehensive Employment Training Act, or CETA, Manpower Program both to provide a “State Parks ‘presence’ at the Natural Area during the construction of the Marine Resources Center,” now the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores, and to develop the nature trail, Branch said.

“Based on his previous intern work, he established a half-mile trail through the maritime forest along the northeast corner of the tract to the salt marsh along the sound and back,” Branch explained.

The trail was named the Hoffman Nature Trail in honor of Alice Green Hoffman, the relative of the Roosevelt family who had owned and managed the large tracts of land on Bogue Banks from which the Theodore Roosevelt Natural Area had been donated.

Fussell worked there through summer 1976, and that fall under the CETA program, he worked at Fort Macon State Park as an interpreter to give nature and history programs at the park year-round.

“In addition to giving the usual history guided tours and slide shows at the fort, Fussell also began giving bird and nature walks to the public, which were well received. He also created a birding checklist for the park. In the fall and winter of 1977, he worked sorting through and cataloguing museum artifacts at the park,” Branch said, adding that Fussell left the park in 1978 for other pursuits but returned periodically over the years to take birding groups around the park.

Coastal Review contributor and former Hammocks Beach State Park superintendent Sam Bland said he first met Fussell in summer 1978, when both were working at Fort Macon State Park.

“John was the historian/naturalist and I was a park attendant,” Bland said. “I was envious of John as he was always out giving tours of the fort or taking people on nature hikes while I spent most of my time mowing the mosquito-infested grasses of the fort. But we did get to spend some time birding together and he introduced me to the painted buntings. He was a birding mentor to many and I think that is when he was happiest, sharing his knowledge with others.”

Bland said he considered Fussell to be a friend, but, he clarified, their relationship was more on a professional level.

“During my years at Hammocks Beach State Park, we would collaborate to conduct bird surveys on Bear Island and the surrounding marshes. He was my go-to person, as he was to many, for any birding identification or related questions. Often, he would give me a call to see if I had seen a species of bird that he had recently seen further up the coast,” Bland explained. “If it was a specific species of interest, such as a rare, unusual or out of season sighting, he would quiz me about details as he wasn’t going to consider it a confirmed sighting unless he was sure. One winter, a fairly large group of red phalaropes, which is an offshore bird, were spotted close to shore. John wanted to know if I had seen them off of Bear Island, which I had. But it took some convincing to reassure John that I had actually seen this specific species.”

Bland also noted that while well known as an ornithologist, Fussell was also a skilled botanist who would arrive at first light on the days of planned maintenance and cleanups at the Hoop Pole Creek nature trail in Atlantic Beach to put flagging tape on the rare plants to make sure they didn’t get trimmed and were protected.

“He was a great advocate for preservation, protection and restoration of our coastal resources. His ornithological and botanical surveys were instrumental in documenting our natural coastal heritage, especially during times of rampant development. His knowledge was an invaluable resource that will be greatly missed,” Bland said.

The day after Fussell’s death, Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Adviser Derb Carter shared on an online birding forum that with Fussell’s death, North Carolina had lost a “giant in the birding community,” of which he had been a fixture for 60 years.

“He knew the birds and every birding corner along his beloved NC coast like no one else,” Carter posted, referencing Fussell’s book published in in 1994 by the University of North Carolina Press, “Birder’s Guide to Coastal North Carolina” which “remains the definitive guide.”

Carter noted that Fussell “cared deeply” about protecting important habitats and as an accomplished naturalist contributed his knowledge and observations to the identification and preservation of lands by state and federal agencies and conservation organizations.

Among Fussell’s many contributions to promoting birding in the state, Carter explained that Fussell regularly volunteered to lead birding field trips for Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, Wings Over Water Wildlife Festival on the Outer Banks, and other birding events.

“The one thing you could almost be certain of on one of John’s trips is you were going to get your feet soaked within the first hour. If the shortest way was dry, John would take the long way through the marsh or tidal flats on the chance of flushing a rail, sparrow, or wren,” Carter said.

He led Morehead City’s Christmas Bird Count for more than 60 years and participated in the counts in Wilmington and Masonboro Island.

“Sun, wind, rain, or snow he would be dropped off on the north end (of Masonboro Island) by boat first thing in the morning and walk the eight and a half miles to the south end to be picked up late afternoon.  The gulls, terns, shorebirds, and pelicans will be looking for him on Saturday and will miss him. We will all miss him,” Carter said.

Peter Vankevich, co-publisher of the Ocracoke Observer on Ocracoke Island, is a bird enthusiast who founded and serves as compiler of the Ocracoke and Portsmouth Island Christmas bird counts. He’s also an active supporter of the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust’s longtime efforts to protect Ocracoke’s 132-acre Springer’s Point Preserve.

“I first met John some years ago when he led a spring walk for the N.C. Coastal Land Trust through Springer’s Point on Ocracoke Island —  not for birds, but to point out the native plants of which seemed to have an equal amount of passion,” Vankevich said. “He was a gracious field trip leader.”

In recent years, Fussell frequently visited the massive wetland restoration project at North River Wetlands Preserve in Carteret County, documenting the changing bird communities as the wetlands are restored, Carter said. The preserve is a 6,000-acre restoration project of the Coastal Federation.

When recognized in 2017 by the North Carolina Coastal Federation with a Pelican Award “For Enduring Commitment to Preserving the Spectacular Natural Heritage of Our Coast,” he said that for many years he focused on environmental issues for which his involvement is disproportionately important.

For example, “Issues that I know a lot about but which are mostly ignored by the general environmental community,” he explained. “I have mostly focused on protecting rare plants and habitats in a major reserve of native biodiversity in our backyard, the Croatan National Forest.”

Fussell told Coastal Review at the time that he spent countless hours documenting the amount and numbers of rare plants in the Croatan National Forest, and sometimes their disappearance, and then getting that information on the radar screen by providing it to the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program and the U.S. Forest Service.

He added that he monitored projects, often at several stages, to make sure information did not get ignored or forgotten.

“I find it rewarding to find that if you persevere, sometimes you can make a difference,” Fussell said.

In the mid-1980s, Fussell worked with the Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, on an effort to protect what is now Hoop Pole Creek Preserve area in Atlantic Beach from a massive development project.

“That effort turned out to be ultimately successful and it was a major milestone in the development of the Coastal Federation as an important factor in addressing environmental issues. I found out that sometimes you can make a difference,” Fussell said in 2017.

There was an outpouring of condolences and memories on the birding forum after Carter’s announcement.

Ross McGregor of Stirling, Scotland, previously of Beaufort, wrote that he joined Fussell on Sunday morning birding trips.

“What really struck me about John were two things. Firstly he wore his vast knowledge so lightly. He was a great communicator. He never bragged and was always wanting to learn,” McGregor wrote. “Secondly, he could ask questions like few I have met. He would quiz me about my research on red-cockaded woodpeckers asking questions that really made me think. I think the questions were coming from his desire to know more and understand better, rather than to demonstrate my lack of knowledge and understanding. I learned so much from these chats. For me, it was these things made spending time birding with JF such a joy. He was a thoroughly decent bloke and the world is a poorer place without him.”

Harry LeGrand, who worked for the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, said on the forum that he and Fussell were in some of the same classes at N.C. State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“He was the premier naturalist for 50+ years for the central NC coast,” LeGrand explained. “Not just with his knowledge of birds but also of botany and various other biological sciences, such as ecology and natural communities. He provided the N.C. Natural Heritage Program, where I worked for 31 years, with numerous reports of rare plants, especially from his beloved Croatan National Forest.”

LeGrand added that Fussell’s 1994 guide “was a birder’s ‘bible’ and is still useful today” because so many public sites have not substantially changed since.

“I will greatly miss JF, as he called himself, as will so many other folks who knew him, went on his many field trips, and got to learn so much from him,” he said.

Bob Lewis of Durham called Fussell “one of the giants” of North Carolina birding of the last 50 years.

Walker Golder, previously with the National Audubon Society, said on the forum that with the death of Fussell, “North Carolina has lost a great person in the bird world.”

Golder said he came to know Fussell in the mid-1980s as part of North Carolina’s early waterbird surveys.

“I consulted him often in the decades thereafter about various areas of the coast. Rest assured, he had been there. He was always glad to chat and would share the unwritten history of the regular birds and the rarities at the site. Birders visiting the coast from other states would often call my office seeking information about where they could see a particular bird. John’s book- A Birder’s Guide to Coastal North Carolina -was (and remains) the source for finding birds on the coast. I always recommended John’s book and occasionally received a call back from folks impressed with the thorough and detailed information. But that’s who I found John to be.”

His funeral will be at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 8, at Noe-Brooks Funeral Home and Crematory in Morehead City. Visitation will precede the service, beginning at 2 p.m.

Editor Mark Hibbs contributed to this report.

In the fall of 1927, G. Albert Lyon, millionaire businessman, gifted inventor, and renowned sportsman was restless and looking for a challenge.

It could be almost anything: a new gadget to tinker with in his home laboratory, a journey to an exotic country to hunt big game, or maybe a fall fishing adventure in Cape Hatteras, one of his favorite places in the world.

Lyon grew up in Philadelphia and worked as a mechanic. By day, he repaired engines, but at night, he tinkered and explored. Friends described the ebullient entrepreneur as bursting with energy and ideas. A dropout, Lyon was smarter by years than many of his better-educated companions, and more ambitious as well.

At the age of 19, he was awarded his first patent for an automobile bumper, and soon thereafter borrowed $100 to start a manufacturing company. As with many of Lyon’s ideas, the one for a bumper came from everyday life. One morning, Lyon was walking to his job at the garage when he saw a woman lose control of her sedan and crash into a street lamp, crumpling the hood. The accident left Lyon to wonder why the sedan didn’t have some sort of protective girdle or skirt, and he set about designing one. His timing was impeccable. Automobiles were transforming the daily lives of Americans and sales were booming. Within a few years, Lyon had earned his first million; many more would follow.

Patents would also keep coming, year after year: for bumpers, hub caps and stainless-steel wheel covers, fender wells and skirts, steering wheel attachments, luggage carriers, rims, disks, radiator baffles, side mirrors, horns and, later, helmets, sailboats, even aluminum masts for yachts. In all, Lyon would be awarded nearly 1,000 patents, establishing him as one of the most prolific inventors in history.

But Lyon’s unique spirit of inquiry wasn’t limited to tinkering. He also painted portraits, designed his own vacation home, studied the planets and stars, dove on coral reefs in the Bahamas, kept two or three chess games going at once, and amused his friends with his skills at the slingshot.

Lyon later moved to Allenhurst, New Jersey, from Philadelphia, but also spent part of his time in Detroit.

According to century-old newspaper stories, Lyon first visited the Outer Banks in the early 1920s to go fishing with his friends Rex Beach, a popular author of outdoor adventures tales, and Van Campen Heilner, a silver spoon explorer, and the son of a wealthy coal magnate. Heilner and Lyon both lived near Asbury Park, on the northern New Jersey coast, then a kind of arcadia for sportsmen, artists, and writers. They fished and hunted for waterfowl along Barnegat Bay with the noted illustrator, Frank Stick, who also lived nearby.

During one of their adventures, Lyon’s yacht, Alberta, exploded and burned to the waterline near the mouth of the Barnegat Inlet. Lyon and Stick saved themselves by jumping into the swirling waters.

Lyon and his pals made the long journey to the Outer Banks to take advantage of the world-famous fishing there. The warm waters of the Gulf Stream hug the coastline near Cape Hatteras, drawing some of the Atlantic’s largest and most-prized species – yellowfin tuna, blue marlin, and red drum.

Heilner already had a small fishing camp between Hatteras Village and the inlet. He also owned a 1920 Model T outfitted with fishing rods and gear, known locally as “The Pride of Pamlico.” They used the sedan to travel up and down the banks in search of fishing holes, landing 100 channel bass during one adventure, scores of red drum during another.

Lyon decided it was time to own a piece of Hatteras for himself. He purchased a 1,500-acre tract at the southern tip of Hatteras Island, not far from the world-famous inlet, from Andrew S. Austin, a local merchant. The following year, Austin helped Lyon build a hunting lodge, later named the Gooseville Gun Club. The simple structure wasn’t as large or elaborate as some of the other hunting lodges, but it served its purpose and over the years was greatly enjoyed by Lyon and his guests. Aptly, the land surrounding the lodge was shaped like a fishhook and included a creek, nearby sand reef and two miles of unspoiled oceanfront.

Luther Austin, the brother of Andrew and the longtime manager of the hunting lodge, recalled that Lyon would “travel down to Gooseville on his yacht,” which was also named Alberta, for one of his daughters, to hunt and fish with his family and friends. Rex Beach was a frequent companion and kept a houseboat nearby.

“He stopped in here and they hunted. This feller Rex had a houseboat. He had all of his hunting equipment on it. They stopped in here and old man Lyon was with him. That’s why he built the place here,” Luther Austin explained to Elizabeth Farrow and several co-authors in a history of the Gooseville Gun Club.

The hunting parties used a small boat to get out to the sand reef, where they had blinds, batteries and sink boxes, Austin recalled. The boxes were made from concrete and sunk in the sand. When the tide came in, they pulled a canvas cover around themselves and used iron decoys to sink the wooden batteries low in the water. Of course, there were wooden decoys as well. So many, it took several trips to haul them all out, Austin told the authors.

In the 1930s, Lyon hired a well-known local pilot, David Driskill, to ferry wealthy guests from Manteo and other locations to his hunting lodge. The design and operation of airplanes had improved dramatically since the Wright Brothers made their first heavier-than-air flight in 1903. But coastal flight, with its unpredictable winds, layers of marine fog, and beach landings, was still challenging. As if to prove the point, Driskill lost one of his wheels during a takeoff when it became stuck in the beach sand, according to published reports.

During the Great Depression, Driskill delivered mail, food and supplies to the federal work camps scattered up and down the Outer Banks. Thousands of poor, itinerant workers were building an artificial sand dike from the Virginia border to Ocracoke Island. According to a 2018 Driskill profile by the historian Casey Huegel, Driskill also flew more than 500 injured workers from Cape Hatteras to a Marine Corps base hospital in Norfolk. Later, Driskill became one of the first test pilots for prototype helicopters and flew one over the Outer Banks photographing the government’s sand dune. In October, 1949, Driskill was killed while testing an experimental helicopter near Moorestown, New Jersey.

Over the years, Lyon entertained scores of visitors at the Gooseville Gun Club. Many of them were wealthy business acquaintances and artists. At the same time, he tried to maintain good relations with locals from the nearby villages. In 1930, he donated $35,000 for a club building and library for high school girls in Hatteras. The hope, speculated one writer, was that the club would positively direct the girls’ “energies which in some instances, might otherwise go astray.”

Lyon’s attitude toward the locals stiffened after he found hundreds of red drum left to rot on the beach by a careless angler. Afterward, he positioned a guard on his property and angered locals by blocking them from hunting and fishing. For a time, he also battled efforts by the National Park Service to condemn his property for a national seashore on the Outer Banks. In 1954, Lyon finally sold his club and land to the Park Service for $47,000.

Lyon shifted his attention to the tiny tropical island of Bimini, in the Bahamas, where he built a million-dollar mansion on Paradise Point and spent his days snorkeling and fishing the gin-clear waters for bonefish and tuna. In 1957, a writer for Sports Illustrated profiled Lyon, calling him “The Commodore of Bimini.” The writer described a typical Lyon day this way:

“Guests find a typical day can begin in the predawn darkness with the Commodore rousing the house to come look at a favorite star through his telescope on the roof. A swim in the pool or sea may follow, and after breakfast the day really gets under way. The morning may be taken up with deep sea fishing for giant tuna or blue marlin; or a skin-diving expedition, led by the Commodore, to the wrecks around the reefs and an hour of water skiing, and always a continuous chess game aboard either of the two fishing cruisers which act as floating bases for the day’s sports.”

Fisheries researcher Samantha Farquhar has traveled far to learn more about industrial fishing and food security, and the related effects of a changing climate on peoples’ lives. Work that first requires building a level of trust.

Her travels have taken her from the University of Washington in Seattle to East Carolina University in Greenville, with stops in Nepal, Madagascar, Greenland and a small village in northern Quebec. Also included was a stop on the Outer Banks, where she worked as a seasonal fisheries technician with the Department of Marine Fisheries.

“I got to know a lot about what fishermen think of the regulations really fast,” Farquhar told Coastal Review recently.

It was, she explained, time well spent, especially for her chosen field of research.

“You go down to Wanchese, it’s their life. You have to really respect that when you’re doing research. You can’t just go in there asking a bunch of questions,” she said. “You have to take the time to build the right partnerships and develop trust.”

She was in Greenland this summer, spending most of July in Uummannaq, a town on the west side of the country. Although most of her work has been with fisheries, in this case she was working with Hurtigruten Expeditions, a Norwegian company that offers cruises to Greenland.

She was looking into the effects of climate change on the indigenous culture there.

“Greenland is one of the only countries that is (approximately) 80% indigenous people. It’s an indigenous-run country, which is pretty cool, but with strong ties to Denmark,” she said.

Farquhar was studying how climate change was affecting the use of the qajaq (pronounced kayak), which is the traditional kayak of the Inuit people of Greenland. Made of stretched animal skins over whalebone or driftwood, it is a long, narrow watercraft, that, because of its construction, is used only in relatively calm seas.

What Farquhar found was that days with conditions safe for qajaq use were becoming more infrequent.

“I can almost definitely say it’s harder for kayakers, than, say, 30 years ago,” she said. “A kayaker will tell me, ‘I will only go kayaking when it’s between zero and 0.5 meters of wave height. If it’s greater than 0.5 meters, it’s too wavy. I don’t feel safe going out.’”

Farquhar is in an ECU doctoral program administered by the Coastal Studies Institute on the ECU Outer Banks Campus that she described as unique in the world of academia.

“I’m in a PhD program called Integrated Coastal Sciences. It’s the only PhD program in the world that has this title,” she said, adding that trying to describe the program is difficult.

“It’s like coastal resource management, but more integrated,” Farquhar said.

“I have to understand the fishery science side of things,” she said, adding that her works demands an understanding of food security, food systems and how people obtain food within the food system. “So it’s really interesting.”

After five years of study, Farquhar  expects to defend her doctoral dissertation next spring.

Aquaculture sans ocean

Farquhar, fresh out of college with an undergraduate degree in biology, began her career in Nepal, where there was opportunity, despite what she describes as a “really funny” experience, “because they don’t have an ocean.”

And it was, she said, a place where the economics of food security, society and fish intersect.

“It was an aquaculture project that was for women specifically, because in a lot of traditional Nepali societies, women are stuck in the household, and they don’t have a lot of options for economic development,” Farquhar said. “That led me to get into fisheries development … to see how fisheries could be tied to people.”

The societal aspects of fisheries became a frequently recurring concept in her work. She later spent nine months living in Madagascar on a U.S. government Fulbright Student Grant Program.

“I was working in a marine protected area,” she said, describing how it was managed by a local community, “small-scale fishers, traditional sailing vessels, that kind of thing.”

Beyond the managed area, industrial-scale fishing was permitted, but vessels from the European Union or Asian countries were entering the marine protected area. “They would get very upset,” Farquhar said. “They’d be like, ‘This boat is stealing all of our fish.’”

Often, industrial-scale fishing operations are described as “really bad for local communities, especially when the industrial fishing is by a different party and not the local community,” Farquhar said. But, empirical proof of harm is difficult to produce.

“If you think about it in terms of data, it’s really hard to prove that industrial fishing happening here is causing this household over here to lose out on meals and suffer,” she said.

Some of the difficulty in showing a link is in the recordkeeping, or lack thereof.

“There is no good long-term data for Madagascar,” Farquhar said. Even in developed nations, it can be difficult to show how food security and industrial fishing are interwoven in the local economy.

Because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, Farquhar was unable to return to Madagascar, but she did find a project in Canada, where she found, there was “much better data.”

The focus of her work in northern Quebec was in Kuujjuaq, an Inuit town on the southern side of the Hudson Straight. The town, with a population greater than 2,600 is the largest town in the Nunavik region of Quebec.

Unlike her work in Madagascar, Kujjuaq residents are developing an industrial fishing economy with the goal of benifitting the Nunavik region.

“The commercial fishery that they’re ramping up in the area is shrimp,” Farquhar said. “Shrimp is not a traditional food in the indigenous community that I’m working in. They like it, but it’s not like something that they’re (saying), ‘Yes, this is important to our culture.’”

What is important to the culture is Arctic char, a fish that looks a bit like salmon, although it has yet to catch on as an export commodity.

“It’s very important to them. It’s a really good-tasting fish. You can never find it in the United States,” she said.

The Kuujjuaq community has been fairly successful, too, exporting most of the shrimp to Asia, Farquhar said, adding although that, “they hit a bit of a bump during COVID.”

There may be a limit to how much shrimp can be harvested, however, if a healthy population of arctic char is to be maintained.

“Arctic char eats shrimp,” Farquhar noted. “So, if you’re fishing your shrimp population, is that going to affect your arctic char population?”

That remains unknown because the local ecosystem has not been well studied, something that, for Farquhar, makes working with the locals even more interesting.

“It’s very innovative work. The community is really interested in the work. They’re asking me questions to look at in my dissertation,” she said.

The allure of the coast is not confined to people who grew up on it or near it; it crosses county and state lines and reaches out to people who live far away.

Some people live their whole lives in places like Kansas or Nebraska, and as soon as they see the ocean, they can never go home again. It’s even a theme in literature, for example, in “Lord of the Rings,” Galadriel tells Legolas “Beware of the Sea! If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore, Thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more.”

For most, it’s not quite as dramatic. They come to visit, feel the pull, but can’t leave home, so they visit as often as they can and get as much enjoyment out of it as possible for whatever period of time they are there. And so it is with Neill Pollock. He is from Charlotte.

While that may not seem too far away, it’s still an almost five-hour drive from his home to his favorite place in Atlantic Beach. With gas prices being what they are, it’s a financial commitment as well. There’s just something about the coast that brings him back to spend time with his family and to experience fishing that he can’t do otherwise.

Neill grew up loving to fish but not having many options available to him, “I grew up in Charlotte without a ton of fishing opportunities, so golf course ponds were where I cut my teeth until around 11 or 12 years old.”

It was around that time when he started to get a better fishing education.

“My grandfather, Warren Pollock, started taking me to fish the mountain streams around Linville and Banner Elk. He was always my biggest influence in outdoor activities.”

Neill and his grandfather spent a lot of time together until the elder’s passing in 2017.

“We hunted and fished together growing up, until his age prevented him from going anymore.”

In my columns, I’ve tried to illustrate time and again how the influence of a mentor can drive a young person to a fulfilling lifetime activity. It’s important for us to remember this and do what we can.

These days Neill lives with his family near Charlotte and runs a contracting business.

“Currently, I own and operate a remodeling company. I spent 16 years behind a desk as a graphic designer before venturing out on my own as a real estate agent. A slow market had me doing side remodeling jobs, which turned into the creation of Red Oak Contracting.”

His family likes the outdoors and fishing too, but in moderation.

“I have been married for 15 years to my wonderful wife Missy. We have one daughter, Mia, who is way more into dancing than she is the outdoors, but gets out with me from time to time. She really enjoys float trips on the tailwaters in Eastern Tennessee.”

Neill said he thinks that she’ll get more into outdoors adventures as she goes along. His wife enjoys boating and going to the beach, and they all take trips together to Atlantic Beach several times a year.

Neill has a long list of saltwater fishing accomplishments including an 8-pound speckled trout caught on a topwater plug.

“Fishing on an early summer morning, I hooked by far my largest trout. Would have been perfectly happy if that was the last fish we caught that morning.”

He has the perspective of a seasoned angler and knows that to catch a fish like that makes the entire day and nothing else is really needed. As has been stated in this column before, sometimes catching a fish isn’t the only thing that makes for a good day.

“I think people get too wrapped up in the ‘catching’ aspect of fishing. Sure, that’s what we are out there to do but enjoying the water and surroundings is what we should really strive for.”

In that vein, Neill has a specific type of fishing he enjoys the most, a way that is not known for always producing the most poundage, but concentrates on the method.

“Fly fishing is my passion! There is nothing more relaxing and exciting at the same time.”

Neill says that fishing with a fly rod helps him feel more connected to what he is doing.

“I get the feeling with fly-fishing that you are more connected to the environment and the fish. Due to the fact that to succeed you need to know exactly what the fish are doing, it’s just a more intimate experience with nature.”

Neill gives credit to his friends that help him out when he goes to the coast. He realizes how difficult it is to stay on top of the fish when you have to travel.

“I have to admit, living in the Piedmont, I rely heavily on my connections at the coast for intel.”

Among all the things that you need to know, he realizes that information may be the most valuable.

“Keep your mouth shut when you get info and it will go a long way.”

He adds that we should never be afraid to try something new when we’re out there. You just never know what it could pull up.

“Never be afraid to try something new. Look for new spots on different tides, you might be surprised what you can find.”

As a young adult right out of high school, I had just finished what I hoped would be my last summer suffering in the hot farm fields harvesting tobacco.

It was late August and I headed to Hammocks Beach State Park near Swansboro to cool off in the waters off of Bear Island. A secret spot, available only by boat, that I had heard about, but never been to. Arriving late in the day, the ranger that was piloting the passenger ferry told me it was the last run of the day. Instead of sending me on my way, he invited me ride to the island with him.

Docking on the sound side of the island, he gave me 20 minutes, just enough time to run the trail to the ocean. I bodysurfed a couple of waves, admired the magnificent beach and sand dunes, then raced back to the dock. The ferry returned to the mainland with a load of sunburnt, sand-crusted beachgoers and I headed off to college. Little did I know at the time, that this ranger would become someone that I admire, respect and have been fortunate to call a friend.

Four years later, in the fall of 1980, I am a newly hired ranger at Fort Macon State Park. I hadn’t forgotten the kindness of this ranger and now, as a ranger myself, I was eager to repay the debt. During my first few months at Fort Macon, I heard a number of stories about the superintendent at Hammocks Beach, Claude Crews, and his stature only grew.

The following summer, I was assigned to help out at Hammocks Beach for a few days due to staffing issues. I jumped at the chance to meet Superintendent Crews, commuting the 35 miles from Fort Macon to Swansboro. To get me familiarized with Bear Island and its park operations, Crews took me on a thrilling boat tour of the soundside backwaters along with a four-wheel-drive excursion on the island.

This was a man in his element. His knowledge and passion left a lasting impression on me, along with a hidden desire to one day follow in his footsteps.

Superintendent Crews had been the guardian of Bear Island long before I formally met him as a fellow ranger. Off the beaten path and accessible only by boat, Bear Island was, and still is, one of the crown jewels of the North Carolina State Parks system. A pristine barrier island of natural and cultural significance, how the island became a state park, is in itself, an amazing story of a colorblind friendship and generosity.

In 1914, the renowned, pioneering neurosurgeon William J.C. Sharpe went on a duck hunting retreat with the Onslow Rod and Gun Club in the marsh waters of coastal North Carolina.

He stepped onto a boat piloted by his guide, John Hurst. Cultures collided as Hurst, an African American and the son of an enslaved man, met the Harvard-educated, internationally distinguished medical doctor. This “chance encounter,” as Dr. Sharpe described it, ignited a close friendship that lasted for decades and created an enduring legacy.

In the brain surgeon’s autobiography, Sharpe described Bear Island as such, “… a four-mile stretch of Atlantic beach, wide, level, and firm enough to permit the landing of airplanes — another Daytona.”

Dr. Sharpe also owned many acres on the mainland, a “peninsular wonderland” known as “The Hammocks.” He purchased the properties as his personal retreat sometime around 1920 and recruited John Hurst and his wife Gertrude as caretakers of the land. This was a bold decision in the heavily segregated South near a town that had a reputation as a “sundown town,” meaning Black people were not allowed after dark. Pressured to remove Hurst as the property manager, Sharpe notes in his book, “I refused to make the change.”

An advocate of civil rights, Sharpe was deeply disturbed by the injustices of segregation that deprived African Americans of basic rights. Later in life, he wanted to gift “The Hammocks” properties to the Hursts for their years of loyal service and friendship. In discussions with Gertrude Hurst, a retired school teacher, a plan was hatched to gift the property to the North Carolina Teachers Association in 1950.

Recognizing the need for recreational and educational opportunities for African Americans along the coast, the teachers association formed the Hammocks Beach Corp. The corporation managed the property providing a “resort” where African Americans could freely enjoy going to the beach, swimming, fishing and camping. It essentially served as its own segregated private park.

Looking for long-term management and protection of Bear Island, the Hammocks Beach Corp. negotiated with the state for the island to be included in the state park system. In 1961, Hammocks Beach State Park became one of only three state parks in North Carolina exclusively for Black people. The other two being the Reedy Creek section of the William B. Umstead State Park and the Jones Lake State Park.

Accustomed to hard work

Born in 1941 in Wake County, Claude E. Crews grew up accustomed to the hard work associated with running the family farm. After high school he attended Shaw University with an interest in elementary education. However, he had a chance encounter that changed his course.

One day while at his grandfather’s farm, a state engineer showed up to do some work for his grandfather. The two started talking and the engineer suggested that Claude apply for a job with the Division of State Parks, and the rest, as they say, “is history.”

Crews first donned the proud colors of the gray and green ranger uniform in 1963 with an appointment at the then-recently christened Hammocks Beach State Park. It was now on his shoulders to carry on the legacy of Dr. Sharpe and John and Gertrude Hurst.

Nine years had passed since deadly Hurricane Hazel swept over Bear Island in 1954, and its devastation was still visible when Ranger Crews stepped onto the island for the first time in his official capacity. The overwash and salt spray from this Category 4 hurricane scorched the island as if by wildfire. The island was barren with dead trees and grasses and new vegetation was struggling to take hold.

Ranger Crews put his farming expertise to good use, planting thousands of native trees and shrubs. Many of the live oak trees you see on the island today were carefully nurtured by Crews, planted from tiny acorns.

Prior to the availability of commercially manufactured sand fencing, ranger Crews collected boatloads of wax myrtle branches from the mainland and brought them to the island. Here, he fashioned his own version of sand fence to tame the blowing sand. This ingenious fencing slowed down the sand, piling it up, creating dunes that rebuilt the primary dune line.

Ranger Crews then teamed up with Karl Graetz of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service to plant hundreds of thousands of individual sprigs of sea oats and beach grass to stabilize these growing sand dunes.

Bear Island was alive and green again.

Face of the park

As a young man with a new job, Crews went about his work managing the seasonal park operations, which included operating a passenger ferry service, bathhouse, concession stand and swimming area. He was the personnel and financial officer, maintenance man, mechanic and custodian.

As he began his park career, the dark cloud of segregation was still overhead and a Black man was still in charge of “The Hammocks.” Crews was not a local, yet, but he was now the face of the park. How would he be received by the community?

When Crews started at the park, Gertrude Hurst was still alive and living on
The Hammocks. He was a regular at the Hursts’ dinner table, enjoying her cooking. She attributed her longevity to eating fish every day, and Crews, who was not a fish eater, soon learned to love fish.

The welcoming friendship he received from her went a long way toward his broader acceptance by the locals, regardless of their race. But there was more: Crews’ character and calm demeanor were also key. He went about managing the park without any serious racial issues. Crews stated to me, “racial issues were not really an issue when I arrived at The Hammocks, any issues in the past had already been addressed by Mr. Sharpe.”

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1963.

In July 1964, with the passage of the monumental Civil Rights Act, the formerly segregated Hammocks Beach State Park was now open to all visitors regardless of skin color. In the first few years after the act, park visitors continued to be mainly African American.

Park Service administrators were a tad nervous when Ranger Crews hired white lifeguards to protect the ocean swimming area. Fearing racial conflicts, trips were made to Swansboro to inspect park operations. It was clear that Crews’ leadership and calm reassurance were respected and any worry of problems was unwarranted.

After a few years at the coast, Crews was briefly stationed at Jones Lake State Park in Bladen County before returning to Hammocks Beach. In 1966, Uncle Sam called his number and he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He pulled his two-year hitch and his job at Hammocks Beach was still waiting for him, but now, officially as the park superintendent.

After integration of Hammocks Beach, the beauty of the park was now a lure to all. This hidden jewel was beginning to be found. Crews guided the park for the next 13 years.

Understaffed and underfunded, Crews and Ranger Jesse Hines, along with some seasonal help, somehow managed to always get the work done. If an engine on the ferry broke down, they had to fix it. They prided themselves in switching out motors in under an hour, keeping the ferries on time. As a captain licensed by the U.S. Coast Guard, Crews piloted the ferries when seasonal captains were unavailable – an issue attributed to the low pay.

With files and a clipboard in hand, Crews also took on the administrative work while on the boat during the 10 minutes of down time between trips while at the dock.

For decades, the North Carolina State Park system struggled with woefully inadequate budget appropriations. Specialty positions such as resource management and educational interpretation were pie-in-the-sky aspirations. A ranger had to have the interest and desire to initiate these duties on their own.

One summer morning Superintendent Crews got word that a nesting loggerhead sea turtle was flipped over on its back and unable to return to the ocean. The turtle was rescued and this awareness led to one of the longest research programs documenting sea turtle nesting in the state.

In 1981, Crews was promoted to a senior level superintendent position at Cliffs of the Neuse State Park near Goldsboro. Leaving Hammocks Beach, he took the same leadership skills to “The Cliffs,” managing it for 16 years before retiring in 1997.

In retirement, Crews didn’t just kick up his heels and sit around drinking iced tea on the porch. He continued serving his community as he had been doing for decades while working at Hammocks Beach and Cliffs of the Neuse.

More than 40 years ago, Crews, who has a deep interest in youth sports, became a charter member of the Swansboro Century Club, which supports school athletics. He was a fixture at hundreds of high school and middle school football and basketball games, keeping a steady hand on the clock as the timekeeper and official scorekeeper.

For close to 20 years, he worked as a district coordinator with Onslow County Parks and Recreation, organizing and managing youth basketball programs. In 2021, the school system honored Crews for his contributions to the community by naming Swansboro’s middle school gymnasium the “Claude E. Crews Annex Gymnasium.” In a newspaper article recounting the event, words like “role model, dependable, selfless, dedicated, respected and friend” were used to describe his commitment to public service.

Crews continues to support the park where he started his career, serving as treasurer, board member and member of the park support group, the Friends of the Hammocks and Bear Island.

I, too, eventually became the superintendent at Hammocks Beach State Park, my dream job. During my years at the park, I was frequently asked about Crews by park visitors who remembered him from his time at the park.

“Where is Superintendent Crews?” they would ask with a smile on their faces.

These included his old friends wanting to catch up and say hello and some people just wanting to tell me a story about his kindness. Parents showed up with their children, hoping to introducing them to Superintendent Crews. A true ambassador of North Carolina State Parks, people still ask about Crews today.

Recently, Crews was honored by the North Carolina Coastal Federation with a Pelican Award for “Leadership and Dedication to Coastal Protection, Recreation, and Cultural Resources,” a well-deserved honor to recognize his contributions to our coastal heritage.

There is a Bob Dylan song where he sings in search of dignity. “Searching high, searching low, Searching everywhere I know.” Finally, he sings, “Have you seen Dignity?”

Dylan may not have found dignity, but I can point him in the right direction. Claude Crews, a man of character, dignity and grace, a person whom we would all do well to emulate.

The vote to prohibit balloon releases within Dare County’s unincorporated areas was anticlimactic when its commissioners unanimously voted last week to support the ban.

Southern Shores resident Debbie Swick, the force behind the ban, addressed the board before they took up the vote.

When Swick began, she pointed to a large, opaque trash bag filled with pieces of balloons propped against the front of the speaker’s podium.

“This bag was collected by five of us over six months. Just five people (and) there’s several hundred balloons in there,” she said. “The National Park Service last year picked up 1,786 balloons along our 70-mile stretch of coastline.”

Now that the rule is in place, it is illegal to release balloons anywhere along the Outer Banks shoreline, from Duck to Hatteras Village.

The county joins its incorporated towns of Duck, Southern Shores, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head in banning balloon releases. Manteo, which is on Roanoke Island, has yet to prohibited releasing balloons, but the town is in Swick’s sights.

Dare County towns are not the only beach towns in the state that have banned releasing balloons. Similar ordinances are in effect in Wrightsville Beach, Topsail Beach, North Topsail Beach and Surf City. Ten states have also banned balloon releases.

For Swick, a member of Network for Endangered Sea Turtles, or N.E.S.T., based on the Outer Banks, and Outer Banks Marine Mammal Stranding Network, banning balloons has become a crusade, and she has created Ban Balloon Release NC to accomplish her goal.

Although she is a one-person movement now, she said that may change over time. 

“I will probably just plug along until I can’t do it by myself and then start looking for more people,” she told Coastal Review.

Coastal North Carolina is just a small part of the problem, she noted.

“You release (the balloon), it’s unretrievable, and it’s going to drift upwards of 1,300 miles from where you release it,” she said, adding the state’s beaches are an ideal location to get the word out about the dangers of balloons in the environment.

“Millions of visitors come from places like Ohio and Kansas and Indiana and Pennsylvania. Balloon releases in their states impact our wildlife and our coastline. So, I’m going to use every opportunity I can to get the word out and educate them,” she said.

Her fears for wildlife are based in science. One of Swick’s arguments for banning balloon releases is that the balloons do not break down in the environment.

Mylar, which is a polyester, can take hundreds of years to completely break down in the environment. Even latex balloons that are marketed as biodegradable take five years or longer to decompose. The strings used hold balloons in place until they are released are generally not biodegradable.

Balloons in the water look similar to the marine life that are part of whales’ diets. Once in the digestive tract, the balloons are not digested and can cause blockages and death.

Education, understanding are key

Keith Rittmaster, natural sciences curator at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, has been responding to reports of dead and dying whales for a number of years, and he has witnessed firsthand the impact balloons have on marine life.

A Gervais beaked whale that beached off Emerald Isle in 2023 was, to Rittmaster, particularly sad.

“(It was) a nursing calf that had no food in the stomach. No squid parts or fish parts. They had mother’s milk,” he said. “This balloon was blocking the entrance to the stomach so no milk could pass. I had to use my imagination to figure out what was going on. I can’t imagine it was anything but this was the first bite that this whale took.”

Whales are not the only marine species affected by the balloons that have landed at sea. Seabirds and sea turtles regularly become entangled in the lines and sea turtles, like whales, will try to eat the balloons.

Rittmaster, whose area of expertise is marine mammals, said that researchers are seeing an unexplained phenomenon regarding whales.

“What we’re learning, which is kind of an ‘oh, wow!’ to me is, we’re finding more plastic balloons all the time in deep-diving whales rather than shallow-diving whales,” he said.

He then sounded a cautionary note about the problem’s pervasiveness.

“It’s going to get worse even if we ended it today,” he said. “If, for some miracle, we could end the releasing of balloons today — I feel pretty confident since these plastics last hundreds of years — this problem is going to continue to get worse, not just the balloons themselves, but the plastic and nylon strings that they are tied to.”

Like Swick, Rittmaster is resolute in calling for action.

“There’s a lot of things that are terrifying us that we can’t even conceive how to solve in generations. This is something we can solve,” he said.

The challenge is often frustrating.

After the city of Greenville voted 4-3 in the fall of 2023 against an ordinance that would ban balloon releases, Rittmaster led some workshops about what happens when a balloon is released.

“A politician was there,” he recalled. “And I gave the presentation and she said, ‘Can we just release the balloons inland but not release them along the coast?’ This isn’t a bad person. She doesn’t really understand, and that highlighted to me what we’re up against.”

Swick believes education is the key, and with that knowledge will come a better understanding of the world around us and perhaps a hope for future generations.

“This is just such small potatoes, so it gets pushed on the back burner…This is one of those things, it’s not going to go away until we decide to make a change,” she said. “It’s going to take a lot of educating but my hope is that the generations of children that are coming up, (that they) learn a valuable lesson and take that with them as they grow into adulthood and raise children.”

I’m sure, since you’re reading this, that you like fishing or the outdoors, possibly even both. If I’m correct, have you ever wondered what the fishing is going to be like in the future, 10, 15, 20 or more years from now?

If you have, have you ever done anything about it?

Seth Vernon is a Wilmington-area, light-tackle fishing guide and family man who not only thinks about fishing’s future, he has decided to do something about it. Having turned 45 in March, his love for his family and desire for the fishing he loves so much to be there for them in the future has led him down a path as not only an outdoorsman but also a respected conservationist filmmaker and speaker.

Growing up in suburban Houston, Texas, Vernon’s earliest fishing opportunities were in local ponds with his boyhood chums. However, his grandfather, James Elon Vernon, or “Red,” as he was known, would transport him to the blackwater rivers of the Atchafalaya River Basin.

“There we would fish with cane poles and live crickets, plugs and casting rods for a variety of sunfish, crappie and bass,” Seth Vernon said.

This would set the stage for a fishing obsession that would last a lifetime. Vernon felt transported in time in the cypress rivers and realized they had been there for a long time precisely because someone in the past had taken time to make sure they would continue to be there.

“Those trips were magical, like being teleported to another world full of wonder and timelessness,” Vernon said.

Learning the trade

Seth Vernon knew early on he wanted to work in the fishing industry. After graduating in 2001 from Appalachian State with a Bachelor of Science in communications, he stayed in the area and worked at Foscoe Fishing Co. on the Watauga River. Later, in 2001, he left to guide anglers in Alaska, but Vernon returned to Boone the next year and went back to Foscoe, working alongside guide Ollie Smith.

“I learned an immense amount of the trade of working in a fly shop and operating a guide service,” Vernon said.

Those years, 1997-2001, also nurtured his love for the abundant variety of species in North Carolina’s High Country. With Smith as his mentor, they fished North Carolina waters and Tennessee tailwaters.

“Our primary targets in the mountains were trout, smallmouth and muskellunge,” Vernon said, adding that, most importantly, he learned about a new way of fishing. “Living in Boone was when I got involved in fly fishing.”

The connections he made there have lasted him, too. “I fish with my friends there as often as I can,” Vernon said.

Going coastal

Experience and connections proved invaluable in his big move to the coast in 2004. In  Wilmington, Vernon partnered with Stuart Smith — unrelated to Ollie Smith — in running Intracoastal Angler, a saltwater outfitting and tackle business. It was during this time that he realized that there was more he’d rather be doing than sitting at the counter. He began working more exclusively as a guide and then walked away from the tackle business altogether.

“In 2006, I launched Double Haul Guide Service to focus full time on charter fishing,” he said, adding that the focus is on inshore species. “Most of the fishing has been light-tackle spin-fishing, but I’m always wanting to push the envelope of what is possible in the way of fly fishing in saltwater.”

He pointed out that one aspect of his favorite style is often overlooked by those not familiar. “In my opinion, the biggest attraction to fly fishing is the visual nature of the pursuit. In saltwater, we’re more often than not ‘sight fishing’ in shallow water to actively feeding redfish, rolling tarpon, or busting albacore.”

It’s more than just catching a fish and seeing how many you can get by the end of the day, he said.

“Seeing a target fish species pursue and grab your fly is exhilarating. It’s a feeling all fly anglers chase,” Vernon said.

In terms of advice for the new saltwater fly angler, Vernon said the real key to consistency is casting ability.

“Distance is king, but there are many situations involving wind and clouds where a close presentation is necessary,” said the guide, who added that an angler must be ready at all times. “Each wind change, target fish or angle of presentation is its own puzzle. Be fluid, learn and adapt to the situation at hand.”

A nugget that could be Vernon’s catch-phrase: “Consistency is a byproduct of being flexible.”

Practice is what is going to make the difference between catching a prize fish or going home disappointed. There is a skill in fly fishing that is important to casting when it’s windy.

“For the new to saltwater fly angler, the best piece of advice I can give is learn to double haul. This is a casting technique that unlocks the hidden potential of your fly rod for improved accuracy, distance and ultimately control.”

Vernon described it as a way to increase the flex in your rod by pulling down with your line hand. That will result in longer casts. Not knowing how makes things more difficult, he said, adding that it’s best to practice this skill before heading to the water.

“Seek instruction from a professional, and when you think you’re ready to apply these new skills to the water, practice some more,” he said.

The Vernon family likes to get out on the water with him whenever they can. Vernon’s wife and daughter are accomplished anglers in their own right.

“I’m blessed that my wife Francesca and 13-year-old daughter Olivia enjoy the water as much as I do. Olivia is getting pretty good walking the dog with a topwater for redfish these days.”

It’s part of teaching her to deeply appreciate the world that she already enjoys so much.

“Olivia has shown an interest in fishing and the ecology of our sounds and beaches. I continue to foster her appreciation for the natural world and its inhabitants,” Vernon said, adding that he hopes the state’s natural beauty will still be there for her in the future. “Our state and its agencies can do better, but the citizens of this state will have to hold them accountable in order to see a positive outcome for the next generation of anglers.”

Second in a series

In January 1972, Earl Slick purchased the Pine Island Hunt Club for $2.75 million.

It was in some ways a steal. The nearly 3,000-acre tract ran from the Atlantic Ocean to the Currituck Sound and included miles of oceanfront, pristine marsh, wooded uplands and interior ponds. A two-story white clapboard lodge straddled a sprawling grass field and freshwater pond built for migrating waterfowl. On blue sky days it was possible to see three miles across the shallow sound to the distant mainland towns of Coinjock and Moyock. Look to the east and the even darker blue ocean limned the sand dunes.

Slick was unsure what to do with the historic property now that he owned it – or if he even wanted to keep it. He wavered between developing it and preserving it. Between building a small arcadia of cottages and leaving the rest alone, a sanctuary.

In 1973, he asked William E. Hollan Jr., who had recently begun working for him, to see if the National Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy or the federal government might be interested in buying the tract. “He thought at the time he could flip it to a conservation entity,” Hollan recalled. “I spent about a year trying to find some type of nonprofit or government entity to acquire Pine Island at cost. … At that time there was no money or no interest.”

Slick didn’t want the Currituck Banks to be swamped by development the way Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head had been in the postwar building boom that transformed the Lower Banks into a vacation resort. Currituck County commissioners shared his concern and asked for Slick’s help as they scrambled to formulate a plan to manage the expected growth. In a controversial move, Slick agreed to restrict traffic through his property unless developers agreed to cluster-style resorts with centralized utilities. But slowing the wave of development was never going to be easy. Developers and speculators had already acquired 6,000 lots on the Currituck Banks, and another 5,000 were listed for sale. It seemed inevitable that a road would eventually be built.

And it was.

Unable to sell the property, Slick tried to develop it. For help, he turned to his first cousins, Joe and Rex Frates, real estate developers from Oklahoma, and their associate Devane Clarke from Dallas, Texas. The out-of-state trio entered into a partnership with Slick to design and market a modest resort. “They sent out a man and he did a lot of work,” Hollan said. “The idea was to build 50 to 100 cottages around the Pine Island Club House. They would leave the rest of the property open. It would have a low-density appearance.”

But the timing couldn’t have been worse. In 1973, the nation slipped into a lengthy recession after OPEC implemented an oil embargo. Real estate projects dried up everywhere and the Frates brothers and Devane Clark found themselves squeezed for cash. The plan for Pine Island stalled as well. The cousins met with Slick and it was decided to end the partnership. “I think they looked at the plan and said this is just not marketable. We’re not going to get our investment back. We would like to gracefully back out,” Hollan recalled.

Slick turned his attention to the southern portion of his Pine Island holdings, known as the South Mile, near the border of Dare County. He had sold a small tract to the Venture Management Group, which included John C. Whitaker Jr., the son of Slick’s Winston-Salem friend, John Whitaker Sr., the CEO of Reynolds Tobacco. The young developers modeled their Sanderling resort – named for the small, puffy sandpipers that skitter along the beaches – after the restrained, Nags Head style cottages of old, advertising Sanderling as “Life the way it was” on the Outer Banks. There were no pools or tennis courts but lots of trails and quiet, natural spaces.

The group developed two sections of Sanderling but then stopped. Once more, Slick faced a dilemma: find someone to continue building or sell and recoup some of his original investment. Hollan said Slick leaned toward selling but that he convinced his boss to allow him to take over the project. They finished six additional sections and in 1986 added an inn with 29 condominium-style rooms. Over time, more condominiums were added, a spa and tennis facility, and two restaurants, one basically a coffee shop, the other for fine dining. A copy of Audubon’s “Birds of America” was placed in the lobby of the inn.

“Mr. Slick wanted it to resemble a hunting lodge,” Hollan said.

~

Earl Slick didn’t run Pine Island like other hunting clubs. There were no memberships, meaning you couldn’t buy your way in. You had to be invited. Slick kept a close group of friends from his Yale days and business dealings. Many were from the Winston-Salem area. But there were also friends from Nova Scotia and a “flying preacher” who likely landed his plane on an airstrip Slick built near the marsh. There was a men’s only trip, trips with wives, a dove-hunting trip in September, trips to fish, and of course opening day of duck hunting season in December – maybe a dozen trips a year, said Hollan.

The guests might hunt for an hour or two, have lunch at Pine Island or The Narrows, play cards (Slick loved to bet and to win), and enjoy a drink before supper. The bar was fully stocked and there was usually a bottle of Aquavit in the freezer. Slick stuck with vodka, gin or light rum, depending on the season and his mood. The upstairs bedrooms were small and spare but comfortable enough. Later, Slick built several cabin-style houses for his wife and family in the upland woods overlooking the fields and marsh. His daughter Phyllis and Paul Mickey Sr., the Steptoe & Johnson attorney, also built cabins nearby.

One of Slick’s favorite guests was Donal O’Brien, a prominent New York City attorney for the Rockefellers and a board member of the Audubon Society. He came every year with his wife Kate. O’Brien was a legendary fundraiser and likely met Slick that way. Slick donated to Audubon and was the recipient of various conservation awards. The duo got along famously. O’Brien was a natural storyteller, discreet, humble, and he could shoot. He quickly saw the value of the Pine Island marshes as a refuge for birds and in March 1977 wrote an impassioned memo to his board following a solitary morning hike.

“There must have been 2,000 birds, mostly Pintails and Canada Geese, but there were others as well – Blacks, Ducks, Mallards and Green-Winged Teal. I was stunned by this spectacle. I know I had never seen so many waterfowl in one place at one time … and in those magical moments of that March sunrise, I knew that this was a property that had to be saved for the ages.”

A year later, in August 1978, Earl Slick agreed to donate half of Pine Island to Audubon and help to endow a fund for the planned sanctuary. As part of the agreement, Slick continued to manage the property for a decade, while also earning a generous tax break, spread over several years. Initially. Audubon agreed to pay Currituck County property taxes on the tract but then reversed itself, fearing the nonprofit was setting a precedent that could affect its other land holdings.

~

A decade later, in 1989, Donal O’Brien approached Slick with a new idea. According to Hollan, O’Brien proposed to Slick that Audubon give back most of the oceanfront it had received as part of the original donation. In return, Slick would give Audubon the remaining marsh he owned. Audubon officials described the deal as a win-win. The marsh held more value for migrating birds; it was a safe place for the birds to rest and feed. Slick, on the other hand, would add prized oceanfront. This at a time ocean property was doubling and tripling in value.   

Slick saw the value of the swap. But Hollan said he was concerned how the trade would look. “He didn’t want to be thought of as a slick (no pun intended) real estate developer.” There had to be a net gain to Audubon, so Slick decided to also give the nonprofit the 1,000 acres of mainland marsh he owned as part of The Narrows Hunting Club. After the trade, Audubon controlled about 3,000-acres of marsh, while Slick owned most of the oceanfront from Sanderling to Pine Island.

Slick, now nearly 70, wanted to move quickly. The market for oceanfront real estate had begun to veer toward larger, more luxurious houses from the more restrained cottages that John Whitaker Jr. built as part of the original Sanderling. Instead of passing second homes across generations, investors saw the bigger homes as money machines — a way to generate both sizable tax breaks and profits by renting them to vacationers for up to $10,000 a week. An investor could pay off his or her mortgage in less than a decade and use the profits to buy another house, and then maybe another. Currituck, once a lonely outpost, was fast becoming a source of vast wealth for developers, investors, and county officials.

Slick owned the land. But Hollan turned to a popular local builder, Bob DeGabrielle, to develop and market Pine Island. In a bio, DeGabrielle writes that he developed and sold over $1 Billion worth of real estate on the Outer Banks. After he retired in the 2000’s, he became one of the early entrepreneurs in the emerging cannabis industry, founding the largest outdoor cannabis farm in North America. In 2001, he sold the farm for $67 million.

“Bob is a force of nature, very enthusiastic, the most efficient person I’ve ever met in my life,” Hollan said. “He started at 5 in the morning … and he carried two Dictaphones with him.” 

DeGabrielle built to the new luxury market – houses with six to 10 bedrooms, HGTV-style kitchens, entertainments centers, and pocket pools fronting the sand dunes. On weekends, it wasn’t uncommon to see a dozen cars parked in driveways. But where the oceanfront narrowed along the South Mile, the long rows of houses appeared crowded together. Not everyone was happy. Stories and letters to the editor appeared in local newspapers. The writers complained that Pine Island changed the aesthetics and economics of the Banks. They weren’t wrong. But it was too late to pine for the old days. The Outer Banks were now driven by wealth and that wasn’t about to change. 

Hollan told me that Slick, who passed away in 2007, at the age of 86, was pleased with the houses. “I think the Audubon thing worked out well,” he said. “I think it was what he wanted to see happen and I helped to bring it to fruition.

“Yeah, those are bigger lots than typical lots, but those are bigger houses,” he continued. “They are what they are. It’s not Sanderling. It is a nice community.”

In June 2022, I arranged to visit the Pine Island sanctuary, just a stone’s toss from the oceanfront mega houses. Robbie Fearn, the manager of the sanctuary the last decade, took me on a tour of the century-old lodge before we picked our way through the nearby woods to a pocket beach where brackish water has crept ever higher and created a ghost forest.

In the distance, a car speeding past the mansions left a contrail of noise but then was gone. At one point, Fearn, medium-built and thoughtful, raised his hands as if addressing the sky. “Isn’t it amazing,” he said, meaning the road, the cars, the mansions, and this startling refuge for thousands of migrating birds. “In the summer all of these cars fly by and I don’t think any of them even know we are here. It’s as if we don’t exist.”       

First of two parts

In 1972, between 50 and 100 people called the Currituck Banks home. The actual number isn’t important. It could have been a little more or even a little less. The point is no one really knew or cared. The miles of scrubby sand dunes, low-lying interior flats, and sprawling brackish marsh was largely empty except for birds and fish, and that was how the natives preferred it. 

That it couldn’t stay unspoiled was more or less a given. Currituck, a poor, centuries-old economy based on agriculture, needed money, and developing its 23 miles of unspoiled oceanfront seemed to be the answer. Developers had already purchased thousands of acres and were busy laying out designs for resorts from Duck to Corolla. The county had a rough plan to manage what was coming but needed time and help to pull it off. It was, in a way, an existential moment. No less than the future of the Currituck Banks, so bright yet also so perilous, stood in the balance.

One night that year, Earl Slick, a multimillionaire developer from Winston-Salem, took a surprising phone call from a Currituck duck hunting guide. Carl P. White knew every inch of the sound, sure. But more than that he was a savvy investor who listened closely to the wealthy industrialists who hunted the Banks and used that knowledge to buy stocks and land. A few years earlier, White had steered Slick to purchase the Narrows Island Club, a 1,000-acre strip of rich mainland marsh south of Poplar Branch Landing. Now, White proposed another deal. The longtime owners of the Pine Island Hunt Club, the Barney family from Hartford, Connecticut, were looking for a buyer. The property included nearly five miles of unblemished marsh and oceanfront stretching from the Dare County border north.

Slick knew the property. He had been a guest at the club and enjoyed shooting there. But he already owned The Narrows and planned to build a larger, more accommodating family lodge there. His answer was no. Still, the idea of owning Pine Island nagged at him and over the course of several days, Slick found himself wavering back and forth. Finally, he asked White to find out how much the Widow Barney wanted.

Slick’s decision would have an outsized impact on the future direction of the Currituck Banks, both dramatically preserving and altering its landscape, reshaping the architecture, even helping to shift the economics from an economy based on second homes to an investment-driven market. Not that many of the visitors teeming onto the Northern Banks would recognize these impacts. Most have never heard of Earl Slick or know his history. And for Slick, who died in 2007 at the age of 86, that would have been just fine.

When asked his profession, Slick jokingly called himself a “dog-trainer.” Yet here was a maverick, instinctual investor who owned airlines, cattle farms, wineries, and television stations, among his many and varied interests. And while Slick rarely sought publicity, he built two of the most talked-about resorts on the Currituck Banks – Sanderling, a rustic, nature-themed community, and the sprawling Pine Island resort, with more than 300 luxury-styled beach mansions. In a way, Earl Slick’s story mirrors the larger, complicated story of the Banks themselves, a mix of breathtaking natural reserves, waterways and maritime forests, interposed with a conveyor belt of ever-larger, more exclusive vacation resorts — a cultural and environmental drift that has been playing out now for decades.

~

Earl Frates Slick was born in 1920 in western Pennsylvania but grew up in Oklahoma City, where his father moved the family to hunt for oil. Tom Baker Slick was a man of the American moment: independent, hard-charging, seemingly tireless. But he was so luckless at first, locals took to calling him “Dry Hole Slick.” That changed in a heartbeat when Tom B. struck oil at the No. 4 Eakin well, producing 10,000 barrels a day. Another well produced a staggering 43,000 barrels a day. Soon, the same locals were calling Tom B. the luckiest wildcatter around — hell, “The King of all wildcatters,” the most famous wildcatter in the world!

Money spilled all around. Millions and millions of dollars. Earl and his older brother, Tom Jr., grew up in wealth and privilege, boarding at Exeter and attending Yale, with a $10,000-a-year living stipend. But life wasn’t always easy. They lost their father to a stroke at the age of 46. The boys were only 14 and 10. Their mother remarried Tom B.’s partner, Charles Urschel, who continued running the oil business. Years later, Tom Jr., considered a brilliantly esoteric student, became obsessed with hunting the Yeti. He, too, died at 46 when a plane he was piloting crashed returning from a Canadian adventure. Those who knew Earl Slick said he was haunted by the deaths and worried that he was destined to die young as well.

After Yale, Slick flew cargo transports in the war and saw the business possibilities of using planes to haul food and cargo from coast to coast. Shortly after being discharged, in December 1945, he learned that the military planned to auction nine surplus Army Curtus Commandos and headed to Washington. According to a short profile in Time Magazine, he walked into the surplus plane division at 1 p.m. and came out 15 minutes later owning the planes. “After that, things really began to move fast,” he told the reporter.

Slick was all of 25. Clearly, he wouldn’t have been able to buy the planes, which cost $247,000, without family money. Yet, like his father, he was relentless, impatient, and endlessly creative. Over the years, he would build Slick Airways into one of the two-largest air transport businesses in the nation, hauling fresh fruit and vegetables in refrigerated cargo planes from California to the East Coast, later contracting to transport military equipment back and forth to Southeast Asia.

While building Slick Airways, Earl was also on the prowl for other business opportunities. In 1948, he sold two cotton ranches to Lloyd Bentsen Sr., father of the future U.S. senator and candidate for vice president. He also bought a 16,000-acre quail-hunting farm, Mossy Dell, in Georgia, where the boyishly handsome six-footer would shoot from the saddle, and invested in a sprawling cattle ranch in southwestern Australia with the television host Art Linkletter and other celebrities. In time, he would expand into commercial real estate development, building one of the first Thruway Shopping Centers in North Carolina, invest in a vineyard, renovate historic buildings, buy stakes in radio and television stations, build nursing homes, fund a Formula 1 racing team, Slick Racers Inc., collect expensive artwork, and exhibit show horses, including Beau Black, a solid black gelding that, according to newspaper stories, “seldom tasted defeat in the show ring.”

“Earl loved the adventure,” recalled Paul Mickey Jr., an attorney and family friend. “I think he kind of liked the life of Ernest Hemingway. I never got the sense he was a deep thinker so much as a resourceful, canny businessman. Whenever I saw him, he was in fatigues. He was a sportsman.” 

In 1952, Earl moved the operations of Slick Airways to Los Angeles while relocating his family to Winston-Salem, a small but prosperous center of textile and tobacco industries. William E. Hollan Jr., a family friend and longtime business colleague, explained that it was probably so Slick could be closer to Washington, D.C., where he and his air transport business were represented by the powerful regulatory law firm, Steptoe & Johnson. “This was before jets. It was propeller-driven planes … and it was a long flight from San Antonio to Washington. Winston-Salem was a lot closer. He could get up and back in a day,” Hollan said.

Slick also liked the close-knit, genteel culture of Winston-Salem. He quickly became friends with CEOs from Hanes textiles, Chatham Manufacturing, Reynolds Tobacco, as well as Paul Mickey Sr., a managing partner at Steptoe & Johnson, who also was from Winston-Salem. Earl and his wife Jane built a retreat at Roaring Gap, a small, exclusive mountain resort where corporate elites from Winston-Salem socialized. There, they fell into a comfortable rhythm among a small group of friends who valued their privacy and privilege.

“There was a lot of money, yes,” said Hollan, who acted as a spokesman for the family for this article, “but it was not showy wealth, like the Yankees up North. Earl admired that. There was a lot of Southern charm. It was much more his style of things.”

Earlier in his career, Slick spoke to the press and even seemed to enjoy it. But as he aged, he became more discreet, even publicity shy. Pictures rarely appeared in the papers and he avoided interviews. His philanthropy, often generous, wasn’t broadcast. When different rumors and stories circulated, he instructed his employees not to respond. A code of behavior was evolving. His approach extended to hunting on the Currituck Banks, which Slick first appears to have visited in 1952 as a guest of Steptoe & Johnson. When he purchased his own club and had guests down, they discovered there were strict rules. Guests never shot before dawn and once they were given a blind, they weren’t allowed to change. They were provided one box of shells – always copper, never lead because lead was poisonous – and when they were gone, that was it. For Slick, hunting was about the experience and the camaraderie, not how many birds a hunter put in his bag.

There is another possible explanation for Slick’s penchant for privacy. In the 1930s, his stepfather Charles Urschel was kidnapped from their Oklahoma City mansion while playing bridge with friends. The kidnappers were led by the infamous George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his wife Kathryn. Urschel was returned home after nine days. But the family was never the same, withdrawing from public life and hiring armed guards to surround their house.

Now, as he debated whether to buy the Pine Island Club, Slick wavered between his roles as a conservationist who loved the outdoors, and as a developer who made millions buying and selling land. How could he balance these seemingly opposing forces? Should he even try? Or should he just walk away from the deal?

Next in the series: The story of Pine Island

In 1976, Walter Davis purchased 4 miles of oceanfront near Kitty Hawk for $2.1 million. It was not his first foray on the Outer Banks. The colorful oilman turned land speculator had been gobbling up large chunks of the Banks for the better part of a decade, with an eye toward controlling the oceanfront from Kitty Hawk to Corolla. 

Davis, who grew up on a soybean farm near Elizabeth City, worked as a stockboy for $9.50 a week at F.W. Woolworth’s, then built a billion-dollar empire stretching from Texas to New York, wasn’t interested in building beach houses. He saw the sandy tract as an investment and one day hoped to sell it at a hefty profit. After all, he was a speculator and that’s what speculators do. They don’t get rich by betting small. They bet big. Which is what Walter Davis had been doing for decades, sometimes rashly, but almost always without regret.

Still, this latest purchase was different. Southern Shores was an actual development with hundreds of houses and at least that many empty lots waiting to be built. Davis was like a dog chasing a car. Now that he had finally caught the car, he didn’t know what to do. He needed help.

He turned to Charles Hayes Jr., better known as Mickey, a talented young landscape architect who had grown up in Virginia Beach and spent part of his youth frolicking on the Banks. Davis called Hayes to come visit him at an upstate office in Cary. When Hayes arrived, Davis was nowhere to be found. So, he plopped down in a chair to wait. And wait. When Davis finally emerged from an interior office, Mickey Hayes saw that he was wrapped in a spider’s web of telephone wires.

“He had three telephones going at once. It was a Sunday and he had $350,000 bet on pro football games. He was in there managing his bets,” Hayes recalled.

It is unclear if Davis won or lost that day. He bet so much, and so often, it was hard to keep score. It was a different story for Mickey Hayes. Not only did he win a job, Davis gave him “full autonomy” to finish designing and building Southern Shores, today considered one of the more attractive communities on the Outer Banks. Walter Davis’ bet on Southern Shores eventually paid off as well. In 1985, he agreed to sell the development for $6 million – or about three times his original investment.

~

How do you begin to describe someone who in many ways is indescribable?

Walter Royal Davis was a singular, larger-than-life American: self-possessed, enigmatic, impulsive, quick-tempered, yet wildly, even rashly, generous. Booted from several high schools for his indifference to classroom schooling, he nonetheless prized learning and later gave away millions for scholarships and libraries and was invited to sit on the boards of prestigious universities. But his philanthropy wasn’t limited to slapping his name on buildings. Stories abound in Eastern North Carolina of Davis leaving $100 tips for $1 cups of coffee. A rare raconteur who also listened closely, Davis would lean into a waitress and ask about her life and goals. If she dreamed of going to college, Davis would make it happen.

According to a family biography written by North Carolina journalist Ned Cline, Davis once paid to bring the comedian Bill Cosby to a school in Manteo as a reward to the children. By the time he died in 2008, at the age of 88, it is estimated that Davis had given away over $100 million. His generosity included his ex-wives. Davis was married six times to four different women (two, twice). Cline recounts that Davis agreed to settle one divorce for $1 million but insisted that the money be delivered in $1 bills by armored truck. That was also Davis: an unrepentant rogue. But not one you wanted to rub the wrong way.

Davis’s politics veered from Democrat to Republican, depending which party happened to be in office. He gave generously to all, millions by his count, not necessarily expecting anything in return except that the politicians would pick up the telephone when he called, which they did. Walter Davis could make or break careers and legislation. He knew everyone and, if he didn’t know someone, he quickly found a way to befriend him. When he returned to his native North Carolina from the Texas oil fields, he kept a suite at the Radisson Inn in Raleigh Triangle Park, where politicians paraded by for his drinks, advice and money. In the late 1960s, he bought a shabby motel in Kitty Hawk and spruced up one of the rooms to host all-night poker parties. Among his guests were Sen. William J. Fulbright of Arkansas and House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. He also knew Henry Kissinger and Dean Rusk, and once socialized with French President Charles de Gaulle, according to his biographical sketch.

When young Marc Basnight was considering a run for the North Carolina Senate in the 1980s, Davis pulled him aside and told him he wasn’t ready. Still, he saw something. Like Davis, Basnight had barely escaped high school yet was preternaturally smart and good around people. Davis bought Basnight a subscription to The Economist magazine and quizzed him weekly while they tooled around Manteo in his Lincoln Town Car. When it appeared Basnight wasn’t keeping up, Davis called him stupid and advised the would-be politician to pick up the pace. Basnight won his election and went on to serve as Senate pro tempore, the second-most important position in North Carolina politics. Visitors to his Raleigh office recalled it being filled with magazines of all stripes — many of which were dogeared or marked-up. Clearly, he had gotten the message. Dumb wasn’t going to cut it.

~

After quitting Woolworth’s, Davis rotated through different jobs, working as a long-haul trucker, office manager and restauranteur. He spent three months in federal prison for failing to pay business taxes, then relocated to Salinas, California, where he met another rebellious entrepreneur, Fred Rumbley, who quickly recognized Davis’s innate business savvy. The pair worked profitably together for a quarter-century. In the 1950s, Rumbley backed Davis on a new venture: hauling oil from wells to refineries in the booming Texas Panhandle. Davis moved to Midland, the hard-driving, hard-drinking center of the oil fields, and began buying tanker trucks and making friends, including the future president, George H.W. Bush. The flamboyant Davis became so popular, bartenders named a drink for him at the Midland Petroleum Club – the “Walter Davis,” straight Seagram’s VO over ice, according to Cline’s biography.

After a number of years, Davis was hauling a half-million barrels of crude a day and making millions for the Rumbley-Davis partnership. In time, he would branch out, adding real estate and manufacturing businesses, and his wealth would grow to preposterous levels. But the Texas Panhandle was brutally hot in summer and Davis decided to split his time at a Nags Head bungalow he bought. In the late ’60s, he began to invest in Outer Banks real estate, picking up a home here and there, the old Sea Ranch Motel, even a fishing pier.

Davis had more stories than a dog. One that stands out is how, one summer day in 1968, he was looking for a bottle of Orange Crush soda on a Kitty Hawk pier. When he couldn’t find one, he complained to the pier manager, who apparently didn’t recognize Davis and told him, “Tough,” and if he didn’t like it, he should buy the pier. Which Davis did, writing a check on the spot for $96,000. A decade later, he sold the pier for $2.5 million – a testament to Davis’s skill, luck, and the soaring real estate values on the Outer Banks.

About this time, Davis was introduced to Armand Hammer, volatile chairman of the board of Occidental Petroleum. The meeting was arranged by North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford and took place at an Outer Banks marina, where Hammer’s yacht docked beside Davis’s prized boat, Gemel 1. Initially, Davis liked Hammer. He was an impulsive gambler, like him. Two years later, he merged his oil business with Occidental. It would prove to be a horrible mistake, Davis would later say. The worst decision he ever made.

In the late ’60s, Davis began to buy large tracts along the pristine Currituck Banks, including 4 miles of oceanfront for $1.2 million from the members of the Currituck Shooting Club. He used Carl P. White, a legendary waterfowl guide and hunt lodge manager who speculated in land on the side, as his proxy. White acquired an option and then sold it back to Davis.

A year later, Davis turned to White again, this time to buy the Pine Island Hunt Club, which had been owned since the 1930s by the Barney family from Connecticut. The tract included roughly 5 miles of gently rolling sand dunes, interior forests and sprawling salt marsh from the Atlantic Ocean to the Currituck Sound. Davis, then a vice president of Occidental, used a company subsidiary to pay for the $2.5 million option on the land. According to legend, when Hammer learned about the deal, he quickly canceled the payment. Not long after, an embittered Davis left Occidental.

With his plans to control the Currituck Banks scuttled, Davis sold the Currituck Shooting Club land to James Johnson and Coastland Realty, which developed the popular Ocean Sands resort. But Davis wasn’t quite done. In 1976, he purchased the 2,700-acre Southern Shores property from David Stick, the local historian and developer, who was having money issues. Davis and Stick had become friends while working together on the initial Coastal Resources Commission Advisory Committee a few years earlier. Stick was divorced and in debt and wanted to devote more time to his writing. According to Mickey Hayes, “Mr. Davis thought a lot of David. He had no interest in the real estate. He wanted to help David and that is what he did.”

Davis left Hayes to finish Southern Shores. Hayes said he worked tirelessly during the day laying out the undeveloped lots, “trying to make the houses fit the land,” and his nights designing houses on the side. One house he designed was for Davis along the northern oceanfront in Southern Shores. Hayes laid it out horizontally, not vertically, like most beach houses today. “It was a huge house and had everything you could put in there,” he said. “It didn’t matter what it cost. Mr. Davis said: `Do what you can do.’ And I did.”

In the early 1970s, the Outer Banks were still rough enough around the edges that it was possible to confuse the rolling sand dunes and pounding surf with the rugged coast of England. At least, that is what Lilias J. Morrison thought the first time she saw Nags Head.

It was sometime around 1970, she thinks. She was cruising along the interstate in a turquoise VW Bug with her good friend, Jennifer Frost. They were on holiday, heading back to New York City, where they were graduate students at Columbia University. It was 4 or 5 in the afternoon. The sun was sinking. Rounding a bend in the road, a sign for the then-modest resort appeared. “It sounded like a place back home in England,” Morrison recalled. “I said to Jennifer, ‘Let’s go see.’”

Morrison had grown up in Lancashire, on the edge of the Lake district of the United Kingdom, earned degrees in theology at Sheffield and Oxford, then spent three years teaching Latin at a girl’s high school in Nairobi, before moving to the United States to continue studies for her doctorate.

She never collected the advanced degree.

The Outer Banks got in the way.  

~

Most of the visitors who crowd onto the Outer Banks probably have never heard of Lilias Morrison, let alone know her remarkable backstory: A theology student who became one of the Outer Banks’s most influential designers — not to mention, the first woman builder of consequence along the Northern Banks. Like one of her mentors, the late Earl Slick, she is proud yet quiet, comfortable yet humble. But don’t ever confuse her with lacking ambition. Morrison helped to design and market Sanderling and Palmer’s Island, two of the more admired developments north of Duck. She later formed her own company, Real Escapes, focusing on environmentally friendly and energy efficient builds, remodels, and sales – or as she likes to say, “houses that blend into the land” instead of overwhelming it. Along the way, there were forays into local politics, a campaign to protect the quaint, village-like nature of Duck, even a drive to fend off big-box stores and keep the skies dark.

Morrison, who describes herself as “over 75” and still has a pleasing lilt in her voice, never wanted to be an ordinary developer. “I became a builder because local builders wouldn’t do anything except beach boxes,” she said “We didn’t want to turn the oceanfront into suburbia by the sea. We placed a great emphasis on preservation and conservation.”

Which isn’t surprising when you learn a bit about Morrison’s past. Growing up in the Lake District in Northwest England, she was surrounded by botanical gardens and historic buildings. “I grew up with these wonderful landscapes. There were living gardens. Land for parks and museums. In the old industrial steel towns, historic factory buildings with abstract strength I admired. All of this had a great influence, you see.”

Morrison had always wanted to travel in Africa and after university got her chance. With a family friend’s help, she landed a job teaching at The Kenya High School for Girls, one of the best schools in the British Commonwealth. “My job other than teaching some biblical stuff to train people to think, I taught Greek and Latin as well. It was high academics with a goal of getting the girls to take the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams.”

During breaks, Morrison and the other young teachers explored the continent, visiting wildlife parks and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. One of her favorite places was Kampala, the capital of Uganda. “Those days, Kampala was the Athens of Africa, (home to) writers and artists,” she said.

In the mid-1960s, Morrison moved to the United States to continue graduate studies in theology at Union Theological Seminary, affiliated with Columbia University. She landed there amid wrenching cultural shifts and student protests. “We were rebels,” she laughed. “I remember climbing a gate.”

She met Jennifer Frost at Columbia, an older student from Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, who liked to travel and surf. They planned adventures, moved to Germany to learn the language, drove to Atlanta, and then tumbled into Nags Head, where they fell in love with the locals and the coast. “We didn’t have much time. We spent the days walking the beach, swimming, walking the upper ridge of Jockey’s Ridge, which was bigger in those days. We both said we would come back to this wonderful place,” Morrison said. And they did.

They returned the following fall. Then again that spring. The owners of a Nags Head bakery invited them for drinks, recalling how they had moved to the Banks from the Midwest. The idea for a bakery evolved slowly but once it did, it stuck. They opened on Memorial Day and closed on Labor Day, and made just enough to get through their first winter and reopen the following spring. Lilias and Jennifer were enthralled and decided they should do a business, too. But what kind of business? And where?

They wound up in Manteo where they discovered the history of “The Lost Colony” and met a helpful real estate agent named Phil Quidley. They had no money, they explained, but wanted to start a small business. Somehow, Quidley negotiated a modest down payment and they became the owners of the Fort Raleigh Hotel. During season they could count on overnight guests coming to see “The Lost Colony.” They also became agents for Western Union. Lilias used her botanical skills to turn a garden into a local attraction, naming it for Sir Richard Granville, the daring naval commander from Cornwall.

Lilias and Jennifer ran the hotel for two seasons. Like many Bankers they scrambled in the off-season, working as waitresses at the Sea Ranch Motel and studying in their spare time for their real estate licenses. “We weren’t too proud to be waitresses. Our main financial goal was survival, you see,” said Morrison.

By now, it was the mid-1970s. Lilias and Jennifer began to sell houses and lots in Hatteras, Nags Head, and Collington. They eventually found their way north, to the Village of Duck, which wasn’t much more than a few dozen houses, a surf shop, post office, and a grocery store. Still, they saw the potential and wanted a piece of the action.

One day, Jennifer saw an advertisement for a project called Sanderling and, on a hunch, phoned. She soon found herself speaking with John C. Whitaker Jr., a talented young builder with a vision for a quaint, natural community built in the old Nags Head style – no tennis courts, no swimming pools, but lots of nature trails and unpretentious houses meant to be passed from generation to generation.

In 1977, Lilias and Jennifer began working for Whitaker as sales agents and landscape designers. Morrison gives credit to Whitaker for creating one of the more unique resort communities on the Northern Banks. But without Lilias and Jennifer, their boundless energy and creativity, Sanderling may never have thrived. “They turned out to be super salespeople,” said William E. Hollan Jr., who continued developing Sanderling after Whitaker and his partners stepped away in the early 1980s. “I give them 100% of the credit for carrying through on the mission.”

Hollan and Earl Slick, the owner of the property, finished six additional sections of Sanderling and then built the Sanderling Inn. Jennifer left to start a radio station in Duck and take up other real estate ventures. Lilias continued to work closely with Hollan and Slick at Sanderling. Later, when Hollan acquired a small tract of land just north of the Dare County border, Morrison joined him in developing the exclusive gated community known as Palmer’s Island. There was only enough room for a dozen houses – but what houses! They were outsized, New England-style beach homes, with spectacular views of the ocean and the sound.

 “It was zoned for multifamily and could have been condominiums. It would have changed the whole character and Sanderling. And so, we decided to build large summer homes rather like Newport for extended families,” Morrison said. “In a way, Sanderling and Palmer’s Island was more old money and old beach atmosphere. Pine Island was more new money: fortunes from the computer industry and Wall Street. Owners who wanted the latest thing. The character of those houses changed.”

At Palmer’s Island, Morrison designed a house for an executive of General Motors. Another house sold to heirs of the DuPont fortune. “Their goal was to be very peaceful and incognito. They were very cautious of their privacy,” Morrison said.

Around 1993, Morrison moved out of Sanderling and set up a new business, the Real Escapes Group, in a historic building in the center of Duck. Her focus shifted from building to designing and remodeling, with a strong focus on preservation and conservation. Today, she runs her business out of a commercial outlet in Harbinger but lives near the sound in Southern Shores in a house she purchased from David Stick, the late historian, politician, and developer.

Related: Frank Stick: A Maverick Who Helped Shape the Outer Banks

She owns other property but doesn’t think she will develop it. “Let’s face it,” she said, “if you are in real estate … you are interested in acquiring property the way (other) people acquire a good overcoat or a pair of shoes.”

Morrison has now lived on the Outer Banks for a half-century. During that time, she has witnessed incalculable changes yet hasn’t lost the sense of surprise or awe she felt that late afternoon she landed in Nags Head years ago. “As far as I am concerned, the Outer Banks are world class,” she said. “There is still a pristine quality I hope will remain in spite of development.”

Fishing means a lot of different things to people. For some it’s a simple escape from the hectic world, for others a way to connect with family, still others have managed to use it as a way to earn a living in the world. For Dave Rohde of Kitty Hawk, it’s not hyperbole to say that fishing saved his life.

The fish-rich waters of the Northwest is where this story begins. Born in Pocatello, Idaho, and raised in Seattle, fishing was part of Rohde’s life from the very beginning. His father would shepherd him around to local fishing holes.

“I started fishing when I was 5 or 6 years old and my dad would take me to stocked farm ponds to fish for trout,” he recalled recently.

Ironically though, Rohde’s father didn’t fish much himself.

“My father was supposed to be a fisherman. In my 18 years in his house, I only saw him fish once, but our house was loaded with antique bamboo fly rods by famous makers such as Horrocks-Ibbotson and other famous rod builders.”

When confronted with the problem of catching fish, Rohde figured it out one way or the other.

“I was a completely self-taught angler and I would fish the streams around my house in Seattle with eggs and worms until I graduated to Mepps and Panther Martin spinners,” he explained.

Later, he found advice in the printed word and outside helpers: “I learned mostly from Boys Life and the Scouts.”

Like many in the armed services, Rohde’s family moved around a bit, first from Seattle to Puerto Rico and then to the Tidewater, Virginia, area. Rohde didn’t fish much in Puerto Rico but a new passion found him while there.

“From 19 to 24, surfing dominated my life, and when I was in Puerto Rico, surfing was my focus.”

Once the family moved to Virginia his passion turned again to fishing.

“As soon as I returned to the mainland I was back at it.”

Then in 1976 he met the woman who would become his first wife.

“When I was 24, I met my wife to be, Gretchen Majors.” This relationship would change his life in more ways than he could ever had imagined at that time. Rohde met a man who would teach him the fishing and outdoors skills he still uses.

“Her father was a gentleman named Ergo Majors III. He simply became my life mentor, taught me how to fly fish, tie my own flies, shoot clays and load my own shells,” Rohde said. “This man was as important to me as my own father. He was larger than life to say the least.”

And then Rohde’s star began to rise in the surfing community.

“By this time, I was a well-known West Coast surfboard builder and I split my passion between fishing and surfing.”

While out West, Rohde started to fish some legendary waters.

“I started going to Mammoth, California, fly fishing the Kern Valley rivers, and to Northern California to chase steelhead,” he said.

But then it all came apart.

When his marriage ended messily in 1980, it affected him deeply.

“When my marriage fell apart, I went on a mini self-destruct and ended up in my dad’s house in Norfolk, Virginia. I really didn’t fish much for three or four years,” Rohde said, adding that he found solace in drinking and drugs at that time. It took an outside force to bring him out of it.

“The company I was working for, Wave Riding Vehicles, moved their factory to the Outer Banks and it was game-on with fishing again,” Rohde said.

Among those in the sport, Rohde is a well-known name for his surfboard-shaping prowess, and a WRV board bearing the Rohde name is highly coveted.

“I started fly fishing the bass ponds in Currituck and chasing bluefish on the beach,” he said, and that is what brought him out of a very dangerous time. Rohde figures that if not for fishing he may not be here today.

“I got sober in 1994 and started fly fishing for stripers around Oregon Inlet. By 1996, I was doing wade trips around the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center. I’ve been guiding on the Outer Banks ever since,” he said.

Then in 2000, Rohde met Joanne Lassiter, and he called her a great influence who made him a father with her son, Alex Lassiter.

“I had him since he was 10 and I raised him like he was my own. He and I would go surfing and fishing together all the time,” Rohde said.

But then a few years later, tragedy hit and again threatened to pull Rohde apart.

“Alex passed away from a very rare cancer in 2013, and I stepped away from guiding for six years,” Rohde said. But once again, his lifelong passion found him and brought him back. “After we lost our son, fishing and surfing saved me. Fishing brought me mentally back from the abyss of loss and depression.”

Rohde has been fly fishing for a long time and has a few words of wisdom for those getting into the sport: “The only way to get better at anything, and especially fly fishing, is practice and a good mentor.”

Having a good place to practice also makes all the difference, he added.

“My father-in-law introduced me to the San Diego fly fishers. We would go to Balboa Park on Sundays and there would be a ton of guys there that would work with me on my cast. There is no substitute for this. YouTube videos will not make you a good caster.”

Lacking a professional club of outstanding fly casters, just get out there on a pond or lawn or wherever there is enough room, he advised.

“I think the most important thing in saltwater fly fishing is presentation. The ability to cast the right fly that swims properly, to the right spot, is the key to success. And if you can’t cast over 30 or 40 feet, you’re going to be out of luck quite often.”

These days, Rohde keeps busy with a multitude of projects. He’s guiding still around the Oregon Inlet area, but there’s more.

“I supply all the local shops with flies. I still build a few surfboards. But I do it all part-time now,” he said.

And fishing remains a favorite pastime, but he’s also found new passions.

“My preferred method of fishing is fly, but I probably actually spin fish 70% of the time. Totally situational,” he said.

That other more recent driving force of late has been Rohde’s soft spot for animals. He is involved with animal rescue and specifically saving the feral and abandoned cats that proliferate all along the North Carolina coast.

“I’m quite an animal activist. I do trapping for the local animal rescue groups, and I’ve saved several cats myself,” he said.

And for those reading this who might feel they’re in a dark place like he once was, Rohde offers encouragement.

“I’m not shy about getting sober. If I can do it, anybody can,” he said.

People are always saying things about how they are going to take the thing they love to do and turn it into their life’s work. Most of us never act on it. Tim Still of Havelock has, and by all accounts seems to be doing well at it.

Next time you’re in a tackle shop, look at the selection of casting spoons, chances are, Still’s Beach Bum Lures will be represented on that rack. Still has taken his avocation and turned it into an ongoing vocation. It’s not many of us who can make their love of fishing into a successful career. 

Originally from Salisbury, that’s where Still was introduced to fishing by his family.

“I grew up pond and river fishing with my family for crappie, bream, catfish and white bass,” he recently told Coastal Review.

It was his father’s best friend, Mr. J.C. Campbell, who taught him about doing more than just sitting and waiting.

“He only used artificial baits, which I found more interesting because he was constantly moving around the pond looking for fish rather than waiting.”

Mainly, Still enjoyed pond and river fishing for panfish as a kid, but the saltwater was always there, an annual event.

“Once a year we would go to Virginia to fish for spot and croaker,” he explained.

As he got older, Still developed into a good athlete, good enough to play three sports in high school and to play college baseball.

“In high school, I played football, baseball and indoor track; I played college baseball at Wingate University,” he said, referring to the private

He was also good enough to pursue a career as a baseball player for several years. But like most of us, he had to come back to Earth and get a job. For a while the sports world continued to keep him busy.

“After baseball ended, I was a sports writer at the Sun Journal in New Bern, then at the Daily Reflector in Greenville,” he recalled. Then a career change landed him in Charlotte, where he worked for Wachovia, now Wells Fargo.

But another change was in the works.

Still made untold numbers of trips to the coast from Charlotte and developed a real love for casting to schooling fish from the beach.

Spanish mackerel and false albacore will bite anything shiny when they are visibly feeding close to shore. The problem was, Still said, many of the products available to do the job were made with poor finishes that flaked off after a few fish strikes, along with cheap hooks and split rings that bent or rusted quickly.

Still decided to do something about it.

“I started Beach Bum Lures Fishing Co. in 2019, full time in 2021-present, designing lures for saltwater fishing,” said Still.

The way Still figured, even though quality finishes and hardware might cost a little more, he could still get into the market at a lower price point than some of the mass-produced casting spoons. He began to produce higher-quality lures with longer-lasting paint jobs, nicer sharp hooks, and split rings that don’t break. He does it all himself.

At first, Still’s output was just a way to pay fishing expenses, but he gradually shifted to a full-time operation.

“I manage sales, design, quality control and customer service. From start to the order being delivered, I handle pretty much every step in the process,” he said.

That vertical integration – cutting out the middle man — helps keep the lures competitively priced.

“The plan is to handle distribution, production, and anything else independently, rather than through a distributor,” he said.

Still shares his home in Havelock with Shirley, his wife of 24 years, a Vanceboro native, and his three younger kids.

“We have six kids, three are adults, three in school. The younger kids all enjoy fishing and really like being close to the beach,” Still said. “I will fish for just about anything if I’m able to use an artificial bait.”

But he has definite favorites: “Spanish mackerel and false albacore are at the top of the list.” And fishing from the surf or shore is what he enjoys most.

“I prefer being on the sand rather than a boat or pier. I like the challenge of coming up with a strategy,” he said, adding that surf fishing is definitely not a game of numbers most days. “The key to my and many others’ success is putting the time in and being OK with the fact that some days, you’re not going to catch them.”

That’s a pretty good outlook to remember no matter what kind of fishing you’re doing. A big key to success in surf fishing is being aware of the variable conditions that will affect fish location and their feeding mood.

“Understanding the wind direction, water temperature and clarity are vital for the type of fishing that I do and those three things are everything,” he said.

If you understand how these three things combined with tide affect the fish you seek, you greatly enhance your chances of success. The only way to know this is by being aware of what is going on through time on the water.

In terms of the future, Still sees himself continuing to grow his business, expanding beyond North Carolina. “

The market is wide open,” Still said, noting that he has a lot of new product in the pipeline. “I’ve only sold 10% of my designs this season. I will introduce them a few at a time, adding onto already-established patterns.”

Anglers who know are likely looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Frank Stick was in search of two things when he arrived on the Outer Banks in the 1920s: adventure and money. He found enough adventure to fill a lifetime but like many Bankers on the isolated barrier islands, he scrambled to pay the bills. Once one of the largest landowners, with property from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras, the artist turned developer lost many of his holdings during the Great Depression. Stick eventually recovered and developed the much-admired Southern Shores community with his son David and other partners. A complex man of shifting interests and unwavering opinions, Stick was both a conservationist who played an instrumental role in the formation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and an avid land speculator who wrote of turning the Banks into a playground for tourists.

This is his story.

Chapter Four: Inventing the Seashore

Read the ongoing series

In the 1930s, with the nation in the throes of the Great Depression and any signs of a land boom now a distant memory, Frank Stick shifted tactics and returned to his role as a conservationist.

Writing in the July 21, 1933, edition of The Elizabeth City Independent, Frank outlined a sprawling new vision calling for the government to set aside a large share of the Outer Banks as a park. Entitled: A COASTAL PARK FOR NORTH CAROLINA AND THE NATION, Frank argued that the government had scores of beautiful parks out West – Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, among others – but barely any presence in the East, and nothing along the coast. Why not a park for the Outer Banks? he asked. The low, slim barrier islands included miles of “shining beaches, peaceful sun-kissed sounds, and bountiful wildlife.”

Frank’s cri de coeur took up an entire page of W.O. Saunders’s broadsheet. That by itself should have signaled to readers that Saunders favored the idea. In fact, a decade earlier the editor had called for a state park in Hatteras in his newspaper. Frank Stick’s plan was far more elaborate, taking the readers through the logic for a park, where it might be located, and how it would boost the isolated Banks and its faltering economy.   

Frank began by telling readers that the “opportunity for healthful outdoor recreation and communion with nature” was an indispensable part of America’s progress as a nation — as important as commerce, politics or education. Unfortunately, he continued, speculators had acquired the majority of the nation’s shoreline for private development. With so much land tied up in private hands, ordinary citizens would have dwindling opportunities to experience the serenity and beauty of the seashore.

At first blush, it might seem odd that Stick, one of the largest title holders on the Outer Banks until the Depression, would single out speculators. However, it is worth remembering that Frank never saw himself as a real estate man greedily buying up the oceanfront. In his mind, he was a conservationist striving for an equitable balance between development and nature. Was it true? Not exactly. He landed on the Banks with a plan and needed to make money in real estate after abandoning his art career. Still, his later developments, especially Southern Shores, did achieve some of the balance he sought.

Frank proposed that the government should acquire up to 100 miles – or most of the Banks – via philanthropic gifts, condemnation, and outright purchases. The Outer Banks, he wrote, were “unique among all lands on the earth,” enjoyed a mild year-round climate, and rarely experienced hurricanes. Contrary to popular narratives, he added, meteorological records showed that the Outer Banks were no windier than the New Jersey coast where he had lived for more than a decade. It was a bold claim and likely made to boost his park plan. In private correspondence, Frank often complained about the relentless wind on the Outer Banks. Indeed, only months after writing his proposal, a hurricane struck the Banks, leveling Frank’s pavilion on Kitty Hawk Bay.

At the time, there was only a small section of paved road on the Banks, paralleling the ocean from Kitty Hawk to Whalebone Junction. Frank envisioned constructing a highway the length of the Banks. With his usual confidence, he explained to readers: “This roadway is no fantastic dream; no expansively enthusiastic scheme to attract public or political favor, but a sensible, well thought out project that would prove inestimable economic and esthetic value …”

Frank calculated that a seashore park would attract 50 visitors for every one visitor to an inland mountain, lake or forest. He wasn’t wrong; a seashore park would draw large crowds. But his numbers were wildly exaggerated. In recent years, even with up to 3 million visitors annually, Cape Hatteras National Seashore ranks well behind the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with its nearly 13 million visitors. Indeed, none of the National Park Service’s 10 national seashores crack the top 10 in attendance for its many parks.

Frank ended his proposal by suggesting that a seashore park could be dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the newly elected president. It was a savvy political move but probably unnecessary. The administration was already looking for projects for its New Deal relief programs and had embraced legislation calling for the development of recreational areas and public parks. Within a year or two, the Work Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) would employ thousands of jobless and homeless Americans, using them to clear and maintain forests, build camps, repair wildlife refuges, and scores of other jobs. The men would provide a ready source of cheap labor for a seashore park.

The idea of a seashore appealed to National Park Service officials, who, like Stick, worried that the nation’s coasts were being bought up by wealthy Americans, shutting out everyone else. “When we look up and down the ocean fronts of America, we find that everywhere they are passing behind the fence of private ownership,” wrote Harold Ickes, Secretary of The Department of Interior, which includes the National Park Service.

The Park Service sent Marion Shuffler, a researcher, to study the possibility of using the Outer Banks as America’s first national seashore. Shuffler reported back that the economy of the Outer Banks was in serious decline “and tied to a way of life that no longer exists.” He then argued that the future of the Banks depended on tourism, tied to a park. A subsequent study identified a dozen possible locations for federal seashores but settled on the Outer Banks as the best choice.

The momentum was now behind Frank’s proposal. All he needed was for the politics to align.

~

Frank Stick didn’t think of himself as a political person. He called himself “a lefty” but that appeared to be a joke. He complained about some of the New Deal programs and criticized government bureaucrats who never acted quickly enough for his mercurial tastes. If anything, his politics veered more Republican than Democratic.

In a strange twist, in 1940, the FBI office in Charlotte opened an investigation of Frank after they received information that “Frank Stick is an individual who is in favor of dictatorships and opposed to the democratic form of government in this country,” records show. Edward Scheidt, the Special Agent in Charge, asked Victor Meekins, the Dare County Sheriff, to investigate. A few days later, Meekins wrote the agent that Frank had originally been a Republican but was now trying to “adjust himself … to Democratic sentiment.” Meekins added that Frank appeared to be loyal to his country but perhaps became confused at times. “With a world gone hay-wire, he probably is perplexed himself, and scatters remarks without discreetly remembering who is listening.” The Bureau dropped its probe.

After being appointed to a state commission established to promote an Outer Banks park, Frank bristled at the slow pace of those working with him and sometimes took matters into his own hands, traveling to Washington and Raleigh to push his proposal. Over the next few years, Frank worked tirelessly on his vision and was a relentless letter-writer to politicians and key government officials, urging them to move more quickly.

In Frank’s mind, the window for a park was limited. Residents of the Outer Banks had responded favorably to his proposal. But Frank knew there were limits to their enthusiasm. Like him, they had a tenuous relationship with the government. They liked when the government built them roads and bridges. But they worried that the park might be a land grab and restrict their ability to move about freely, hunting and fishing. Their concerns – as well as missteps by the government, and the coming war – would delay the seashore for years.

Park Service officials admired Frank’s energy and dedication, especially Conrad L. Wirth, a Washington, D.C.-based administrator who helped to plan the National Seashore and eventually would be named NPS director. Publicly, Wirth praised Frank. But privately he worried that Frank had “ulterior motives” and might be pushing the park to boost the value of his remaining real estate. It was a classic case of supply and demand. If the government controlled large swaths of the Banks, the remaining land in private hands would go up in price. In a letter to Maud, Frank once noted that if the park were approved, it would be good for them and might help to turn around the family’s fortunes. Of course, Frank wouldn’t have been the only one to benefit. In any event, the two ideas, pushing for a large swath of the Outer Banks to be preserved and encouraging a vibrant tourist economy, weren’t mutually exclusive in Frank’s mind.     

Throughout this period, Frank worked closely with Lindsay C. Warren, the congressman from nearby Washington, in Beaufort County, who represented the Outer Banks. Like Stick and others, Warren saw the future of the isolated barrier islands as tied to tourism. Warren was young, 36, ambitious and eager for headlines. In 1937, he introduced legislation in the House to create the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and also played an instrumental role in directing millions of New Deal dollars to Eastern North Carolina and the Banks.

When FDR unveiled the WPA and CCC, Warren saw an opportunity and began lobbying the administration. In May 1935, FDR invited Warren to spend a weekend on his yacht, Potomac, along with Harry Hopkins, the President’s right-hand man on the New Deal. Two weeks later, Warren announced that the WPA was setting aside over $1 million dollars to fight erosion and help “stabilize” the Outer Banks.

Like most barrier islands, which are constantly shifting, the Outer Banks suffered from chronic erosion. The problem was especially acute near the historic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which was being undermined and was at risk of collapsing into the Atlantic Ocean. Following publication of Frank’s proposal, a cadre of state foresters and geologists visited the Banks to study the issue. They concluded that the Outer Banks (let alone a park) would not survive without human intervention. They proposed a towering artificial sand dune to prevent sand from washing across the islands in storms. The barrier would extend from the Virginia border to Ocracoke Island.

Frank never mentioned erosion or the supposedly ragged condition of the Banks’ sand dunes in his proposal. Nevertheless, he quickly endorsed the idea as his own, contending that a stable dune was needed to protect the asphalt road he envisioned running the length of the Banks. Later, he directed a crew at one of the eight government camps on the Banks that housed thousands of itinerant workers building the dunes.

Years later, in 1973, the NPS would abandon its dune-building activities. Erosion was a natural part of barrier island migration, scientists said, and blocking sand from washing across the islands and elevating the interiors was a mistake. The artificial dune also provided a false sense of security, the scientists wrote, encouraging development in areas prone to flooding and storms. By then, the Service had spent millions of dollars moving around sand. State engineers had spent millions more.  

America’s first national seashore didn’t officially open until 1953. By then, Frank Stick had moved on to new ideas and interests, including new real estate deals. His son David would assume the family lead in helping the seashore into existence, working closely with state and federal officials, writing articles, and giving talks.

Next in the series: Southern Shores

Frank Stick was in search of two things when he arrived on the Outer Banks in the 1920s: adventure and money. He found enough adventure to fill a lifetime but like many Bankers on the isolated barrier islands, he scrambled to pay the bills. Once one of the largest landowners, with property from Kitty Hawk to Hatteras, the artist turned developer lost many of his holdings during the Great Depression. Stick eventually recovered and developed the much-admired Southern Shores community with his son David and other partners. A complex man of shifting interests and unwavering opinions, Stick was both a conservationist who played an instrumental role in the formation of Cape Hatteras National Seashore and an avid land speculator who wrote of turning the Banks into a playground for tourists. This is his story.

Chapter One: The Outdoorsman

After finishing a new book, “The Geography of Risk,” in 2018, I began rooting around for my next project. I thought I might write about the Outer Banks. I had been coming to Currituck for over three decades at that point and had watched it grow from a modest seashore retreat to a modern-day coastal playground with ever larger and more luxurious “cottages” and amenities. I was both intrigued and, I suppose, alarmed by these changes. I didn’t want the Banks to morph into another coastal suburb with big-box stores, chain restaurants, and row after row of grid-style houses. I wanted the old unpretentious Banks, with their rough edges, rogue charms, and breathtaking views. I thought there might be a story and wanted to know more. 

Discovering things is how I work. I rarely begin with an outline. I prefer to get dirty, prowling around in archives and spending countless hours online reading old newspaper stories. In public settings, writers assume a pose of confidence and control. But don’t believe it. A week didn’t pass in which I wasn’t hounded by the thought all my research might be for naught. The Outer Banks, really? Who wants to read a modern history of the Banks? And then one coffee-deprived morning, I stumbled upon Frank Stick.

Of course, I had no idea who Frank Stick was, why he mattered, or what he had to do with the Outer Banks. But there he was, lurking in a yellowed 90-year-old newspaper clipping about a grand new resort he planned to build near the border of Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills. Frank talked about building beach cottages and hotels, and how his plan marked a new beginning for the long-ignored Outer Banks, then one of the poorest places in North Carolina. Local newspaper editors ate it up. Change was at hand, they proclaimed, and not a moment too soon. It was the 1920s, after all, and the markets were roaring, jazz was in the air, optimism rampant.

“Look at Florida,” roared W.O. Saunders, the irascible editor and publisher of The Elizabeth City Independent. “Why can’t the Outer Banks with all of its natural assets be the next Florida? We can fashion a national playground for Americans of all ages, who will come here and spend their money, creating jobs for anyone who wants one. It will be a new golden age, perhaps even a Paradise.”

For reasons I can’t explain, I became obsessed with Frank Stick. Every day I learned a little more of his improbable story – artist, outdoorsman, gadfly, dreamer, developer, speculator — and how he had landed on the Banks in mystery and shadows. What I couldn’t decide was whether Frank (he was now just Frank to me) was a hero or merely posing as one? His motivations were complicated. He was a naturalist who filled miles of beaches with vacation houses. A conservationist who eagerly speculated in land and promised investors big profits. An artist, coveted for his illustrations, who abandoned his art to be a real estate man.

Just when I would think I knew him, some other facet of his personality would reveal itself and I would find myself fumbling for purchase again.

“Stick was a unique individual, characterized by his extreme versatility,” wrote Michael F. Mordell, author of an early biography of Stick, the artist.

That sounded about right. Frank painted, drew, and sculpted. He designed homes and landscapes. And he wrote feverishly, if often baroquely, about a wide range of subjects. At times, he exaggerated, claiming to be a native of the Banks, or took credit for projects he didn’t lead. I imagine it had to do with his competitive personality and solitary upbringing. Frank was uniquely self-possessed and rarely short of confidence. It brimmed in his art and cast a long arc over his family. And over the course of four decades, it had a powerful impact on the Outer Banks.

~

Frank Leonard Stick was born in the railroad town of Huron, South Dakota, in February 1884, but at an early age moved to Sioux City, Iowa, then to Oglesby, Illinois. As a young boy, he vanished into the woods to hunt, fish, and explore. Initially, these forays lasted hours. Then days. Then weeks. Smart but bored with formal schooling, he headed to the woods of northern Wisconsin, where he worked as a camp cook. By the time he was a teenager, he was expert at camping and guiding. In time, he moved deeper into the forests and mountains of the West, traveling as far as Yellowstone in Montana. Grainy photos show Frank dressed in a buckskin shirt and hat, with an ever-present neckerchief and pipe – oh, and an elk strapped across his back.

“I am not able to remember back to a period when I was not engaged in one way or another in getting my full measure of happiness from the out-of-doors,” Stick wrote in the journal Outdoor America, published by the Izaak Walton League of America.

In the early 1900s, Frank found a way to marry his passion for nature and wildlife with a future profession. He began drawing, sketching, and painting landscapes and hunting scenes. In 1904 he sold his first painting of a fisherman landing a bass to Sports Afield magazine for $10. Over the next two years, he contributed 75 illustrations to the magazine, according to Mordell. An expert angler, Frank also wrote stories about his fishing exploits for national publications and later in life would co-author a book on surfcasting.

Around the age of 22, Frank was invited to join Howard Pyle’s Brandywine School of Art in Wilmington, Delaware. Pyle was arguably the nation’s best-known illustrator. Instruction was free, informal, and lasted as long as the instructor and budding artist deemed necessary. Frank stayed three years and was surrounded by an array of talent, including N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish and W. H. D. Koerner, who would become a great friend. It was at Wilmington that Frank also met a petite and exuberant model, 18-year-old Ada Maud Hayes, who would become his partner in both business and life.

Frank and his new bride returned to the woods of northern Wisconsin, where they lived in a simple, Thoreau-style cabin on Squirrel Lake. Frank continued to hunt, fish and paint. His illustrations graced the covers of Field & Stream and other magazines. Others highlighted popular calendars, then a lucrative source of money for illustrators. Frank was a commercial and financial success, with as much work as he wished. Yet, as would become a familiar pattern throughout his life, Frank grew restless. Perhaps tired of solitary life, he decided to move the family east, closer to the big cities with their magazines and publishing houses.

In 1917, Frank, Maud, and their young daughter Charlotte moved to the tiny borough of Interlaken, near the seashore resort of Asbury Park, in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Named after the exclusive resort in Switzerland, Interlaken was approximately midway between New York and Philadelphia, centers of the publishing industry. Importantly, it also bordered Lake Deal, a magnet for migratory waterfowl, and was only a short hike to the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay, for fishing. Known as an artist’s colony, the small borough attracted painters, poets and actors. Frank built a large Georgian-style mansion and art studio on the banks of Lake Deal and called it Pine Cove.

Today, the Asbury Park many people know is the one Bruce Springsteen sang about in his seminal first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park,” a gritty, down-on-its-luck, fading seashore resort. But at the turn of the last century Asbury Park was very much alive and thriving. A popular destination for actors, politicians, and wealthy industrialists. Frank seemed to know all of them. Some he met through his art. Others through his adventures hunting and fishing. He also gave talks to any group that asked and frequently wrote about his exploits for the local papers.

One of his closest friends was Van Campen Heilner, a silver spoon scion of an anthracite coal fortune, who lived in nearby Spring Lake. Heilner often appeared in the newspapers in a pith helmet and was a well-known explorer, writer, and filmmaker associated with The Museum of Natural History in New York City. Ernest Hemingway considered Heilner one of the finest anglers in the world and named one of the characters in “A Farewell to Arms” Nurse Van Campen, an inside joke. In 1920, Stick and Heilner co-authored a pioneering work on surfcasting, “The Call of the Surf.”

Along with G. Albert Lyon, an inventor who made millions patenting bumpers and wheel covers for the nascent automobile trade, Stick and Heilner traveled from Maine to Florida hunting and fishing. In one memorable incident, Stick was fishing on Lyon’s yacht, Alberta, near Barnegat Inlet, when the yacht suddenly exploded and burned to the waterline. Lyon, reported The Asbury Park Press, “made a picturesque figure, garbed in a suit of pajamas and hip boots” as he launched himself into the inlet’s notoriously dangerous currents. Stick escaped by dinghy, telling a reporter that he didn’t mind losing his fishing tackle but greatly regretted he was unable to recover a “fine string of big bluefish.”

Frank also befriended Zane Grey, the popular author of “Riders of the Purple Sage”and other Western novels. Grey edited articles Stick wrote for Outdoor America. In turn, Frank illustrated some of Grey’s books and magazine stories. Grey was an avid angler and kept a camp in the Florida Keys, the Long Key Fishing Club. Frank became a frequent guest, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. He landed so many bonefish Grey included him as a character in his 1922 story, “The Bonefish Brigade,” which recounted one of their many fishing adventures.   

By the mid-1920s, sales of Grey’s books topped $1 million, making him America’s first millionaire author. Meanwhile, in one year alone, Stick reportedly sold over 150 illustrations. Even so, Frank complained that his art was beginning to feel cookie-cutter; editors were asking him to produce the same scenes over and over. He also worried that his illustrations of hunters glorified slaughtering the very waterfowl and animals he intended to celebrate. “Of course the main reason I quit art,” he told Maud, “was that I was fed up on that hunting stuff.”

Something had to change.

Next in the series: The nature lover turns speculator

BUXTON — Probably never before would “Aloha, y’all!” be such a culturally apt greeting for a vessel pulling up to an Outer Banks dock.

But that changed this month when a sleek six-paddler, ocean-blue, outrigger canoe, notable for the long, skinny extension off its left side that looks somewhat like a floating sidecar, arrived at Swell Motel in Buxton on a late Saturday afternoon, making for a novel scene even for boat-centric Hatteras Island.

The traditional oceangoing Polynesian canoe, widely used in Hawaii, Tahiti and Samoa, turned out to be a perfect vessel to bring attention to the goals of We the Water, a collaborative clean water awareness campaign.

“It’s the first time an outrigger canoe has been out here,” Bernadette Burton, president of the Wrightsville Beach Outrigger Canoe Club, said in an interview after paddlers completed a three-day, 125-mile journey from Swansboro to Cape Hatteras on Sept. 16.

“We felt so lucky and so blessed, we almost forgot how tired we were.”

Twenty-four paddlers in the 92-member club, the first of its kind in North Carolina, joined the second leg of the three-year plan to paddle up the entire 325-mile coast to talk with coastal folks about water quality issues. Last year, the club’s We the Water team paddled 120 miles from Sunset Beach to Ocean in Carteret County.

We the Water evolved during club brainstorming sessions, when member Kerri Allen, who works as the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s coastal advocate at its Wrightsville Beach office, realized the natural link between the two nonprofits.

Allen, who joined the canoe club in 2019, suggested that the paddling community’s culture of “mālama” — a Hawaiian word that means “to take care” — was a perfect fit with the Coastal Federation’s clean water advocacy and coastal stewardship.

The Coastal Federation publishes the Coastal Review, an editorially independent online newspaper.

In the interest of taking a positive approach to coastal water quality, Allen said, the We the Water initiative was born to foster connecting with the people who actually live and work along those waters, while at the same time raising funds to support the Coastal Federation’s work.

It was decided that a contingent of club members would paddle up the entire North Carolina coast, divided in three parts over three years. By stopping along the way and meeting with folks for some friendly conversation, the hope was that the paddlers could raise awareness about risks to clean water and empower communities to protect water quality.

“It can be doom and gloom, frequently, so we wanted to focus more on the good,” Allen told Coastal Review. With its striking appearance, the canoe served as a human magnet, drawing curious folks over to docks and shorelines.

“People were fantastic,” she said. “They were very surprised. Most of them, this is the first time they’d ever seen an outrigger canoe. Most people didn’t know what it was.”

Even those who did recognize the vessel had only seen them in Hawaii, or on the closing credits of the old TV crime drama series “Hawaii Five-O.” People would come up to chat with the paddlers, Allen said; sometimes they’d sit in the boat.

“We had some really great conversations, everyone from commercial fishermen, oyster farmers, local businesses hoteliers, and just folks out enjoying the water,” Allen said.

Long popular on the mainland West Coast, where there are about 70 clubs, outrigger canoes started showing up more on the U.S. East Coast after the founding in 1997 of the East Coast Outrigger Racing Association, which includes clubs in Canada and about 16 in the U.S.

The lighter version of the canoe, known as a va’a, was employed for We the Water. Typically described with Hawaiian words, the vessel is 44 feet long and 16.5 inches wide with two arms known as iakos attached to the outrigger, or ama, which provides stability in the ocean surf.

The carbon fiber Unlimited Class six-person outrigger canoe weighs just 145 pounds, versus some models that weigh about 400 pounds.

Compared to a regular canoe, which has a flat hull for navigating shallow waters, the outrigger canoe’s hull is narrow and aerodynamic, although it can still manage in shallow waters.

“It can take on a lot of swell,” Burton said. “This vessel 100% has its origins in the ocean.”

Originally from Winston-Salem, Burton has participated in numerous outrigger races in Hawaii and California, where she began paddling in 2007 with the Dana Point Outrigger Canoe Club.

After returning in 2013 to North Carolina, she became one of the co-founders of the Wrightsville club in 2016. At the time, Reggie Barnes, the owner of Eastern Skateboard Supply in Wilmington, had purchased two outrigger canoes.

“From there, he kind of put the word out, and a group of us — about 15 — came together,” she said about the club.

Members regard the club as their family on the water, or their ohana. Each leg of the We the Water paddles provided opportunities to meet so many coastal residents, she said, reinforced the shared love of the water and appreciation for the need to keep it clean.

“Blood is not family,” Burton, who serves as the club’s long-distance coach, wrote in an email response to Coastal Review. “Ohana is built from those who come into your life and make it more fulfilling … We may have started out with the purpose to bring awareness, but I believe in the end we now have become more aware, more fulfilled, and more in tune with those who truly need the water as a way of life.”

In addition to mahalo — gratitude — for the warmth and kindness extended by the folks they met, the team also delighted in educating them about the outrigger sport and culture, Burton added, as well as being together for a worthy adventure.

“We spent five days together ‘talking story,’” Burton said. “That’s pretty important in the Hawaiian culture.”

Videos of the outrigger underway show it zipping through the sound at a surprising speed, with six paddlers using synchronized, powerful strokes, as if they’re shoving the water away. Each position has a specific role, with the stroker at the front setting the pace, the steersman in the back in charge of navigating, the mid seats calling when to change sides: “hut” for switch, “hoe” to paddle.

“Remember, we have no motor,” Burton said. “We have to rely on human power, ocean power and wind power.”

With Hurricane Lee churning miles offshore, the conditions were rough, but the tide worked in their favor, at one point propelling the boat to about 11 mph.

“The swell was amazing,” Burton said. “When we hit that tide, it helped us along — it’s like an invisible paddler.”

Things really amped up on Day 2, after leaving Harkers Island that morning in the dark, Burton recounted. By the time they hit Drum Inlet, the wind was “brutal,” with a crosswind blowing steady at around 18 mph, with 25 to 30 mph gusts. But the team toughed it out, countering the wind by zigzagging across. The last day was easier, with none of the “crazy” wind or swell, she said.

Teams of six paddlers traded off in the morning and afternoon, which each run covering about 20 to 25 miles, depending on conditions. They were joined by a North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission boat for the 24-mile leg in Drum Inlet, and Cedar Island hunting and fishing guide Buddy Goodwin served as their escort vessel for the remainder of the trip, sharing his local insights.

Crew changes between those on the escort boat and the canoe were done in the water so paddlers could switch in and out of the canoe without it having to stop.

To Allen, it was especially rewarding to be together with her teammates in a different environment, with the vast openness of the Pamlico Sound, and seemingly endless estuarine marshes. At one point, they saw many hundreds of stingrays while paddling through seagrass beds behind Ocracoke.

The adventure was also rewarding for the Coastal Federation, which between a silent auction, sponsorships and donations for the event, she said, raised about $10,000.

Allen said she looks forward to the final leg of We the Water next year, when the Wrightsville Beach team will paddle from Buxton to Carova and once again “use the outrigger to tell the story of that coast and highlight all the good work that’s being done coastwise.”

By then, maybe Outer Bankers will be working to establish their own outrigger canoe club.

“An outrigger is truly a connection to the water like no other,” Allen said. You might start out looking for a fun way to exercise, she added, but it’s easy to get hooked.

“Because it is a culture, it’s a community, it’s a sport, it’s an activity,” she said. “It’s been in and on the ocean. And conditions that you don’t get to experience otherwise. So, it truly is extraordinary. And something that I think everyone should try to get the chance to do in their life.”

Tonya Sanders had had enough of the online trolls.

She simply wanted to share her fishing feats on social media, her capabilities as a recreational angler, and exchange fishing tips with others who enjoy casting a line as much as she does.

But as anyone on social media knows, there are plenty of keyboard warriors itching to pounce at the opportunity to belittle, discourage and insult.

As she ramped up her online presence earlier this summer so too did the negative comments.

Sanders was called a “prop” by a poster who accused her of not catching the fish she was holding in one photograph. Another commenter mocked a different photograph, telling her she looked like she was posing for a glamour shot.

The online harassment took a particularly unnerving turn when one man commented about female breasts.

“I just didn’t realize it would be like that and maybe that was my fault because I was just being happy-go-lucky and not really diving too much into the social media aspect of putting myself out there as like, ‘Hey, I caught this and I’m proud of it. Does anybody else want help learning how to do this?’ Or, maybe someone else would give me pointers,” Sanders said.

So what if she’s wearing makeup, she thought.

“I guess maybe it doesn’t look like I’ve been fighting a fish,” she said. “I have no clue.”

But Sanders firmly believes she would not be reading the same derogatory comments on her posts if she were a man.

“So, I decided that I was going to make my own group,” Sanders said.

The Facebook group would be open to all anglers, regardless of gender or experience level.

“But it’s specifically a safe haven for women to be able to post their catches or to connect with other anglers,” Sanders said.

Within the first four weeks of creating Female Fishing Fanatics earlier this summer, Sanders’ Facebook group had grown to more than 320 members and counting from across the country and as far away as Thailand.

She’s garnered the support of local businesses who’ve joined her group, donated prizes to be handed out to the winners of raffles she’s hosted — just a way to keep things fun — and been welcomed by owners of businesses she and her fiancé, Rob Lissor, feature in what they plan to turn into a traveling-angler-type series they’ll share on the group.

“I knew I was going to have to put in a lot of work and sharing, but I did not expect it to take off like it did,” she said.

This is not where the 37-year-old Wilmington native ever thought she’d find herself.

She’s been fishing throughout the area since the time she was a toddler being toted around by her father, a man who, after learning he had a baby girl said, “That’s OK. I’ll take her fishing anyway.”

Sanders doesn’t claim to be an expert angler. She does not own a boat.

That doesn’t hamper her desire to fish. On her days off she can be found fishing in Wrightsville Beach for sheepshead or in Fort Fisher for drum, depending on the season.

She was fishing in Town Creek, a blackwater river meandering through Brunswick County, during a telephone interview with Coastal Review.

She stopped mid-sentence, the conversation going silent, before apologizing and explaining, “I heard drag screaming and that’s my favorite sound.”

Sanders and Lissor were in the midst of featuring The Gator Hole Country Store and Tackle, a convenient store in Winnabow that proudly advertises the sale of cold beverages, cigarettes, live bait and tackle.

It was Aug. 30, the day before the remnants of Hurricane Idalia would blow in from the southwest after making landfall Aug. 29 in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 3 storm.

“We got a hurricane on our doorstep and we’re out here and, you know what, this is what this is all about,” Lissor said. “I’ve had a rekindle of love of fishing since we started this.

“Speaking as a male in an administrative position in a female group, the amount of support that we give our members and that our members give each other is something that I’ve never seen before in any Facebook group. We are uplifting and caring and we encourage everybody to post and we celebrate those posts. There’s no negativity whatsoever and that’s what’s drawn people to us. It’s been a heck of a ride so far and we’re loving it.”

Jaime Short, who co-owns The Gator Hole with his fiancé Nicole Pruitt, said he teamed up with Sanders and Lissor for the love of fishing.

“We just like to see people have fun and go out fishing,” Short said. “We just want everyone to enjoy the water. It’s fishing. It’s supposed to be something that everyone goes out and enjoys. I get out-fished by Nicole, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

HATTERAS – Researcher and island resident Kate Sutherland’s work studying the chemical isotopes of the feathers from black-capped petrels may lead to better understanding of the foraging habits — if not the varied physical appearance — of this difficult-to-study, endangered Gulf Stream bird species.

Sutherland is set to present her findings in October at a joint Waterbird Society and Atlantic Marine Bird Cooperative conference in Florida.

“That’s exciting,” she said. “It’ll be my first time to get to go to a conference and present something that I’ve done.”

Black-capped petrels, or Pterodroma hasitata, are pelagic birds, a species that lives most of its life in the open waters of the oceans — the pelagic zone — returning to land only long enough to reproduce.

There are numerous challenges in studying black-capped petrels. The open ocean that is their habitat is part of the difficulty in field research. Equally daunting is the mountainous terrain of the island of Hispaniola where they are known to nest. Compounding the challenge, they are burrowing nesters, and their nests can be difficult to find or identify.

They are one species of a wide variety of pelagic birds, and are one of the most endangered. At one time they were numerous throughout the Caribbean, but extensive hunting in the 18th and 19th centuries and, more recently, loss of habitat have diminished the population. At one time it was thought the species was extinct.

In 1961, ornithologist David Wingate found nesting sites in Haiti. To date, the only known nesting sites for black-capped petrels is on Hispaniola, although there may be other sites in mountainous regions of the Caribbean islands. There are an estimated 600 to 2,000 breeding pairs remaining, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

Sutherland has made black-capped petrels her focus, but pelagic birds in general have caught her imagination.

“They are like little superheroes. They live in this environment that is so foreign to us. You go out there on a boat. People are seasick and holding on and it’s really rough. And they’re just totally at home,” Sutherland said.

The black-capped petrel, though, is special to her.

“From the beginning I have been interested in all of the seabirds we see offshore, but the black-capped petrel is specific to this area, the Gulf Stream, and our offshore environment, so they are our signature species,” she said.

As a species, black-capped petrels have characteristics that set them apart.

“It’s the order Procellariiformes, the tube-nose seabirds,” Sutherland explained. “They have these tubular structures on top of their bill (that are) their own little desalinization plants. They need fresh water, they drink saltwater, they excrete this briny thick solution from those structures on their bill.”

The tube nose has another function as well.

“They also focus the scent molecules on their olfactory bulb, which is quite large. They have a highly developed sense of smell. It’s pretty amazing. That’s how a lot of times they find their food,” she said.

The first trip to the Gulf Stream was more than 20 years ago, and it was not a meticulously planned adventure. She and a friend from birding class at the western Virginia community college where she earned her associate’s degree in wildlife management were looking for something different to do and a pelagic birding trip was recommended.

“We came down here in 2000 for a winter trip, and it was weathered out,” Sutherland recalled. “So we went the next day, and she (the friend) was sick all day. And I was in the wheelhouse all day. They were keeping the numbers and the data and transect information, identifying all these birds and I was hooked.”

That was with charter boat Capt. Brian Patteson, who is now the captain of the Stormy Petrel II. At 61 feet long, it is a large, powerful craft. Sutherland still works with Patteson and is still keeping records.

She commuted that first year from Virginia to Hatteras Village, the Stormy Petrel’s homeport. A year later she moved to Hatteras Island.

It took her a while, but in 2015 she enrolled at University of North Carolina Wilmington, graduating in 2019 with her bachelor’s in marine biology, but as COVID-19 took hold, Sutherland reassessed what she was going to do with her degree.

“I had a bunch of work lined up on research vessels, which is kind of what I thought I wanted to do at the time. And then COVID happened. Everything was canceled,” she said.

Instead, she enrolled as a graduate student at the UNCW Department of Biology and Marine Biology, working with Dr. Steven Emslie as her adviser. The project she proposed was to analyze black-capped petrel feathers of specimens housed at the North Carolina State Museum of Natural History. The samples had been gathered by the late David Lee, who had been curator of birds at the museum.

Lee died in 2014.

Sutherland proposed analyzing isotopes of nitrogen, sulfur and carbon found in the specimens that could be used to profile the birds’ diets to see if what they were eating could account for color differences in the species.

A characteristic of black-capped petrels is the color variations among different birds.

“Two variations of Black-capped Petrel occur, a light form and a dark form, with some individuals displaying intermediate characteristics between the two,” she wrote in the introduction to her master’s thesis.

Where or why the variations occur is not understood. At present, the few nesting burrows that have been identified are exclusively dark or intermediate-colored birds.

“Burrows hosting light-form birds have yet to be discovered,” she wrote.

Sutherland had proposed that an analysis of the bird’s diet might explain the color differences, but that was not supported by the data.

“This study did not show any statistical differences … among the color forms in Black-capped Petrels,” she wrote in her conclusion.

But the study did suggest that male and female black-capped petrels forage for food in different parts of the Gulf Stream, and that the chemical analysis of the samples “… enhances our interpretation of foraging areas with females feeding in areas with prey having generally higher (sulphur) values, but lower (carbon) values, possibly due to using areas farther offshore than the males.”

Although she did not find the differentiation in diet she had suggested might exist between light and dark black-capped petrels, her work is nonetheless significant, Emslie, Sutherland’s adviser, noted.

“Overall, Kate has provided important baseline data that can help direct future studies of this and other seabird species for which we know little about their diet and foraging behavior,” he wrote in an email.

The stereotypical image of the fly angler may be that of an older man with a faded-out vest and a well-worn, long-brimmed cap, stalking a trout stream somewhere in the hills.

In saltwater fly fishing, you might think of a leather-skinned gentleman, who squints all the time due to a lifetime spent in bright sunshine looking for fish.

Kristi Irvin of Kitty Hawk is here to break all your stereotypes.

She’s young, doesn’t have leathery skin, and rarely — if ever — squints.

In the past few years, she’s gotten into fly fishing in a big way and has cashed the receipts to prove it. Her fly fishing journey has taken her to some pretty special spots and aided her with some personal healing, as well.

Like so many who grew to be accomplished anglers, Irvin grew up in a family that fished together.

“I’m from central Pennsylvania, and I grew up in a large family of avid fishermen,” Irvin told Coastal Review.

It was her father, Scott Pecht, however, whom she credited with really getting her going.

“My father would take us on several trips a year to fish in Canada. I remember the excitement of being allowed to go out in the boat with my dad,” she said.

Back home in Pennsylvania, she was almost always in or near the water.

“I spent my entire childhood swimming, tubing and fishing in the Juniata River,” she explained, adding that her desire to be around the water directly contributed to her passion for fishing. “My love of fishing really is a byproduct of my love and need to be in the water. Looking back now, my life has always involved being near water.”

That included water-themed sports.

“I swam for years at the local swim club and was on the crew team,” she said.

Call it destiny? Her career path steered that way for a time.

“I even worked for a few years at a lake, running the bait and tackle shop,” she said of the lure.

Fly fishing was something she was interested in early in life, but she thought it seemed too difficult. Still, the allure of handmade flies was fascinating.

“My fly fishing interest started when I was a teenager. I was always very crafty, and I remember being fascinated with flies.”

But even with all the fishing they did, nobody in her family fly fished, so she was not able to really get started.

“I thought it would be too difficult to master the art of casting without any help. So, it was another 20 years before I picked up a fly rod,” she said. But she got there eventually.

Nowadays, Irvin fly fishes exclusively.

“I am the only one in my family that would call themselves a fly fisher. To my knowledge, I don’t think my father ever touched a fly rod,” she said, adding that once she got into it, fly fishing gave her focus through difficult times. “I have faced significant loss and some very hard days, and fly fishing has brought me back to life.”

The joy she gets from fly fishing is real.

“I literally feel giddy every time I go out,” she said, expressing what is true for many of us.

Irvin said she feels lucky to have met fine guides and instructors who have helped her.

“I credit every one of the guides that I’ve fished with for my growth and knowledge. Many have become friends and mentors, and I call on them often for advice and guidance,” Irvin said.

And Irvin said she respects the knowledge they have gained through their time on the water and their ability to pass some of that wisdom along to others.

“I respect their skill, knowledge and willingness to teach me. I love that I can learn from guys that have been fishing longer than I’ve been alive,” she said.

As we all know, the best way to get good at something is to get out there and do it.

“It’s a privilege to hear about their memories and watch them fish with a skill that is only earned through a lifetime of experience. It’s humbling,” Irvin said, noting that she prefers saltwater. “Although I learned to fly fish in freshwater for trout and smallmouth bass, I have become a saltwater gal.”

She likes being right in their element as the fish feed and hopefully grab her fly.

“I prefer wading in big water, hunting fish and experiencing the huge tug and run of a big saltwater gamefish,” Irvin said.

Fishing has led Irvin to destination around the world, as shown by her trips to Germany and Nicaragua just in the past year. “I love to travel. I love to fish. Life is short. I will travel and fish and make memories.”

Irvin’s family includes two grown kids who also enjoy getting out on the water, son Wyatt and daughter Brinley go out with her quite often.

“They prefer offshore fishing, and I have taken them on many trips,” she said, adding that these varied experiences helps them become better people themselves. “I want my children to know from my example that doing what makes you happy has a ripple effect on the entire world. I want them to see me actively pursuing an activity that requires effort, learning, humility, respect for the environment, and patience.”

Irvin said she tries to embody those traits by creating and learning to create more, including her love for tying flies, which she said goes along with knitting socks and hats that she wears on her winter fishing outings. It’s the same passion and challenge of learning that keeps her intrigued, she said.

“The end result of catching a fish is an indicator of how well you have prepared and educated yourself for that moment.”

If you’ve ever wondered about who the people are who make the fishing regulations, what they are like, and if they actually like fishing, then you should know that Chris Batsavage has been working his way up the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries’ ladder for 25 years.

And he loves fishing.

“I started working for NCDMF in 1998 as a field technician in the Wanchese Field Office. I was also a fisheries biologist there and later in Morehead City where I moved in 2005,” Batsavage recently explained to Coastal Review.

Many who know him probably remember his work as the lead on the division’s flounder team, but that may not reflect the depth of his work and the breadth of his expertise.

“I served as the lead biologist for southern flounder and represented NCDMF on multistate technical committees for summer flounder, scup, black sea bass, and spiny dogfish,” he said.

He is currently the special assistant to councils with the division, working with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

Batsavage has been fishing his whole life and has developed a passion for the marine environment that has become his life’s work.

Growing up inland in Virginia, his first fishing was freshwater-oriented.

“I grew up in Leesburg, Virginia, which is about 40 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. Most of my fishing was in area farm ponds, creeks and the upper Potomac River, targeting bass, sunfish, crappie and catfish.”

Batsavage credits two childhood buddies with getting him going.

“My biggest influences in fishing were a couple of my friends that loved fishing. We fished as often as we could and learned a lot from each other, despite the relatively limited fishing options,” Batsavage recalled.

And as is the case for so many, the lure of saltwater fishing was difficult to resist.

“Our family would vacation at the Outer Banks and Chincoteague, Virginia, which is where I learned to fish in saltwater,” he said.

Later on, Batsavage’s career allowed him to get deeper into the saltier side of the sport. Eventually, his freshwater pursuits were supplanted.

“I moved to Greenville, North Carolina, to attend graduate school at East Carolina University, and then moved to coastal NC for work, so I’ve done much more saltwater fishing than freshwater fishing over the last 25 years,” said Batsavage, who is now 50.

Batsavage now lives in Morehead City with his wife Tina and son Sheldon, who is just a couple of months shy of 14.

“They both enjoy fishing and spending time on the water.”

Apparently, similar to his counterpart Dr. Cooper on the TV show, “Big Bang Theory,” young Sheldon demonstrates genius, but his genius relates mainly to catching big fish.

“Fishing is by far my son’s favorite hobby, and he’s an excellent angler. He’s already caught several southern flounder over 5 pounds and a 41-inch red drum. I learn as much from him as he learns from me,” Sheldon’s father remarked.

As for dad, he enjoys fishing the shallows.

“I mostly fish in the estuaries and nearshore ocean from boat and shore. I have a 21-foot skiff, which is pretty versatile for fishing these areas,” he said.

And Batsavage pursues any and all fish species that can be caught in coastal North Carolina waters.

“I target a variety of species including speckled trout, flounder, red drum, weakfish, sea mullet, Spanish mackerel, and sheepshead. Striped bass was one of my favorites when I lived on the Outer Banks during the late 1990s and early 2000s. I also try to go shad fishing in the coastal rivers in the late winter and spring,” he said.

And his preference is fishing with lures rather than bait.

“My favorite way to fish is casting — jigs, spoons, plugs, etcetera — to the variety of species found close to my home. The number of species to fish for was limited where I grew up, so I don’t take the variety of available species around here for granted.”

Most likely, as a consequence of his recordkeeping for the division, Batsavage has a specific method of tracking his fishing trips, a database of sorts. A trove of data that would probably help us all.

“I wish I was more consistent with my fishing success, but the key to helping me with fishing is keeping a logbook,” he said. “Recording the times of year, weather, tides, water conditions, fish caught, and gear used from past fishing trips has really helped me learn the patterns for different species over the years.”

His data spans decades.

“I started keeping logbooks in the late 1990s, so it’s also interesting to look back to see how things change annually and over time,” he said, noting there are also other advantages that give him an inside track on the fish. “Another thing that has helped me with fishing is what I’ve learned about fish as a fisheries biologist and manager. Knowing the life history and habitat preferences of fish has made me a better angler.”

It goes the other way too.

“Conversely, recreational fishing for most of my lifetime has helped me as a fisheries biologist and manager by gaining a better understanding of the recreational fishery,” he said.

Batsavage’s logbook helps in myriad ways, but most especially in preparation.

“Having a plan with fallback options before I go fishing has worked well for me, that’s where the logbook is a great asset,” he said.

But initial plans don’t always work out, though they often lead to educational opportunities.

“Time and weather windows are often narrow, so fishing options can be limited. You can’t fish for everything on a single trip,” he said. “Of course, the plans don’t always work out, but if I had fun and learned something, then it was a good trip.”

As for the long term, Batsavage sees himself fishing and having fun with his son Sheldon through the years.

“I hope to be retired and still fishing with my son 20 years from now and to have more time to travel.”

In 1860, Edmund Ruffin described the Corolla wild horses, the Banker horses, in his book, “Sketches of Lower North Carolina, and the Similar Adjacent Lands,” in unflattering language.

“These horses are all of small size, with rough and shaggy coats, and long manes. They are generally ugly,” he wrote.

Ruffin’s description is apt: The Corolla horses are small, and they tend to have rough, shaggy coats and long manes. Beautiful and ugly are in the eyes of the beholder, but even Meg Puckett, herd manager for the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, agrees they are not show animals.

“Some of them are, we call them marshy, swampy ones. But those are the ones that survive, and they look like that way for a reason,” she said.

The Corolla Wild Horse Fund is the horses’ protector.

The Corolla wild horses are feral animals, a species that has been introduced into an environment and is not native to it. They are certainly horses, but their behavior has little in common with domestic horses, something Puckett knows from experience.

“I’ve had domestic horses my whole life,” she said. “And they’re so different. The way they think, the way they behave, just everything. Nothing is the same.”

How or when they first came to coastal North Carolina is unknown. Genetic testing has shown a direct link between the Corolla herd and the mustangs of the Conquistadors, although there are other genetic influences in their makeup.

Whatever their origins may have been, the Banker horses long thrived. Writing for the National Geographic in 1926, Melville Charter estimated that, “Between 5,000 and 6,000 of these wild horses roam the sandy banks of the North Carolina coast …”

After the 1920s, however, the population plummeted. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which was worried that the herd would compete with migratory waterfowl for resources when it established the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge in 1938, placed a bounty on the horses.

Other factors, including a change in North Carolina open range laws that required the once free ranging horses to be penned, also contributed to a steep decline in the population.

The last remnants of that herd now live on the Shackelford Banks on Onslow Bay or Carova, the area that stretches 11 miles north of Corolla to the Virginia state line. Carova is an area with no paved roads, although large vacation homes dot the landscape.

A landrace breed

Banker horses have adapted to their environment. More than 160 years ago, Ruffin noted that the herd could survive where other breeds would die.

“To introduce horses of more noble race … if turned loose here, would scarcely live through either the plague of blood-sucking insects of the first summer, or the severe privations of the first winter,” he wrote.

The ability of the horses to survive in an environment that would most likely kill other breeds differentiates the Banker horses.

“They are considered a landrace breed, which means that they are a breed that has developed in a specific region and has developed adaptations, physical and behavioral adaptations, based on where they live,” Puckett said. “That sets them apart, regardless of anything else. And that’s what makes them Banker horses and culturally significant.”

It’s a hot and humid day on the Carova beach north of Corolla. On the dunes lining the beach, there is a small harem, a stallion, two mares, and a colt grazing on the sea oats.

The sea oats and other grasses that grow in the dunes are part of their adaptation. Puckett points out that what grows in the sandy soil of Carova would not sustain a domestic horse.

“They couldn’t process it and it also wouldn’t be enough calories,” she said. “That’s the big thing with these horses, they just do not need the calories.”

The reverse is also true — the Corolla horse cannot process the nutrient-rich grass that most horses eat. As development continues in the Carova area, some homeowners have planted grass. For the horse, it’s another place to graze, but Puckett notes, “that green grass is not that great for them.”

There are times a horse must be removed from the herd, usually to save its life, and after recovery from an injury or illness, the animal cannot go back to the wild. The Corolla Wild Horse Fund has a 10-acre farm where rescued horses are placed.

“You can’t put them out in the pasture at first because it’s just too much. They go out in the dirt paddock … because the grass will kill them,” Puckett said.

Managing the herd

Because a significant portion of the land where the horses roam is in the Currituck National Wildlife Refuge, the size of the herd is limited to 130 horses by a management agreement with U.S. Fish and Wildlife. Puckett said the current population is 101, although there could be some uncounted animals in the marsh islands on the north end of Currituck Sound.

Recently a mare and her foal were added to the herd, and Puckett, who has named well over half the herd and knows them all by sight, is certain the pair had not been seen in the past.

“The mother of this foal has a very distinctive marking on her face, so I am positive that she’s not in our file,” she said.

That illustrates how difficult it is to get an accurate count of the herd.

“From what we’ve seen, there were five total out on that island. But you know, the horses go back and forth between those islands all the time,” she said.

Difficult decisions

The Corolla Wild Horse Fund has two goals with the herd, and Puckett said the two objectives can be at odds with each other at times.

“Managing a population of wild animals and also managing breed conservation do not always go hand in hand,” she said. “Not only are we trying to allow a wild population of animals to stay here and remain wild, but we have to make sure that they can do that. We have such a small population that every individual is critically so important that we can’t afford to lose them. So, at what point do you step in? And at what point do you let nature take its course? And it can be tricky.”

Puckett said the horses can survive injuries that a domestic horse does not encounter, such as after a fight between stallions.

“They can survive injuries and issues that a domestic horse would just lay down and die. You’ll have a stallion with a neck bite or something like that, but they’re tough. It’s very, very rare that you need to intervene when it comes to natural injuries. My general rule of thumb is, if something happened to it naturally, I’m not messing with it. It doesn’t need me giving antibiotics. That’s a part of life for these horses,” Puckett said.

There are injuries and diseases in which a horse must be treated, and sometimes difficult decisions must be made.

Equine pythiosis is almost always fatal to a horse if untreated. Sometimes called swamp cancer, the pathogen that causes it is Pythium insidiosum.

The Louisiana State University Ag Center website describes the disease as, “traditionally thought of as an aquatic fungi or water mold and typically occurs in wetland conditions.”

It begins at a small cut. The wound does not heal and develops into tumor-like lesions. Over time, the pathogen will infect the animal’s entire system, eventually killing it.

Since 2020, there have been four cases of the disease among the Corolla herd …

“… that we know of,” Puckett stressed.

The first case that was detected illustrates the often-difficult decisions that must be made balancing herd management and breed conservation.

“The first mare that got it, she had just had a foal. So we said, ‘Alright, this is fatal, but it’s not immediately fatal.’ The quality of life really doesn’t begin to deteriorate right away,” she said.

The options were to take the mare in for treatment immediately at the North Carolina State University College for Veterinary Medicine or allow her to raise her colt.

Although quality of life for the mare was not yet affected, Puckett and the vets who were aware of the situation decided the disease was too far advanced for a successful outcome. But, if they pulled the mare from herd before the colt was weaned, the colt would also have to be taken from the herd and raised at the farm.

“The chances of us being able to save her at this point were pretty slim,” Puckett explained. “We’ve now lost her and the foal from the herd, or we can leave her here, let her raise him and then next year when he’s old enough, we’ll take her and see what we can do about treating her. That’s what we decided to do. She unfortunately did not survive.”

“But the colt is still here. He has a harem of his own now,” she added.

Human interaction

Many of the people who encounter the Banker horses do so when the animals come out of the dunes and wade into the surf.

“Especially when it’s really buggy and hot,” Puckett said.

The beach is a crowded place, with four-wheel-drive vehicles lined up for miles. On this recent day, a stallion and two mares can be seen walking along the wet sand. A Currituck County ordinance mandates a 50-foot separation between people and the horses, and on this day, the beachgoers are doing a good job of keeping their distance.

The horses don’t seem to be bothered by the families and all the cars.

“They don’t care about people,” Puckett said. “They’re going to go where they’re most comfortable. But, do I think that it does change their behavior? Some. If it’s really, really crowded, that could certainly deter them from wanting to go out there. But at the same time, they’re used to it.”

The Corolla Wild Horse Fund is a mostly volunteer operation, and Puckett noted that in the summer there are almost always two volunteers on the beach trying to let people know about how to avoid interacting with the horses.

“I think that people don’t understand how lucky they are that these horses are so generally good-natured. There could be a lot more pain and suffering that could happen if they were more reactive,” she said, adding, “It can happen in a heartbeat. They are very wild. Last Sunday we had a group of stallions that were fighting, and they ran over the dunes and ran right through people on the beach.”

She looked over at a harem grazing on sea oats and the sparse grasses. The colt stayed close to his mother and Puckett smiled.

“It never gets old,” she said. “Never, never gets old.”

Remember when you were in high school and there was that young male coach who was always quick with a smile, a joke, and a kind word for everybody?

Josh Helms is that guy at Havelock High School.

In between his work as a P.E. teacher, coaching soccer and spending time with his wife Heidi and their dog Beacon, Helms will often be found someplace near the water with a fishing rod.

After spending most of his life bouncing around the country as his father, Dave Helms, was transferred from one Marine Corps duty station to the next, he’s settled down at Havelock, bought a house in New Bern and is fishing every conceivable spot between Beaufort and Johnson City, Tennessee.

Like so many of us, Helms got his start in fishing when his father would take him.

“I started fishing probably when I was about 7 years old. My father got me going and taught me the basics on how to fish for catfish, blue gill, and other typical pond fish.”

A little later on he had a revelation.

“Saltwater fishing didn’t surface for me until I was 11. My dad first took me to the beach fishing for red drum in the surf, and that’s where the addiction for saltwater fishing came from.”

He couldn’t get enough.

“After that, I would be asking him every weekend if we could go,” Helms said.

But day to day, after school and whenever he could, “Most of my fishing done as a kid was pond fishing.”

When Helms was younger, he did the typical odd jobs teenagers take.

“I worked as a busboy during high school summers. While attending college and playing soccer at Methodist University, I worked as a camp counselor for Morehead City Parks and Rec,” he said.

Helms sees his family as frequently as he can.

“My parents live in Maysville, and we get together often. I go fishing with them as much as I can but they’re pretty busy,” he said.

While his father continues to be his biggest influence, Helms had made some great friends along the way who help. That includes friends from college, among them a former colleague at Morehead City Parks and Recreation.

“Are you ever really done growing? Because as I’ve grown over the years, my buddy Kirk Peterson has really helped open the realm of saltwater fishing to me,” he said, referring to the department’s former program supervisor who now resides in Kinston.

Helms is learning to fly fish too with guidance from another longtime friend.

“Logan Klarzuk (of Boone) has recently gotten me into fly fishing. But we won’t talk about that because it’s still a work in progress … There’s just an art to it that I can’t explain,” Helms said.

Helms does a lot of traveling to satisfy this new artistic passion.

“Some weekends I’ll go see my buddy Logan up in Boone and go fly fishing around there, and in Tennessee or Virginia,” he said.

When you talk to old salts, they will tell you that there is no substitute for time on the water when it comes to achieving consistent results in fishing, and so it is with Helms. He said it’s the key to success, “Because It’s never going to be the same lure or the same perfect weather.”

He’s learned a few things, he said.

“You have to think about how fish will act in certain conditions or which lures to use or even spots to try out as the seasons change. Paying attention to fish patterns over the years and what they like or don’t like is very important.”

And you can’t be afraid to try new things.

“You have to be always evolving, thinking about different ways to even approach a fish. And just be open minded,” he advised.

However the real key to being successful with your time on the water is just having a good time, he said, because you’re not going to catch fish every time.

“Whether it’s with your buddies or by yourself, just enjoy the scenery and kind of get lost in it,” he said.

These days, Helms is delving more into fly fishing. He’s fishing some ponds near his house, really getting into it, and he’s looking forward to getting his fist saltwater fish on fly. He loves to spend time with his wife and dog in the home they recently purchased, and as for the future:

“I’ll keep doing what I’m doing as a health and physical education teacher and a coach for the men’s and women’s soccer teams, enjoy what I have and spend as much time as I can with my family, on the water,” Helms said

WILMINGTON – Hopping from duty station to duty station as a military child, Mariko Polk was accustomed to a routine of moving to different houses, communities and schools.

That’s the pattern that cuts the life fabric for most kids in the military. Consistent inconsistency.

Her tried-and-trues were her family, one that unknowingly would craft what has become a passion for the natural sciences and, call it fate, growing up by what has become her life’s work.

“I’ve been very fortunate to live by the water my entire life,” Polk said before noting she lived a short time in Arizona.

Now, 36, with a newly earned doctorate in marine biology, she will work with others who live near the water and assist them in adapting to a landscape being altered by climate change and sea level rise.

Polk is the latest hire to North Carolina Sea Grant, moving into a position long held by Spencer Rogers, who retired in February 2022 after 40 years as the organization’s coastal erosion and construction specialist.

She officially started June 5, settling into Rogers’ former office at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science campus.

Same windowless office. Different title.

Polk is the new coastal processes specialist for Sea Grant, a research and education nonprofit that focuses on coastal issues.

This is her dream job, where she will be able to utilize her years of research and offer them as tools to coastal communities dealing with the effects of a changing climate.

“I didn’t expect this position specifically,” Polk said during an interview after attending Cape Fear River Watch’s annual State of the River forum June 1 in downtown Wilmington.

“I knew that I really wanted a position where I was doing some level of service, which is so great because this position is all about community-based service,” she said. “But also, I think every PhD has this in mind that you think you’re going to go academia. To be honest, I’m really excited about the fact that this is academia-adjacent – what I’ve been calling it – where I’m still part of it, but I’m also part of the application aspect for the community.”

Let’s rewind for a moment and get back to her childhood.

When her father, a Marine, was stationed in Japan he fell in love with a local girl. They married and had four children. Mariko was their firstborn, followed by two boys and a girl.

Polk’s childhood is full of memories exploring outdoors with her parents, swimming with her siblings and tapping into a self-described nerdy, science-y curiosity about natural sciences.

Her pursuit of higher education somewhat mimics her hopscotching lifestyle as a child.

She earned an associate degree at San Diego Miramar College in 2009, a certificate of geographic information systems from the University of West Florida and a bachelor’s in environmental resource management from California State University Bakersfield in 2012.

During those years she married a Marine and the two moved from San Diego to Okinawa then Okinawa to North Carolina, where they’ve remained since 2014.

That move afforded Polk the opportunity to set her sights on graduate school at UNCW.

In 2014, during what was the start of a two-year internship with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, she received recognition for her research comparing more than a dozen living shoreline projects and eight controlled site locations along the North Carolina coast.

In 2015, she earned a master’s degree in — get ready for this mouthful — science and environmental studies with a concentration in coastal management. She completed that degree in one year after overloading on credits to ensure she put herself through college debt-free.

Her research was first published in summer 2015 on erosion control and living shorelines.

Going back to school to earn a doctorate was, at that time, out of the question.

“Absolutely not,” Polk said. “I was like, ‘no, I’m done. Thank you, ma’am.’”

She was content working as a geospatial consultant with the Coastal Federation and coastal municipalities including Swansboro, Pine Knoll Shores, New Hanover County Soil & Water Conservation District and Beaufort to create watershed management plans.

But, she said, “the science drew me back.”

“Being surrounded by inspirational people, it was just so exciting so I took the plunge again, glutton for punishment that I am I guess,” she said. “But it provided me an opportunity to really delve into salt marsh ecology and living shorelines, which was a really big interest of mine, so I couldn’t pass up the offer. I really couldn’t.”

She’s passionate about her dissertation, “Implications of estuarine shoreline stabilization decisions in North Carolina on human and natural dimensions.”

May was an especially celebratory time in the Polk home. UNCW graduated her with a doctorate and her husband with a double bachelor’s — the first in his family to do so — in information technology and cyber security.

Shortly after she was offered the job with North Carolina Sea Grant, he accepted a job at Corning Credit Union.

“This is home. This is home and I want to see us thrive. I want to see our people be OK and for devastating storms like (Hurricane) Florence not to have the life-changing impacts it had. If getting research out there and being able to help communities apply it, that’s one small thing I think I can do. I’m really optimistic about what can be accomplished in our communities. I really am hopeful that I can empower communities in that sense. Very dreamy, I know,” she said with a smile.

People have activities they pursue for a variety of reasons. The ones that tend to get the most enjoyment out of it are not the ones who do it to be better than somebody, or to always win — these people do it for the nature of the activity itself.

It may be no surprise that these people are often highly skilled at whatever the endeavor they have chosen and usually experience success. And so it goes with fishing. Approach it for the intrinsic values and don’t worry about “winning,” the success will follow.

Chris Ellis goes fishing for the pure joy of it, the opportunity to experience things he could not otherwise and share those experiences with his friends and family. It’s not an accident that he also happens to be quite good at it and is one of the people who will be catching fish when others might not. By focusing on the why and the how instead of how much, he gets more joy and hence more success. Fishing is a journey, not a destination. The fish will follow.

A native North Carolinian, Ellis  was born at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and he lived out his formative years in Carrboro. The lakes and ponds of central North Carolina proved to be his training ground.

“I’d do any kind of fishing I could — bass, bluegill, and crappie in local farm ponds, creeks, ditches, or lakes like University Lake or Jordan,” Ellis told Coastal Review.

Ellis credits his family members for getting him started.

“My father Wayne Ellis and grandfather Robert Ellis were my main influences and they took me everywhere. My whole family fished, from my grandparents to my mom.”

Even when he was young, Ellis knew the saltwater would be calling him.

“We’d take weekend trips to Atlantic Beach and Pine Knoll Shores to fish the piers and I loved it,” he said.

Catching spots and blues would have to suffice for a few years though. Like so many, he moved away from home as a young adult.

“After college, I headed to the Midwest, living in the Indianapolis and St. Louis areas for work,” he explained.

In 2000 Ellis started working for Auto Zone as regional loss-prevention manager for 100 auto parts stores in the St. Louis region. He said his philosophy then and now has been all about training and taking care of people.

“Coworkers need to understand the why behind the what of their jobs. If there is no understanding of the end result, it’s just another task,” he said.

That includes treating the people who work for him well, with the understanding that they will then do well. He said that family-style communication led him to becoming the loss-prevention manager for more than 1,000 stores and leading a whole division in the largest auto parts retailer in the nation.

For the past five years, Ellis and his wife Rachel, son Emerson, and daughter Lelaina have been surrounded by water in Sneads Ferry. Ellis takes his family with him to the beach that’s less than 10 minutes away, often to fish, but also many times just to eat ice cream and enjoy the view. Emerson loves to fish the ponds on the golf course where they live.

“My wife and kids enjoy being around the water and love to fish. My son is a lot like I was growing up and spends his free time fishing, if he’s not playing baseball or golf,” said Ellis.

He also has a brother who loves to fish, “Scott and his family enjoy fishing as well.  They mainly fish in Atlantic Beach area where they have a house,” He said. “My mom enjoys fishing when she can get away but not as often anymore.”

There really isn’t any kind of fishing Ellis won’t do but he has his preferences.

“Fly fishing for redfish has got to be my favorite, whether hunting for tailers and crawlers, or sight fishing in clear water,” he said.

And for Ellis, fishing is not just a loner’s endeavor. He said the aspect of time together with others has genuine appeal.

“It’s really a team effort with you getting your fellow angler in the right position to make the cast while poling the skiff,” he said.

The fall run is really where Ellis gets a lot of action, especially chasing false albacore and casting for speckled trout in the surf.  And although there is so much fishing possible nearly just outside his front door, he likes to travel, too.

“We take a few trips a year to West Virginia or the North Carolina mountains to trout fish,” Ellis said, adding that he’s caught some big rainbows out there. He is always attempting to fish beyond what he has already mastered, because he knows that is the only way to grow.

Ellis’ philosophy is reflected in his professional accomplishments. Auto Zone recently made him an offer of promotion, and he and his family are set to move to the company’s corporate offices in Memphis, Tennessee. But he said there is zero chance that he won’t find the best fishing near his new home.

“The key is being out on the water and fishing. Time on the water makes a better angler. Even when you aren’t catching fish you are still learning,” he said. “I think a successful day is being able to spend some quality time with friends or family. Regardless of if you catch fish or not.

“The true test to whether you enjoy someone’s company is if you are able to spend a whole day on the boat with them and want to do it again.”

Take a young man who is taught that the best things to do in life are in the outdoors, give him the smarts to excel at a major university such as Duke, a business acumen that would allow him to do well in any venture, and what do you end up with?

If you’re talking about Capt. Tom Roller, you get a highly successful fishing guide and award-winning conservationist.

Roller has been guiding anglers to catch everything that swims around the Carteret County area for 20 years. He has a unique outlook that has allowed him to follow his passion to protect and preserve our fisheries, and he has been involved with committees and meetings that have led him all the way to a seat on the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission.

First appointed to the commission by Gov. Roy Cooper in 2020, Roller, owner of WaterDog Guide Service of Beaufort, has been an avid fisher since he was little.

“My Dad says the best and worst thing he ever did was teach me to fish. I was absolutely obsessed since my very early childhood,” he told Coastal Review.

That obsession led him on countless quests to find the best fishing spots.

“When I was a kid, we moved around a lot. It drove me to fish every retention pond, creek, ditch and anywhere I could possibly get outside and explore,” he said.

The Roller family eventually settled in suburban Indianapolis, not exactly known as a fishing hot spot.

“I went to high school in Indiana and lived in the suburbs. When I was there, I bet I fished every single retention pond in a 20-mile radius,” said Roller.

Still, it was saltwater fishing that called to him during family vacations to the North Carolina coast, and it pulled him back.

“In the end, being away from the big water is what ultimately drove me to settle where I wanted to be, near the coast where I spent much of my childhood summers, so I could chase all those big fish I was always dreaming about,” he said. “I’ve lived here for more than 25 years, and I’ve been a full-time guide for 20.”

During that time, he’s developed a philosophy that drives him, and it’s based in sustainability.

“If I had a mission statement, it would simply be, ‘Healthy fisheries take care of their fishermen.’”

Most of Roller’s family share a similar outlook that’s reflected in how they choose to spend their free time.

“Most people in my life are outdoorsy, otherwise we’d never see each other!”

Roller also subscribes to Emerson’s notion of how to have a purposeful life in that he wants to be useful, honorable, compassionate, and to have made some difference. In that light, his passion for fish and fishing has led him to a second calling, that of being an activist and getting involved with preserving the very things that give him so much joy.

“I love our natural resources, and I love the North Carolina coast — and all outdoor places — so much that I have been hyperfocused on being involved in conservation and management, in an effort to hopefully conserve our fisheries and ecosystems for future generations,” Roller said.

That focus led Tom to serve on committees and get involved, where he’s not shy about his passion.

“I’ve served on federal advisory panels for bluefish, Spanish mackerel and king mackerel. In the state I’ve served on advisory committees for southern flounder and blue crab. Currently I am appointed to the main fisheries rule-making body in North Carolina, the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission,” Roller said.

He also serves on the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council. And he gets involved with nonprofit conservation groups and is a founding board member with the American Saltwater Guides Association.

His tireless work has not gone unnoticed. He was presented the North Carolina Wildlife Federation’s prestigious Governors Award for Marine Conservation in 2022.

“It was truly one of the great honors of my life,” he said.

With all the different types of fishing possible on the North Carolina coast, Roller said he can’t choose which one he likes best.

“My fishing is based on maximizing access to North Carolina’s super diverse inshore and nearshore fisheries,” he said, adding that there’s an amazing bag of different fish he can pursue on any given day. “I love fishing inshore for red drum, nearshore for false albacore and mackerel, and wreck and bottom fishing for flounder and grouper-snapper species.”

Roller has participated in tournaments from time to time as well.

“I have fished inshore tournaments for red drum but haven’t in a couple years. When I was fishing the local circuits, I did quite well, consistently placing pretty high and winning a couple,” he said.

And, as you might guess, he has a hard time pinning down where his favorite quarry is.

“If you had to ask me to pick something for late summer, I’d say flying to Alaska to fly fish for silver salmon and big rainbows or go offshore of North Carolina and deep drop for a swordfish,” he said, clarifying that it really just depends on the time of year. “If you ask me in the fall, I’ll probably tell you it’s fly fishing for false albacore off of Cape Lookout. In June, I’d tell you it was tossing topwaters for big trout.”

And with his characteristic sense of humor, he added, “Confused? Me too.”

There is lot that a longtime successful fishing captain can teach about having a good day on the water.

“It’s always important to note that the fish, unlike in a lake or river, are not always there. As they say in the Outer Banks, ‘Fish have tails and no homes.’”

How can we relate that to catching fish?

“Make sure your equipment is good, your knots and leaders are strong, your hooks are sharp and your boat and motor are in good working order,” he advised.

Finally, a thought for those who don’t get to fish as often as Roller: “If I was looking for a guide myself, I’d be looking for an older, more experienced professional or a young up-and-coming full-timer who is fishing their face off. Either one will likely give you a great experience,” he said. “Time and days spent, even in a smaller window of time, are invaluable to being a successful angler. In the long term, it’s experience. The accumulation of days simply makes you that much better.”

DUCK — Two women scientists, longtime remote co-workers, recently met on the Outer Banks to celebrate the new annex at the renowned U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Field Research Facility, better known as the Duck Pier.

But their roles and rank among the nation’s premier military and civilian scientists is a notable achievement in their own right.

“We are now 50-50 men and women,” Katherine “Kate” Brodie, senior technical manager and senior research oceanographer at the facility’s Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, said during a tour of the annex in January, referring to the pier’s science and engineering staff. “Which I think is a really great accomplishment for women.”

The $4.3-million annex consists of laboratory and research administrative spaces in support of the organization’s expanded military research mission.

Standing alongside Brodie in the annex’s secure room, Mihan McKenna Taylor, senior scientist at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi, noted pointedly that the nearby lactation room illustrates progress women have made in the workforce. “The closets are no fun,” she said, recalling the only quiet spaces once available for staff to nurse babies. 

As fellow scientists employed by ERDC, Brodie and McKenna Taylor’s careers exemplify not only how women can excel as engineers, software technicians and physicists, but also the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, role models for girls.

Only about 11% of teen girls plan to pursue STEM careers, compared with 35% of boys, according to the American Association of University Women. Although women make up about 28% of the STEM workforce, the gender gap is widest in the fastest-growing and most highly paid fields: 16.5% in engineering and architects and 25.2% in computer and math, according to the National Girls Collaborative Project.

Brodie, who graduated from Dartmouth College before earning her doctorate from William and Mary School of Marine Science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, focused on geological or geophysical oceanography. In her role today as technical manager at the Duck Pier, she helps develop and manage ongoing and future research, as well as mentor early career researchers.

A National Science Foundation fellowship in the summer before her senior year at Dartmouth changed her interest from Earth science to marine science. One of the projects involved working on a model that used current data from radar antenna in Chesapeake Bay to forecast where a person who fell in the water would be located, based on the currents. That was when she learned to code and to see the relationship between math and the dynamics of physics.

“I left that internship feeling really excited and saying, ‘I want to go to graduate school and do oceanography.’” Ultimately, Brodie learned the coding skills that gave her a big leg up in the field of marine sciences, which don’t typically require strong math and computer science or programming skill sets. 

“And I think they 100% should be because in the job that I do today, that is all I am doing,” she said. “You need to understand the physics, you need to understand the oceanography, but to do anything with that data, you need to be able to code and you need to understand the math.”

Early on, Brodie, whose expertise is in using remote-sensing observation equipment to collect real-time data in the surf zone, said she was inspired by McKenna Taylor.

“When I started at the FRF (Field Research Facility) itself, I was one of two women on the science and engineering staff, and the only other woman at the facility was our administrative support at the time,” Brodie said in a recent interview, recalling when she began her job right out of graduate school in June 2010. “I was the youngest by probably about 10 years. And so, I think, at that time, there was not a lot of equality.”

Brodie’s collaborative work often required her to visit ERDC’s main laboratories in Vicksburg.

“I would walk into many rooms where I was the only woman and I think the exception to that was probably the first time I met Mihan,” she recalled. Even back then, before McKenna Taylor was a senior scientist, Brodie said, she was presenting her research with “such a presence and with such personality.”

“I just thought it was so cool that there was this really accomplished woman scientist who was commanding the room — it was definitely male-dominated,” Brodie said. “That really, really struck me as a young woman scientist … particularly in the field of coastal science and engineering.”

Still, over the years, Brodie said, the number of women coastal scientists has grown, and she has met numerous accomplished women researchers, engineers and academics at numerous conferences and events where she has attended.

In time, Brodie, too, was considered one of those very accomplished female scientists. Slender, with blond hair and a casual style, Brodie could be mistaken for a college student. Although she’s not flashy about her brain power, her ease and clarity in explaining the technology and science at the Duck Pier makes it clear why she has a senior position.

Young women graduate students started approaching her at conferences, which led to those young women doing internships at the Duck Pier, and later being hired there. So before long, the pier’s technical staff was half women.

“You know, I didn’t actively have the goal of creating a science staff here at the FRF that was 50-50 split, women and men,” Brodie said. “And so, I think in some ways that’s also impressive that we ended up there without actively selecting for it.”

The 176-acre Duck Pier, which opened in 1977, is ERDC’s only coastal field observation facility. With its 1,840-foot steel and concrete pier and 140-foot-high observation tower, it is ERDC’s only location that conducts continuous observations and collects extensive and detailed data on coastal processes.

In collaboration with the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence, the new 4,008-square-foot annex is focused on research in developing methods to protect and inform military forces, especially operations in the littoral, or nearshore, coastal areas.

As Brodie put it during the Duck Pier tour: “I want to digitalize a surfer’s brain.”

Surfers are experts at reading real-time beach conditions and figuring out how to navigate them safely to achieve their goal, which is wave riding. For the military, the goal is getting personnel and vessels through the surf zone without tipping or other mishaps.

One of Brodie’s first assignments at the Field Research Facility was a more military-funded project that studied how remote-sensing technology could be used to assess a coastline. In other words, how can technology replicate in real time the information a surfer collects and interprets when looking at the waves and currents?

It turns out that the years of civil works research at the Duck Pier as well as its unique instrumentation and techniques developed for its observations and models, Brodie said, were assets to the evolving needs of the military.

“We were well-poised to transition those to help the warfighter with their recent focus and shift toward littoral environments,” she said in the later interview.

Starting with imagery collected from unmanned aerial systems and using Duck Pier instruments, over time Brodie and the ERDC team developed integrated sensing. The technology incorporated relevant data collected from LiDAR scans of a beach, satellites, buoys and towers that recorded information about waves, currents, winds and other factors that influenced the nearshore. Now the software is being readied to make the leap from the research and development pipeline to production.

With the success of the “surfers’ brain” software, funding for the research grew, and the Department of Defense mission expanded to support not only the Army but also Navy and Marine operations. 

“So I would say that that initial project, we’ve been able to grow that and show the value of the technology that we were developing,” Brodie elaborated. “I think if you think about the current sort of climate that we are in, in the world right now, and thinking about where some of the next future conflicts may be, a lot of those locations may involve needing to cross through the littorals or through coasts in some capacity. And so I think there’s been a shift DoD-wide to focus back on the littorals, away from desert environments where the Army has really been focused for the last 20 years.”

Over at ERDC headquarters in Vicksburg, McKenna Taylor oversees a scientific discipline called “near service phenomenology,” or the study of the interface of air, land and sea with the human domain, and a specialty in terrain assessment and manipulation. If it’s a tunnel, a bridge, a building or other things that humans manipulate within the Army’s research domain in the water, the air and the land, it’s probably part of Taylor’s expertise. That would include sensing technologies, most geophysically based, such as infrasound, hydroacoustics and seismology. 

“We’re considered long-term strategic thinkers. It takes 15 to 17 years to field any technology that started from embryonic conception, all the way out to warfighter usage in the way our acquisition and fielding works in the Army now,” she said in a later interview. “I’ve taken a wild and crazy idea from basic research in 2005, and it was fielded with engineers or fighters in 2021.”

Like Brodie, McKenna Taylor started at ERDC right out of graduate school, except she began as a research geophysicist in 2005. With an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in Washington — a major in physics, a minor in chemistry and an unofficial minor in music — she earned her doctorate in geophysics from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Her visit to the Duck Pier was her first in a professional capacity, but she had often come with her family to the Outer Banks from Greensboro, where she grew up. 

McKenna Taylor said she was always good at math, but a seventh grade National Science Foundation physics camp had a big impact on her future career choice. At Georgetown, she said, there were typically “two women and 12 dudes.” But the year she studied physics, it was the opposite. Turns out that other women had also attended summer physics camp.

After earning her doctorate, she resisted the siren song of the oil and gas industry, a job many with her education were offered.

“It was super not for me,” she said. “I wanted to make a difference, not make money. And the bottom line in oil and gas is the bottom line.”

The Corps’ research and development branch, which is funded by sponsors and not by Congress, offered her a flexibility to be creative and have a family life, while still being part of a team focused on the national good. 

“And that kind of combination really appealed to me,” she said. “It’s fun. You know, you can change what you do five times a week or every five years. Depending on what you are investing your time in. And if you’re the sort of researcher that loves the challenge and likes to create your own vision, it’s phenomenal.”

If there is a stereotype of a woman scientist, McKenna Taylor is not it. She acknowledges being opinionated and assertive: “There’s a lot of blowback to it. I fundamentally don’t care.” When she attended the event at the Duck Pier, she was dressed in a full-length purple, pink and lime-green Scottish kilt, a gift from her husband. She talks exceptionally quickly, barely pausing while explaining complex science and head-spinning levels of government within ERDC and the DoD. At the same time, she is open, self-depreciating and funny.

She also plays viola, violin and string bass.

“Right now, I play in a band, I play in an orchestra, I play in a wedding quartet,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I like to think of it this way: Physics is just the music the universe makes. The music the universe makes that we can write down in a different language is the mathematics of physics, or geophysics, specifically. So to me, they’re not different. They’re just a different expression of the same language and feeling and perspective on the world.”

As a mother of two boys, McKenna Taylor has had to navigate the same stressors as other women around childcare and the demands of parenting, especially prior to when federal parental leave was provided. But as a team leader at ERDC, with her supervisors’ support, she deliberately approached work with the belief that fathers and mothers deserve a “whole life balance” that supports family life as well as work.

“It’s important to have a whole life,” she said. “And what that means to each person is very different. But if you have someone who feels satisfied with their whole life balance, they work their tails off. They feel invested.

“I firmly do not believe you can have it all,” she continued. “But you can make choices to have the parts of you that need to be satisfied to exist as a human. Those choices should be yours to make and they should be options.”

But there’s a lot more than that balance that will bring more women physicists and engineers into the workforce,” McKenna Taylor said. The education system needs to be more hands-on. It needs to allow girls to experience the adventure in research. It needs to empower students to have the freedom to fail — “It’s how we learn,” she said — and it needs to let students blow things up.

“I think we need a revitalization of the importance of good, solid, critical thinking and scientific education, from starting people in prekindergarten all the way up through advanced degrees, the respect that science needs to regain,” she said. “You get talking heads that denigrate expertise, and that handicaps us as a country, because if you can’t strive for excellence, what do you become?”

There’s a new trail to hike in North Carolina, appropriate for a state where legislation was passed making 2023 the Year of the Trail.

The 50-mile Jockey’s Trail does not (yet) have the panache or cachet of the more well-known Mountains-to-Sea Trail or perhaps the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. It is fashioned much like the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, with a combination of forest trails, roadways and some beach hiking, but this new trail is different.

It begins at the entrance of Jockey’s Ridge State Park, which is also the eastern terminus of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, and heads due north to a 19th-century boundary marker at the border of North Carolina and Virginia, the unincorporated community of Carova.

But perhaps what is most unique about this new trail is how it came to be. The Jockey’s Trail was not the work of a committee or group of like-minded hikers. It was just Luke Halton and his vision of a through-trail from Nags Head to Carova.

Halton grew up in a Marine Corps family stationed in North Carolina. He graduated from Catawba College in Salisbury in 2001 with a degree in information systems. It was at Catawba that a focus of the school’s program stuck with him.

“One of their their major efforts for all their students — they actively promoted lifelong learning,” he said. “That is something that has stayed with me.”

The idea for the trail originated from more than one experience Halton had over the past few years. The COVID-19 pandemic, he readily offered, played an important role, although, he also noted, he was just ready for a change – and to take a hike.

“For me with COVID, I just wanted to be outside. I didn’t want to be locked down. And I just started the Mountains-to-Sea Trail,” he recently told Coastal Review. “I was just going to do a week or two, but I just kept going.”

He found that, much like for other through-hikers, the trek was just one part of a larger experience.

“Somebody doing a through-hike, a lot of times, is looking for a change of lifestyle or an escape or a restart. And that was kind of the same thing for me,” he said.

Then he got a message from a friend who was getting married in Spain. Halton was still on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, but, “There was no way I was going to miss the wedding.”

In a twist of fate, pandemic travel restrictions created time for Halton to explore the trails of Europe.

“That was absolutely awesome,” he said.

When he left for his friend’s Madrid wedding, he could not fly directly to Spain. He could, however, fly to Ireland, spend a month there, and then continue on to the wedding. And there in Ireland, he encountered a remarkable trail system.

“In Ireland, there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of trails. They’re known for being hillwalkers,” he said.

His hiking took him across the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin to trails that crossed the island to the Atlantic.

In Spain, there was the wedding and then more hiking, this time on the Camino de Santiago, a group of trails that radiates out like the spokes of a bike wheel, covering almost the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula.

What was particularly compelling, Halton said, was the communal nature of sharing the experience of the trail — having a place to stay every night and reflecting with other hikers what their day was like.

“Just meeting all these people staying at the same place every night. Maybe seeing some again, maybe not. That was an unbelievable experience,” he said.

When he returned from Europe he finished the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, got to Jockey’s Ridge State Park and decided to move to the Outer Banks because he felt there was unfinished business.

“I came out here (to the Outer Banks) because I was curious about why the Mountains-to-Sea Trail didn’t go all the way from Jockey’s Ridge to the Virginia border. That’s pretty much it,” he said.

There were some important lessons from the European experience that Halton brought back with him. One, that there is a communal feeling among long-distance hikers and through-hikers, Halton observed, something he described as, “a real hiker community.”

That community is on full display on a cold morning in early March as a dozen or so women of the OBX Women’s Adventure Club and Halton gather at one of the Nags Head Woods trails. They are there to support club member Stephanie Anderson who is doing a final warmup hike before taking on a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail.

“I can’t remember how or why we messaged each other,” Halton said. “But as soon as we started communicating, we automatically connected because she’s doing the Appalachian Trail.”

Some of what he learned in Europe, though, is difficult to apply to the Outer Banks. For example, the concept of a hostel or common meeting place at the end of each day’s hike does not exist along the Jockey’s Trail. Although, Halton pointed out in his discussions that there is still work to be done on lodging for the hike.

One important lesson he learned and has applied is to keep each day’s distance manageable.

“All the mileage is under 16 miles,” he said. “That 16-to-20-mile range, that’s when you start getting blisters and fatigue. You want to enjoy this; you want to take your time and be able to stop because there is going to be so much to see.”

An online aerial video of the trail uses Google Earth to show the route and some of the highlights, including some of the most iconic Outer Banks landmarks.

The trail includes a hike past the Wright Brothers National Memorial. The second day includes an easy trek through the Audubon Pine Island Sanctuary. The third day ends at the Currituck Beach Lighthouse in Corolla. And along the way, there is a scenic segment through Nags Head Woods.

The most difficult stretch is probably the 13 miles from the Currituck Beach Lighthouse to the state line boundary marker. That stretch also includes a considerable amount of beach hiking along the way to Carova. But that is also the realm of the Corolla wild horses, giving hikers a popular wildlife attraction to look forward to.

For Halton, who founded The OBX Way, a nonprofit that made it easier for him to place signs for the route and work with state and local governments, the Jockey’s Trail represents numerous ways to enjoy the coastal outdoors.

The trail can double as a bike route, although the last 11 miles on the Carova beach requires fat tires. It is also a trail that allows hiking at any pace.

Someone asked Halton early in the process of creating the trail about the record time for hiking it, and since to the best of his knowledge, he had been the only one to have completed it, he pointed out his four days were both the fastest and slowest times.

Most importantly, though, Halton sees the Jockey’s Trail as a way for hikers to experience some of the joys of being on a trail for few days without having to lug a 30- or 40-pound pack and everything that goes with it.

“If somebody has dreamed of doing a through-hike, but just never had a month or so to get away for days, (the Jockey’s Trail) gives you a real taste of what a through-hike is like without excessive logistic challenge,” he said.

I’ve often been surprised by the people I’ve met when I’ve been fishing and didn’t realize who they were until we started talking afterwards. TV stars, millionaires, fly fishing gurus — the list is long and interesting.

Noted shark biologist, writer and scuba pioneer Eugenie Clark once said, “Sharing the fun of fishing turns strangers into friends in a few hours.” If you’ve been surf fishing in the Wrightsville Beach area there’s a chance a future Hall of Fame high school lacrosse coach was standing right there.

Paul Gilbert has been coaching lacrosse at Cape Fear Academy for 29 years. In that time, he has sent many young men along to play college lacrosse and his current team has a few who are being recruited to play at the highest levels. He has impacted their lives forever with his family based coaching philosophy, and along the way winning two North Carolina Independent Schools Athletic Association Division 2 championships including, “… last season with a win over our arch-rival Forsyth Country Day School in Winston.”

Gilbert’s been teaching history at Cape Fear Academy the whole time. He, his wife, Rachel, and two daughters, Sarah, 28, and Molly, 21, live in Wilmington.

“I moved to Wilmington from Washington, D.C., in 1993 when my first daughter was on the way,” he said recently, adding that the lobbyist life wasn’t for him. He says he “escaped.”

Coach Gilbert loves to fish and has been fishing and involved with lacrosse his whole life. He credits his father and uncle with getting him started.

“I grew up in Armonk, New York. My first memory of fishing was walking through the woods with my father (Tom Gilbert), uncle (John Gilbert) and brother (Greg) to a lake they called Popes Pond in Wilton, Connecticut.”

It wasn’t any high-tech thing either, he explained. “We were using cane poles that they used to give away when you bought a rug.”

Vacations to North Carolina got him the saltwater fishing bug.

“We would go to the Outer Banks during spring vacation when I was little and throw squids (old-timey molded lead casting spoons) that my grandfather made,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert got serious about the sport of lacrosse soon after. He played at noted Long Island lacrosse powerhouse Byram Hills High School in Armonk, New York, where they captured the Section 1 Class B championship his senior year in 1986.

Gilbert has his coaching scheduled around fishing.

“Fall in Wilmington is fishing season. I used to coach fall sports, now fall is reserved for fishing,” he said.

His fall favorite is surf fishing for sea mullet.

“We hit the surf for Virginia mullet after the tourists leave and the holes start to form at the south end of Wrightsville Beach.”

But it’s not just fall. Gilbert stays away from basketball season too.

“In the winter, I mostly fish from the surf for speckled trout with Mirrolures.”

The big surf red drum also get him on the water.

“I will collect oysters and clams in the winter and will walk the surf, chasing the big schools of reds that often congregate,” he said.

Lacrosse season gets going in February, which ends his fishing for a while and marks the beginning of the winter doldrums. But the timing is perfect as the season winds down.

“Lacrosse ends around the third week of May, when the water is starting to warm. The bonito bite is usually on fire and the first Spanish mackerel are starting to show up,” the coach explained.

Gilbert doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. When I talked to him he was telling me about some big flounder he’d caught around somebody’s dock.

He also usually has a bass fishing tournament for his players one day near the end of lacrosse season. They will fish residential and golf course ponds for bass and send him mobile phone pictures. They’ve been doing it for six years. It’s called “Hoist The Harpoon,” and the winner gets to carry the harpoon that is the team symbol for the Cape Fear Academy Hurricanes.

The combination of fishing, family and lacrosse pulls it all together.

Summer will find him offshore.

“My brother-in-law, Steve Wright is my fishing partner. We go out to the 23-mile rock in the summer to do some trolling and bottom fishing.”

The duo does pretty well on deepwater bottom-dwellers.

“He’s the captain and puts us on the fish. I’m the mate and rig the baits,” Gilbert said.

Pier fishing is another bit of fun he indulges in, and he loves to throw Gotcha lures off Crystal Pier when the Spanish are around.

Gilbert also offers a pretty decent bit of coaching to all of us anglers: “Gotta fish where the fish are,” he advises.  “A full box is always good, but a nice day on the water with a friend or two is what it’s all about.”

That philosophy was formed through years of teaching and coaching, and Gilbert doesn’t see himself slowing down quite yet.

“I think I have a few more good years in the classroom and on the lacrosse field. Probably keep doing what I’m doing.”

ROCKY POINT – Perhaps no one can describe Sheba Shiver’s connection to her family’s land better than she can.

“I always feel like I’m closer to my father, his spirit and, of course, Mother Nature and God the Father.”

The land that has been in her family for more than 100 years is Shiver’s refuge, one flanked by fields and woodlands rising up from the banks of the Northeast Cape Fear River.

This is where she picked plums from trees and scooped up pecans as a child. The land her great-grandfather Herbert Moore purchased in 1919 with earnings he’d saved while serving his country as a soldier during World War I was handed down from one generation to the next.

Blacktop slicing through the property bears her family’s names.

There’s Moore Town Road off N.C. Highway 210 in Rocky Point, a Pender County community about 17 miles west of Wilmington. Thankful Road is named after her great-great-grandmother Thankful Moore. And, Rebecca Kennedy Road, which bears the name of Shiver’s great-great-aunt.

Offers to buy the land come in “all the time,” Shiver, 59, told Coastal Review last week.

Not a chance.

But what to do with 50 acres was a question weighing on Shiver’s mind when she moved from California in late 2019 — after her father’s death that September — to be close to her mother.

“I said, ‘Mom, we should be able to do something with this land besides cut grass,’” Shiver said.

She wanted to try her hand at farming, but she did not want to wait a year to qualify for in-state college tuition to take horticulture courses.

She planted a garden, experimenting with vegetables and herbs to determine what she could successfully grow. The thought of waking early every Saturday morning to sell her harvest at a farmer’s market did not appeal to her.

What about doing something for the land, she thought. Something to enhance it for animals like the white-tailed deer that roam its fields and woods. Something that will help it weather unforgiving floodwaters that swell from Northeast Cape Fear during rain-soaking hurricanes.

Her answer: Trees. Thousands of them.

‘Just me and the trees’

The sun warms us on a chilly March morning as Shiver periodically bends over young trees so small you’d easily step on them if not keeping a careful eye.

She pulls a white tag from a stack she holds in one hand and gingerly but securely loops one around the top of what appears to be no more than a sprig rising from the ground.

Shiver is dressed the part: Her knee-high rubber boots are dusted by yellowish-green pollen thanks to a particularly early season.

She’s sporting noticeably baggy clothes. The oversized, gray Dickies’ jacket she wears hangs past her hips. The blue jeans she’s wearing are almost tentlike on her thin frame. Black suspenders hugging her shoulders keep the jeans loosely around her waist.

These were her father’s clothes.

“I’m going to be out here a long time,” she says with an easy smile.

We’re standing in a 5-acre field nestled between woods and the large, manicured yard where hers and her mother’s houses rest high off the ground on stilts to keep them from floodwaters.

What’s left of the house where she grew up from about the age of 10 until she left for Howard University rests in a heap not far from where Shiver is tagging the tiny trees.

Floodwaters that rose from the river after Hurricane Floyd in 1999 overtook the brick ranch house. Shiver had all intentions to fix up the house, but flooding during Hurricane Florence in 2018 finished off the structure for good.

The rubble mound is a solemn reminder that the river, though unseen from the old homestead and surrounding land, is not far away.

Shiver figures she’s tagged about 600 trees so far — a slight dent considering that more than 10,000 were planted in this field last month (with her mother’s permission) by those who work for the contractor who ordered the trees and 10 volunteers with The Hobby Greenhouse Club in Wilmington.

In all 10,225 trees – chestnut oak, white oak, wax myrtle, elderberry, southern catalpa, silky dogwood, flowering dogwood and persimmon – were planted within an eight-hour span Feb. 22.

Shiver was frankly and pleasantly surprised at how quickly the trees were planted. She’d been waiting to get them on her land and in the ground since receiving word the grant she’d applied for in 2021 had been approved.

Shiver is the recipient of an environmental quality cost-share program that aids agricultural landowners in conserving natural resources on their property.

The Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, is offered through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and provides a 75-to-25% cost-share for grant recipients.

Shiver has not yet received the grant money. She didn’t want it up front. She wanted roots in the ground first. She said she’s unsure of the total cost she’s incurred, but the estimate hovers around $14,000.

The money will come. Now is the time to tag, a labor of love for a woman who left a profession as a clinical psychologist to return to the family land in which her heart is rooted.

“I felt like this was my time to be out here with the trees,” she said. “It’s just me and the trees.”

Maybe more trees will be planted on the land, she thinks. She’s interested in growing trees to help bees pollinate. She wants to do more with other areas of the land.

“There’s a lot of land here in North Carolina,” she said. “People can go elsewhere. It’s not that I’m trying to be greedy. It’s about keeping it in the family so that my nephew and other children that come along have a legacy rather than it being developed. I always think about what to do with this land.  I’m working on a land management plan. I’m thinking conservation. Maybe a conservation easement or historical landmark. I’m going to figure it out.”

You just never know what kind of work the people you meet on the coast are doing until you get to know them. Dave Bernstein is a highly regarded geospatial mapping specialist who uses high-tech tools to map underwater contours for updating nautical charts.

He also happens to live in Morehead City and is an outstanding angler.

“Through graduate school at NC State University, I had an opportunity to work at the coast in marine science with UNC and NC State,” he said recently, adding that it led to a life on the water. “Through working in the marine labs, I met Chris and Sloan Freeman, and a few years later Geodynamics was formed.”

They three have been working together a long time and it’s paid off. “20 years later, Geodynamics has grown to a leading name in the hydrographic research and mapping industry.”

The company does more than make seafloor maps.

“We also use advanced remote sensing techniques like LiDAR (light detection and ranging) and GNSS (global navigation satellite system) to map the coastal environment by ground, remote aerial platforms, airplanes and helicopters. These terrestrial surveys support coastal engineering, design and construction as well as coastal change and resiliency studies.”

It’s tremendous work and it’s happening right here. But there’s a lot more to Bernstein than his work. He loves his family, and his wife and daughter are extremely important to him.

“My wife of 20 years, Kathy, is a school counselor and career coordinator for Carteret County Schools. Our daughter, Josie, is into gymnastics, but will drop everything to go fishing.”

Josie has always loved fishing, said Bernstein. “I started her at around 4 years old and I think she was guided into it at the right pace.”

Bernstein also loves to get the whole crew out on the boat and enjoy the outdoors.

“We love getting on the water and learning together about our environment, fishing, boating and beaching. You can typically find us somewhere around Cape Lookout,” he said. 

Bernstein is known around here as a fine angler and has competed successfully in regional redfish tournaments.

“I got into fishing some tournaments and taking on some sponsors back in 2004. I never really thought of that as a professional adventure, but more of an extension of the competitive life of sports,” he said. “I did pretty good in tournaments with many top 10 finishes and even won some.”

He credits tournament fishing with making him a better angler all around.

“Redfish tournaments forced me to think more about how to catch fish and why fishing can be good or bad at times,” he said.

Nowadays, he doesn’t fish competitively too often, but he still gets out there from time to time.

“Josie and I enjoy doing benefit tournaments, like the Carteret Cancer Crew Fishing Tournament,” he said.

Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Bernstein said his love of fishing began as a kid on trips to the beaches between Virginia Beach and the North Carolina state line. Fishing brought together the men of the family.

“When I was growing up, we visited Sandbridge Beach. These trips with family were where I learned to surf, fish and grow a passion for the ocean and coastal environments,” He said. “My dad, Dr. Allen Bernstein, and my uncles, Steve and Harold taught me surf and pier fishing. I vividly remember fishing for bluefish, spots, and croaker at the Sandbridge Pier.”

He moved to the North Carolina coast in 2001, saying the area “was a great fit.” And as soon as he could, he got serious about his fishing.

“Once I got my first boat, I quickly built a passion for redfishing. Sight fishing, casting lures, and anything else; I enjoy it all and it’s always different.”

However, he does have his favorite methods.

“I love working the marsh banks and shallows with topwater plugs for redfish. You can hear, and often see, the fish coming in and out of the fringe grass to feed. When they crush your lure, it’s exhilarating!”

He’s learned a lot about it over the years and said the key to consistently finding fish is not to get stuck in your ways.

“Go out and explore. When you learn more about the areas you already know, and find new areas, you build a more comprehensive understanding of the whole system.”

The last part of the puzzle is getting them to bite, figuring out what will make those fish want to feed. 

“Determine what they are eating, and the bites will follow,” he advised.

Recently, Bernstein has been heeding his own advice and expanding his own horizons.

“I’ve enjoyed fishing the inshore waters, but now I’ve been exploring outside the inlets and fishing nearshore waters for cobia, king mackerel, Spanish mackerel, false albacore and Atlantic bonito. Wreck fishing is next, but I’ll need a bigger boat,” he said, adding that, “Sometimes my expectation is not to catch a lot of fish, but instead to try something new or just have quality time with my daughter. Then the fish are a bonus.”

Geodynamics, which has seen significant growth in the past decade, is becoming a much bigger operation. In 2021, Geodynamics was acquired and merged into NV5 Geospatial. The company announced in 2021 that the “combination brings together complementary, advanced technologies – Geodynamics’ full-ocean depth sonar-based hydrographic and geophysical surveying with NV5 Geospatial’s topographic and bathymetric capabilities – to deliver detailed insights for a variety of applications, including coastal management, flood monitoring, ecosystem protection, research and more.”

“We’re growing now with some great support from our NV5 team and our 20-person team has quickly jumped to 40.” Bernstein sees this continuing. “Our next 10 years is all about building the team, refining how we manage our work, maintaining the culture, and keeping innovation in the forefront of our work. We have a few new larger vessels coming online in 2023 that are designed to support offshore infrastructure development projects such as submarine cables, wind energy, and sediment resources.”

Bernstein’s family also looks forward to being together more.

“We want to travel, explore the Caribbean and the Mediterranean,” he said. “We’re hoping for more time on the boat and beach, and many family memories to be had.”

Dr. Andy Read’s first encounter with a whale was, in his words, “the most gross, disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”

He was a college student who had just landed a job with the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, putting together the skeleton of a beached fin whale that couldn’t be saved.

The catch? The center’s team hadn’t been able to fully clean the skeleton before they brought it back from Nova Scotia, and it was buried somewhere in Toronto until they had the time to finish the process – that was Read’s job. “I almost quit the first day,” he said.

It’s a good thing he didn’t. Read’s close encounter with that whale skeleton fascinated him and was the beginning of a prolific career. Now the Stephen A. Toth Professor of marine biology at Duke University and director of the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, Read studies the ecology and conservation of whales and other marine mammals.

Read’s move to North Carolina was a geographic stroke of luck. After completing his doctorate at the University of Guelph in Ontario, where he studied harbor porpoises in the Bay of Fundy, he took a postdoctoral position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

During that time, he met his wife, Kim Urian, who was working at the Mote Marine Lab in Florida. The distance was a challenge, and the pair agreed to settle down somewhere in the middle. Read started at Duke in 1995.

North Carolina has been the perfect place for Read to pursue his research and conservation work. “It’s just a great place to do what I do. We have lots of access to marine mammals and sea turtles here,” he explained.

The diversity of animals he encounters in his research is a big perk, and another geographic stroke of luck: North Carolina sits at the confluence of the tropical Gulf Stream and the boreal Labrador Current. This brings a huge diversity of animals to our waters, which host 36 species of marine mammals and five of the six species of sea turtles found in the United States.

Navy sonar study

Read is currently leading U.S. Navy-funded research on one of these 36 marine mammal species, the Cuvier’s beaked whale, also known as the goose-beaked whale, off the coast of Cape Hatteras. His team is working to understand how and why the midfrequency active sonar the Navy uses to detect small submarines affects the behavior of these whales. Cape Hatteras is a great place for this study because it has a high density of beaked whales and a relatively low level of Navy training activity. 

Cuvier’s beaked whales are both the deepest-diving mammal in the world and the mammal capable of staying underwater the longest. They use their exceptional abilities for hunting — according to Read, they forage at an average depth of about 1,500 meters, or close to a mile, but they can descend to depths twice that.

In 2020, a team of researchers including Read recorded a Cuvier’s beaked whale dive that lasted 222 minutes – over three and a half hours. “It’s like running a 5K, taking a breath when the starting gun goes off, and you don’t take another breath until the end of the race,” said Read. “Which is just … How does a mammal do that? They shouldn’t be able to!”

Unfortunately, midfrequency active sonar alters these impressive diving behaviors. Cuvier’s beaked whales that hear the sonar tend to surface very quickly, interrupting their hunting and putting them in physiological danger from decompression sickness. Read and his team think this is because the sonar sounds like killer whale calls. Killer whales are the only natural predators of Cuvier’s beaked whales. They don’t usually dive very deep, which must make hearing their calls thousands of meters below the surface extra disconcerting for the Cuvier’s beaked whales.

“When they’re foraging … where they should be safe from killer whales, all of the sudden they hear the sounds of their predators, and they panic,” Read said. The team’s most recent experiment took place with the help of the USS Farragut, a Navy destroyer, in August 2022. They hope to continue their work until at least 2025.

Read and his students are also studying the ecology of short-fin pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins off Cape Hatteras. He’s also been involved in marine mammal studies all over the world, including a project on humpback whales in Antarctica. “But now that I’m director of the (Duke Marine) lab here, it’s hard to get away for a couple months every winter” to do that research, he said.

It’s not just the director’s job that keeps him busy. Read has also recently been appointed by President Biden as one of three commissioners of the federal Marine Mammal Commission.

The commission was established in 1972 as part of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. It is charged with oversight of all marine mammal research and conservation initiatives in the country, most of which are performed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

While Read had previously served on the commission’s committee of scientific advisers from 2003-2008, this is the first time he has been confirmed by the Senate as commissioner. He was also nominated by President Obama, but never confirmed.

One of the commission’s species of concern – and a personal one for Read as well – is the North Atlantic right whale. “The population is declining, we have fewer than 400 whales left, fewer than 70 adult female whales,” he said.

North Carolina is an important migratory corridor for the species. North Atlantic right whales travel yearly between their feeding grounds in New England and Canada and their breeding grounds off the coast of Georgia and eastern Florida.

One major threat to right whales is entanglement in fishing gear. Ship strikes are another, and are particularly relevant in North Carolina. There are already seasonal restrictions on large ships coming into North Carolina ports in Morehead City and Wilmington. Those restrictions may soon affect smaller ships as well, if changes proposed by NOAA Fisheries to the existing right whale vessel speed rule go through.

“It’s seasonal, so it’s only from November through April. But we have a big bluefin tuna fishery here in some years … We’re very interested to see what NOAA Fisheries decides to do with that rule. That’ll have an impact here locally,” Read explained.

A necessary challenge

Balancing conservation and industry is a necessary challenge, and one Read readily takes on.

Early in his career he helped develop and test small pinging alarms to warn dolphins and porpoises away from gillnets. These pingers are now used by fishers around the world, and when used properly they can reduce bycatch of porpoises by about 90%.

“I think that’s the thing, probably, I’m most proud of, and working directly with fishermen has been challenging, but it can also be very rewarding,” Read, who speaks admirably about the ingenuity of the fishers he has worked with throughout the years. said.

Fisheries and coastal management can be a complex but critical undertaking, particularly when there are endangered species like right whales plying the waters. After decades in the field, Read remains hopeful that society can figure out some of these pressing conservation issues.

“We are industrializing the coastal ocean. But we have so many resources in this country and such good legislative frameworks through the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act,” he explained. However, simply having those frameworks is not enough – we also need the political will to find a way to coexist with marine mammals, he stressed.

So how can the average North Carolinian help on a daily basis? According to Read, figure out where the shrimp, tuna and other seafood you eat comes from, and seek out seafood that’s harvested in a way that has a “gentle, light touch on the environment.”

Despite our state’s abundant marine resources, much of the seafood we eat still isn’t locally or sustainably harvested. Consumers’ small changes could make a big difference for marine ecosystems and local fishers alike. “It’s worth a little investment. We should all think about where our food comes from,” said Read.

Next time you drive across the Oregon Inlet Bridge, take a look down and toward the sound. Is anybody kayak fishing with a fly rod? If so, chances are Capt. Harry Meraklis is nearby, directing them and showing them where and how to cast.

Meraklis is a 100% fly fisherman and has been guiding fellow fly anglers on the Outer Banks for 11 years.

He grew up in the Pittsburgh area. “I actually tied flies at about 12 years old in our basement in Pittsburgh, PA. My dad Sam would wake me up at 4 a.m. on weekends and we were off. Mostly we’d be fishing from his johnboat mounted on the top of his painting van.”

Mr. Sam has been gone for a long time, “… but if he knew — and I hope he does — that I was a fly-fishing guide at Oregon Inlet he would light up in a smile.”

Later on, Meraklis met another friend who influenced him quite a bit.

“My friend Don Beideman reignited my passion for fly fishing streams in central PA later in life, and I have not picked up a spinning rod in quite a while,” Meraklis said.

Even though he grew up in western Pennsylvania, saltwater fishing has been Meraklis’ passion for a very long time.

“My dad started bringing our family to the Outer Banks in 1960. We would wade fish Oregon inlet and surf fish,” said Meraklis.

He couldn’t stay away and later bought a home in Kitty Hawk, where he would eventually move full time.

“I’ve been a homeowner and frequent visitor of the Outer Banks for most of my life and have lived in Kitty Hawk for well over a decade,” said Meraklis, who added that he’d been guiding ever since. “I work for OBX On The Fly, a fly shop and outfitter located in Manteo, and am a fly guide and instructor. I primarily wade fish from kayaks.”

Meraklis will usually launch from the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center and uses motorized kayaks to hit a shopping list of spots that are within easy reach.

“Electric motors extend our range and get us from point to point swiftly,” he noted.

Meraklis’ target species are the usual suspects for inshore fishing in North Carolina: redfish, speckled trout, flounder, striped bass, sheepshead and bluefish.

“I love to hunt the flats with a fly rod,” he said.

Meraklis offered a couple of tips for those wishing to try fly fishing from a kayak.

“A stripping basket can be the ticket when drift fishing in a kayak. We frequently have stiff winds that can wreak havoc with your line management by blowing it out into the water and tangling it,” he said.

As anyone who has done it can tell you, having a knot in your fly line when you finally see your prize swimming in front of you can make you say things that would render your grandma very disappointed. He added that if you don’t have a stripping basket, “A wet towel draped over the floor of the kayak at your feet can also be quite effective in reducing tangles.”

The windy conditions on the Outer Banks can be a challenge for those used to fly fishing in small streams, but there are tricks to help a caster unused to the windy conditions.

“A water load cast is when you lay the fly line onto the water and use that tension to flex your rod. This keeps the wind from blowing your line all over and can be a quick and effective way to deliver your fly.”

Keeping your line tight to the fly is imperative in detecting strikes and setting the hook.

“It is really important to keep your rod tip down and point in the direction of the fly to increase your chances of a good hook set and catch more fish,” advised Meraklis.

Another tip from Meraklis for those who have never saltwater fly-fished before: “Practice your cast before you get out here! The longer you can cast, the more water you can cover, which means more time your fly is in the water.”

Meraklis has even devised his own fly. “I created the Dirty Harry about a decade ago and have not used anything but that fly since. It imitates any of the local bait merely by varying the color and how it’s fished,” he said. 

Crawl it along the bottom to imitate a crab, move it quickly through the water when minnows are on the menu, and when shrimp are around, a twitch-twitch-pause retrieve will do the job. These flies are sold at the fly shop in Manteo and Harry donates $1 from every sale to the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s Adopt an Oyster program.

Meraklis offers one last tip for light tackle anglers in his exceptionally busy area.

“At Oregon Inlet, avoiding boat and kayak pressure is key. It does no good to find fish, only to have them shut down by inexperienced or inconsiderate anglers,” he advised.

And one bit of advice that can help to consider no matter where or how you fish: “Picking the right time on any particular day, in conjunction with a tide that has good current flow is key. As a wade fisherman, hunting the flats in a stealthy manner, and committing to a good flat can pay off in a big way.”

Sharing these nuggets of wisdom is a family tradition. As Meraklis’ father did, he has passed that love down to his sons and grandson. When you teach them right, they will get the love themselves.

“My grandson cannot wait for me to visit so he can go fishing with ‘PaPou,’” Meraklis said proudly of Sammy, who lives near Philadelphia. “The kid’s got mad skills for a 5-year-old. He has his own Trout Unlimited tackle bag full of goodies and loves to select his next lure or fly.”

Randy Sturgill is a craftsman at getting people together to back a common cause, be it rallying in support of a presidential candidate or fighting against offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic.

Sturgill retired Friday as Oceana’s Southeast region senior campaign manager, ending a nearly 10-year chapter of his professional career.

But this is Sturgill we’re talking about, and for those who know him personally, professionally or have an inkling about the man, you can guess “retirement” for him does not include pumping the brakes on doing what he does best — getting people to back a common cause.

Goodbye Oceana. Hello Ukraine.

Not exactly accurate: Sturgill actually stepped up to help Ukrainians shortly after their country was invaded by Russia in late February 2022.

Like so many of his fellow Americans, Sturgill was captivated by news coverage of the war. Heartbreaking images of Ukraine’s husbands and sons loading their families onto buses and trains bound to Poland for safety struck him to the core.

“For me as an organizer it was like, what can I organize? What can I do to help these people?” he told Coastal Review this week.

The answer to that question came to fruition within a short time after the start of the war, one that Sturgill got to see firsthand when he arrived in Ukraine last April to ensure the supplies he’d secured for that country’s fighters got to their intended recipients.

Growing up Mayberry

Sturgill’s trip to a warzone – yes, his wife, Vicki gave him the green light to go – turned out to be a series of adventures.

He caught rides from Poland to cross the border into Ukraine by men who spoke little to no English, set up a shop for Ukrainian nationals to pick up the camouflage uniforms and combat boots he and his wife fronted the $24,000 to buy and ship over, and talked with survivors in Bucha, the city where Russian troops carried out a “cleansing” operation March 4 that resulted in the torture and deaths of more than 400 civilians.

In a telephone interview, Sturgill peppered his stories of his time in Ukraine in vivid detail – how he and the man who picked him up in Poland to begin the journey to the border used Google Translate to communicate one particularly chilly night in an old hotel room where he could see his breath each time he exhaled, and the awestruck faces of Ukrainians as he showed them a photo on his cellular phone of him standing in the yard of his Wilmington home flying both an American and Ukrainian flag.

Interesting stories from a man who has many to tell from a life that was unique even in childhood.

At around the age of 5, Sturgill’s father became chief deputy of the Harnett County Sheriff’s Office in Lillington, a small town nestled along the banks of the Cape Fear River.

The job entailed the Sturgill family moving into the county jail’s living quarters, a two-story brick home attached to the jailhouse, which was connected to the courthouse.

Sturgill grew up in that house living what he calls a “Mayberry-ish” life. Mom took a position as the jail dietician. She was called the “matron of the jail,” looking after the small number of female inmates and ensuring all who were incarcerated – anywhere from five to 25 at a time – ate homecooked meals prepared at the hands of a local woman.

On rainy days, Sturgill and a handful of his buddies would gravitate up to an empty Superior Court room, stretch a portable ping-pong net across one of the long tables reserved for attorneys “and have really good ping-pong matches.”

He would do his share of the work, taking plates of food to the inmates.

He remembers sitting on the cold jail floor and playing cards with men who told him to make good choices so that he wouldn’t end up on the wrong side of the bars that separated them.

Any of this sound eerily familiar? Google “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Long arm of the law to environmental advocate

During the summer after Sturgill graduated from high school, an advertisement for police cadets in Washington, D.C., caught his eye.

The small amount of money his parents had squirreled away each month over the years might have been enough to cover one semester of college. He told them to take that money and use it for something else. He was going to be a police officer.

His first law enforcement assignment was with the communication division on the sixth floor of the police headquarters at 300 Indiana Ave. in the nation’s capital.

But “big city” life wasn’t for Sturgill. He missed home.

He moved back to North Carolina where he took a job as a North Carolina Highway Patrol telecommunicator. He eventually moved back to Harnett County, where he would become one of the first two narcotic agents in the county.

“I ended up with over 10 years in drug enforcement alone,” Sturgill said.

He finished up his law enforcement career as an inspector with the state Division of Motor Vehicles, investigating things like auto theft.

During those years he had two daughters with his first wife. They divorced in the mid-1990s.

Then, he reconnected with his high school sweetheart. They married and raised a blended family – two girls and two boys – in Fayetteville. As soon as the two youngest graduated high school, the couple made their move to the coast.

It was there on Topsail Island where Sturgill began working for then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s campaign.

Sturgill would run Obama’s campaign office in Brunswick, New Hanover and a portion of Columbus counties during the president’s run for reelection.

Political campaigns are all about the buildup up to election day. When the polls close, the work in the office ends.

“You’re just sitting at your desk,” Sturgill said. “You’re looking around. All of this stuff that was so important a few hours ago is now recyclable.”

As Obama settled in for another four years, Sturgill was looking at job postings for campaign organizers. This organization called Oceana that he’d never heard of was on the hunt for an organizer for the southeastern U.S.

Campaign for the environment?

“That would be really cool,” Sturgill thought.

He was 60, the oldest field operative for the Obama campaign in the state.

“I said, ‘These people aren’t going to hire an old guy like me,’” Sturgill said. “I didn’t have a background in environmental issues. I said, ‘what the heck’ and I did (apply)”

He sold his interviewees on this: Give him a shot at building an army of supporters in the region.

Sturgill’s crowning achievement with Oceana is one he calls a “campaign of resolutions,” which kicked off when a New Hanover County beach town board passed a resolution opposing offshore oil exploration and drilling off the North Carolina coast.

He followed the board’s decision with a flurry of emails to beach towns up and down the Carolinas and Georgia.

“If they had a beach or saltwater connected to them I sent this letter asking them to considering doing a resolution,” Sturgill said. “It was all about grassroots. Let me have a few meetings with local people, teach them what they need to do when they got to a town board meeting, which is just basically letting the board members know that this is not a fit for North Carolina. Grassroots won the battle. They went to town halls. They went to county commissioners. They went to their senators, their congressmen.”

It was a David-and-Goliath battle. The little man versus big oil, a fight Sturgill predicts will “rear up again.”

A new campaign

“That was probably the big one for me,” he said.

He turns 70 later this month and, though retired, he’ll still be busy securing military gear and goods and shipping them to Ukraine.

Like the dutiful organizer, Sturgill embarked on this latest campaign with a phone call. This one to a Fayetteville-based military surplus store he picked at random from an Internet search.

That call resulted in him linking up with a man who had the number of used camouflage uniforms – 500 sets of pants and shirts – Sturgill was seeking. He found a deal on brand new military surplus boots for $32 a pair. Gently used were $15.

He paid for the uniforms and boots out-of-pocket and found a startup shipping company in Wilmington that was accepting donations to ship to Ukraine. Sturgill volunteered to help package up donations and, true to his nature, struck up a conversation with the owner.

The two made a deal that the company would ship the uniforms, boots and kneepads free of charge.

In the meantime, Sturgill documented on social media his efforts to get supplies to Ukraine. The donations started coming in.

When the free shipping deal ended, Sturgill made another deal to send supplies via air.

He currently has about $1,000 worth of special bandages for gunshot wounds and a pile of tourniquet kits he’s collecting donations for to fly to Ukraine.

“As long as there is a need I’ll do this, but hopefully the need will end sooner than later,” Sturgill said. “I’m retiring Friday. Everything I will be doing will be like any other John Q. Citizen volunteering to try to do good. I found something I know that I can do that as long as I can do it I’ll do my best to do what I can and then come home and do stuff I want to do like any other 70-year-old guy.”

To help support Sturgill’s efforts, contact him at 910–713-8251 or randysturgill@me.com.

When you ride the North Carolina state ferry system’s Minnesott Beach-Cherry Branch ferry, you may notice an especially tall fellow in uniform.

The new crewmember is H. Michael Kalanikau Howlett, a native Pacific Islander from Oahu and a recent transplant to Carteret County.

“Bo” to his friends and family, Howlett moved to live with his girlfriend Amy Martin on her family farm in Newport and has made quite a nice home for himself.

“I grew up on the island of Oahu in a small town called Laie (pronounced “la-ē-ā”) on the North Shore, about 15 minutes away from all the famous surf breaks like Sunset Beach and Pipeline,” Howlett told Coastal Review.

He spent much of his time there in and on the water.

“I would say the majority of the fishing that I did growing up would be free diving, spearfishing and offshore fishing for pelagic species. I used to go diving for octopus and fish used for traditional dishes that you would typically find at a traditional Hawaiian luau,” he said.

Never far from the ocean, he was obsessed with it as a kid.

“I went after every kind of fish I could. When I was a boy, I loved to dive and spearfish. I would run home after school then walk across the street to the beach and fish.” It was in his blood, “There wasn’t anywhere on Earth I would have rather been.”

Howlett loves offshore fishing, especially offshore trolling for large pelagic species. “Mainly because I love sashimi and poke, my favorite fish to catch are the big yellowfins that average between 100 and 200 pounds.”

He credits his father, Hank Howlett with showing him the ins and outs, starting at a young age.

 “My father had a 31-foot custom sampan, it’s a Japanese-style hull that rides well in rough water,” he said. “When the moon was right and the weather was favorable, my mom, Margo, would pick up me and my sister, Pohai, and meet my dad at the harbor before dark. We’d head out and down the coast a few miles and fish for mackerel with hand lines with six-hook rigs like Sabiki.”

He loved it even back then, fishing alongside his parents until he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

“They’d put me to bed alongside my sister and when I woke up we’d be back in the harbor in time to get ready for school.”

Hank Howlett, however, would keep fishing all day.

“My dad would head back out to the FADs (fish aggregating devices, or floating man-made objects used to attract ocean fish) and catch mahi and tuna with some of the live mackerel that we had saved from the night’s fishing. If I didn’t have school, or even sometimes if I did, I would stay with my dad and go with him to the FADs and I would work the deck.”

But of course, adult life would come along, accompanied by tough choices.

“I went to culinary school in Honolulu, and that was a great experience and I met wonderful people. I learned a lot and I was good at it, but the chef life wasn’t for me, so I got a part-time fishing job on a charter boat.”

From there, he worked his way up to becoming a captain of his own boat.

“I got my first captain’s job running a boat that was owned by a restaurant and bar on the water. I got to meet new people every day, and these people fished for the joy of it and hopefully provide them with the opportunity to catch the fish of a lifetime.”

Later, Howlett met a Carolina girl. That led to the change of venue.

“My boss at the time ran a perpetual job listing on Craigslist for a bikini fisher girl/boat washer/booth girl/photographer. Pretty much almost 100% of the time they never came back after the interview, but then there was Amy (Martin). She came back the next day at 5 a.m., ready to fish. And she kept coming back. She’s tough and she’s the reason why and how I ended up in Newport, North Carolina.”

Howlett moved to Carteret County in July 2021 and has been going strong ever since. He works the Martin family farm in Newport, and for a while you could find him at Rose Brothers Seafood in Beaufort a couple days a week.

Mostly, you’ll see him on the dock on the Minnesott-Cherry Branch ferry run, where he’s a crewmember.

He also took quickly to the local fishing — with success — and the way of life here.

“My first time fishing here, Amy’s dad, Kevin Martin, took me fishing for red drum. We caught our limit on Carolina rigs with finger mullet,” Howlett said.

Howlett was impressed by just how much water he saw around his new home.

“A thing that blew me away when I came here for the first time, was how nautical it is. I was not prepared for the amount of water and coastline in the Intracoastal Waterway, plus offshore and the sheer amount of boats,” he said, adding that things are a lot different in Oahu. “Hawaii has very little safe harbor and there aren’t many places where you can keep a boat in the water. The ones that do exist are full, so you have to be on a waiting list for years in order to get a slip. When your name comes up you have a month to put a boat in it or you go to the bottom of the list again.”

Avid North Carolina boaters would likely find that system painful.

For now, Howlett’s job on the ferry is guiding drivers on and off. He holds an Ordinary Seaman credential, very soon to be upgraded to Able Seaman, he said, and then he’ll be looking at the 200-ton Master.

When I say he’s tall, I’m not kidding, and if you’re on his boat you’ll definitely see him. His name tag says “Michael,” but just say, “Hi Bo.” And he should be around. He sees himself working for the Ferry Division for a long time.

“I hope someday to be at the helm of my own vessel,” he said.

In any field, there are people whose accomplishments make them iconic. Kareem Abdul Jabbar or Marlon Brando might come to mind in their respective professions. Or you might think of presidents or captains of industry. On the coast of North Carolina, longtime outdoor writer and Brunswick County native Capt. Jerry Dilsaver counts as one of these people.

Dilsaver is a freelance writer for newspapers and outdoor magazines, and there’s a chance you have seen his articles in Kayak Angler Magazine, Southern Kayak Angler Magazine, TIDE Magazine, Waterway Guide, Coast Magazine or This Week Magazine. In addition, he manages the outdoor page in the State Port Pilot newspaper in Southport.

Dilsaver’s involvement with fishing and the water is a multigenerational affair starting with both his grandfathers, continuing through his father and to the present day. His grandfathers, David Fulcher and John Dilsaver, both moved to southeast North Carolina at the end of the 19th century. They worked on, in and around the water as shrimpers and commercial fishermen. Jerry Dilsaver’s father, Floyd Dilsaver, learned about fishing and shrimping early on.

“I grew up in a fishing family. My Dad was a shrimper and later became the manager for the shrimping company located in Southport,” he told Coastal Review.

John Dilsaver stayed active until late in his life, working as a shrimper until his final few years. Jerry Dilsaver counts his father as the primary influence in learning all there was to know about the water.

“My father and I fished together all the time,” he said.

Dilsaver’s father passed away in 1987 after many years living in Southport, which the younger Dilsaver still considers to be his hometown, even though he currently resides in Oak Island.

Dilsaver’s interests were always diverse.

“As a young man I raced motocross professionally for several years, promoted concerts, built nuclear power plants, guided duck and goose hunts and more,” he said.

He didn’t find his lane – and his life’s work — until he graduated from East Carolina University at the age of 33.

“I was a late bloomer, and after graduating from East Carolina, I became an outdoor writer and photographer.”

Dilsaver’s journalism career started with a now-defunct North Carolina-based outdoor magazine.

“My first staff job was in 1986 with Carolina Adventure Magazine, and I stayed there until 2002,” he said, adding that his departure was to join a bigger operation. “I began working for the Sportsman Magazine Group. I was on staff at North Carolina and South Carolina Sportsman Magazines and did occasional work for Louisiana and Mississippi Sportsman Magazines.”

The skill that most likely gave rise to Dilsaver’s career, setting him apart from a sea of fine outdoor writers and sharers of fishing reports and stories, was his real-world success in fishing. His list of tournament wins and first-place finishes in season-long fishing tournament tours may be impressive enough, but when you add that he was named Angler of the Year by the U.S. Anglers Association in 1998 and then elected to the Southern Kingfish Association Hall of Fame in 2007, then his stature becomes clearer.

So, when Dilsaver offers fishing advice, pay attention.

“The key to consistently scoring with fish is to not get lazy. Some fishermen get complacent and take shortcuts and this will turn into spooked fish, strikes not happening, gear breaking and such,” he offered.

Dilsaver also recommends knowing your equipment, understanding how it works and how to best use it.

“The way a person gets better at fishing is like anything else: practice, practice, practice. You can learn new things from a book, TV or a seminar, but they won’t work consistently for you until you have practiced enough that they become second nature.,” he said.

A recurring theme is that there is no substitute for time spent on the water. But Dilsaver notes that success isn’t necessarily measured in pounds and ounces.

“I consider having a good time as the most important part of a day on the water. This means leaving prepared, giving it your best and not letting your occasional mistakes or things you can’t control bother you,” Dilsaver said.

Further he said that while it’s nice to release a bunch of fish or invite a few home to be the guests of honor at dinner, the number and/or species of fish you catch shouldn’t be how you judge a fishing trip. 

“I’ve had some great trips where we caught few or nothing.”

These days, Dilsaver has backed off from tournament fishing. He plans to participate in kayak tournaments close home, but the traveling tournament fishing lifestyle is something he’s not pursuing anymore.

“My fishing fleet has been downsized to a 16½-foot flats boat and several kayaks. I really enjoy kayak fishing and have even been known to take it into the nearshore ocean occasionally to fish for king mackerel,” he said.

Dilsaver has been taking the time to appreciate more subtle styles of fishing, including stalking tailing redfish with his wife, donna Mooneyhan.

“We are fortunate to live near some productive water and it’s easy to slip the boat in during the late afternoon while most are calling it a day and enjoy the serenity of an uncrowded marsh,” he said.

The Dilsavers enjoy the technical aspects of sight fishing.

“This isn’t just casting and retrieving, but involves spotting the fish and then moving to within casting range without spooking them.”

One bit of Dilsaver wisdom to remember every time we get near the water: “Fish will teach us new things almost daily.”

If you’re an angler, you have more than likely at some point in your life been approached by a person with a clipboard in the parking lot of a boat ramp, asking you about your fishing day. What were you fishing for? How long did you stay out? Did you catch anything?

This person is doing what is called a creel survey for the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. The data they collect on recreational fishing data includes effort, catch and participation. It’s important in determining how much pressure is being put on our fish populations by recreational anglers.

If you have been surveyed in Dare County, there is a good chance that you have been questioned by a good-looking young guy named John Petrigac. He has been living and working on the Outer Banks for five years now.

Along with his girlfriend, Candace Burns, Petrigac gets out on the water as much as he can. And as evidenced by the 30-inch speckled trout he caught this past summer, it appears he’s got some things figured out.

Petrigac grew up in Pittsburgh fishing with his grandfather, also named John. “My grandfather is the reason I started fishing. When I was about 5 years old, he started taking me to a local lake to fish for bass and panfish.”

Of course, this grew into bigger and longer excursions.

“As I got older we would take trips to our family camp in West Virginia where I spent all my time on a boat with him fishing for smallmouth bass,” Petrigac said.

Petrigac’s grandfather passed away a few years ago but he still impacts young John’s life every day. These idyllic settings would lead to even bigger adventures.

“I got my first taste of saltwater fishing when we took a family vacation to Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, and hired an inshore charter that took us out to catch redfish and trout.” The memories of that trip became indelibly stamped into his brain, “I won’t ever forget the first redfish I hooked into,” Petrigac said.

That first red became a turning stone for Petrigac. As with many other people, the saltwater fishing bug got under his skin.

“After that, I made it my goal to move to the coast. It took me a few years, but I eventually moved to Myrtle Beach,” he said.

Petrigac attended Coastal Carolina University where he studied marine science and eventually got his master’s.

“While I was in school, whenever I wasn’t studying or working, I was fishing,” he said.

He worked at a tackle shop in Myrtle Beach and got all the information and knowledge he could.

“For a few summers, I soaked up as much from the locals as I could,” he said.

That knowledge all paid off when John first moved to the Outer Banks. He got his job with the division and decided, just like in college, if he wasn’t working, he was going to be fishing.

“Since I have moved to the Outer Banks, I have been hooked on kayak fishing in my Ascend 12t sit-on-top,” he said.

You will often find him plugging along in the backwaters where he continues to catch speckled trout and red drum.

“I like to spend early mornings on the grass flats chasing trout and drum but will occasionally switch it up and fish structure for sheepshead,” he said.

Like most of us he has preferences in the way he likes to fish but is prepared to switch up when necessary.

“I like to throw topwater as much as I can, but obviously that is not always what the fish want so I’m not afraid to throw a popping cork or weedless jig over grass beds to get bites,” he said. 

Petrigac also occasionally gets the opportunity to get out in the ocean. “When asked, I won’t hesitate to jump on a friend’s boat to go bottom fishing for sea bass or look for cobia,” he said, adding that autumn will see him surf fishing. “Come fall, I shift my focus to the surf, for trout and redfish.”

Because Petrigac fishes out of a small craft most of the time and is covering water with a variety of species, he has to be ready for anything.

“The most important thing to having a successful day on the water I think comes down to two things: having a game plan and knowing how and when to adjust your game plan when it doesn’t work out,” he said.

You just never know what each day will bring and not being able to go 30 mph to cover different areas forces an angler to lock down on presentation and finding out what is really going on.

“The key to consistently catching fish is paying attention to weather and environmental conditions and how that affects the fish, as well as having the knowledge about the fish you are targeting,” he said.

If you’re lucky, in a few years you might get a chance to fish with Petrigac. He figures he will end up being a charter captain.

“What good is all this fishing knowledge I am getting, If I don’t pass it on in some way?” he explained.

Petrigac said he will most likely be getting a bay boat so he can really get out and cover water and learn more about the entire Pamlico Sound. He’s looking forward to getting married and having kids in the future so he can pass along his love of fishing to them. Staying in North Carolina and the Outer Banks is pretty much where he sees himself.

“No reason to leave as far as I can see,” he said.

Keep an eye out for Petrigac if you see somebody doing creel surveys in Dare County. He’s a good man to get to know.

It can be hard to find native coastal people who have lived, worked and owned a business in the same location for multiple generations — not impossible, but difficult. That’s part of what makes Chris Medlin, owner of East Coast Sports in Surf City on Topsail Island, so unusual.

He’s been there so long that he can’t remember the exact time he caught his first fish, but he assumes it was a spot at the old Barnacle Bill’s Pier.

“I can’t remember my first time going fishing, but I’m sure it was beside my granddad, Charlie, who owned and/or operated the piers where I was raised,” he recently told Coastal Review.

Medlin’s grandfather Charlie Medlin had moved to Topsail Island in 1948.

“He had saved up enough money to put himself through business college and moved to Topsail to open an icehouse.” In those days that literally meant delivering blocks of ice to people’s homes for their nonelectric ice boxes.

Over the years the ice business evolved and became a beach grocery store. But then a different need was seen.

“It was turned into a serious tackle shop in the 1980s by my father, Doug, after granddad retired.”

There was a need for that kind of store on Topsail Island, he said. “I’ve tried to do like granddad,” Medlin said. “He always said, ‘Find a need and fill it.’”

East Coast Sports has been a successful venture ever since, he said.

“Our current model is very successful. We are continuing to grow every year,” Medlin said.

The inventory is vast and varied and covers two stories of a large building on Roland Avenue. Medlin said the shop’s online reviews are a reflection of the friendly and helpful staff. 

“We couldn’t do it without all of our employees to whom I feel indebted. We can only be successful if we can keep an upbeat crew.”

Medlin said the key is treating his employees fairly and respectfully. “My granddad and my father taught me to value people and their time. If you owe them, you pay them.”

And respect should be the rule for whatever you are doing in life, he said.

“You should pay the same respect to everyone you cross paths with — rich, poor, old or young. Everyone.”

But the history of the business has not been all sunshine and roses. The old Barnacle Bill’s Pier was wiped out by hurricanes in 1996.

“We lost Barnacle Bill’s because of it being knocked down and torn up during Bertha and then again during Fran. We had already rebuilt the pier. Lost it two times in the same year.”

It was an emotional period.

“First time I ever saw pop cry.  East Coast Sports was under 3 feet of mud.”

But they soldiered on and again rebuilt.

“We needed to find something while we rebuilt our lives. We did roofing — shingles, tar, standing seam. We also did some siding and remodeling.”

The work allowed them to keep the lights on while they rebuilt the shop, but the sideline was temporary.

“Once East Coast got back up and running we slowly got out of construction,” Medlin said.

He found that it was not a great way for him to go forward with raising his family due to the dangers involved. It also just didn’t appeal to him in the long run. “I didn’t love that job like I do running the store.”

But then they had to do it all again after Hurricane Florence in 2018.

“We got heavy damage from Florence and updated the shop since we had to repair anyway — made it into a more open concept,” he said.

As you might expect from someone who runs a generation-spanning small business, family is especially important to Medlin. And each year he sponsors a kids fishing derby and gives away about 300 rods, reels and bait.

“It’s many kids’ first fishing rod,” he said.

This past year was the 20th and participation has increased every year.

Medlin said his entire family loves to fish. His 13-year-old daughter Caiya and 16-year-old son Charlie have caught some big ones.

“Charlie once landed an amberjack that was probably 40 pounds and a shark of around 100 pounds.”

Medlin’s wife Chaundel likes to go too, but it had better be the right day. “My wife enjoys fishing in perfect conditions,” he said slyly.

The Medlins also like to travel and of course they do some fishing while away.

“My son and I usually do a charter wherever we travel,” Medlin said, noting that there’s nothing like getting out on the water in a new place to see what the local action is like. But not all their family trips include fishing. Chris and Charlie recently visited Peru where they didn’t do any fishing but they did see Machu Picchu, the Nazca Lines and the city of Lima.

“No fishing on that trip but it was pretty amazing,” he said.

Topsail Island has changed a lot since Medlin was young, he said, but one thing that hasn’t changed is people’s desire to hit the water when they arrive.

“The fishing spirit is the same,” he said, adding that fishing industry advancements have made the pastime better for everybody. “The best innovation has to be braided line and graphite rods. Both have revolutionized the tackle business and made most people capable of landing a big fish.”

For many, walking into a tackle shop and looking at all the gear can be bewildering but modern gear has made getting into fishing more accessible.

“Gear has absolutely gotten better across the board. There are technical advances every day in bait, gear, lures, reels and rods,” he said.

ROANOKE ISLAND — Back in 1995 when people mostly used landlines, my home phone rang late one afternoon. Answering, I heard a cheery voice, thick with an Outer Banks brogue, asking for me: “This is Senator Marc Basnight. What can I do to help you?”

Then, widely considered the most powerful man in North Carolina, Basnight served for a record-breaking nine terms as Senate leader out of a total of the 13 terms he served from 1985 until his retirement in early 2011. Since his death Dec. 28, 2020, many have remembered the profound impact Manteo’s native son had on not only higher education and roads, but the state’s environment.

“He was a major force when it came to shaping the environmental policy,” said Todd Miller, founder and executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. “I think he made it acceptable to be an environmentalist. As one of the most powerful people in North Carolina, he gave the whole movement legitimacy.”

Basnight’s unlikely rise to power and his remarkable career is the topic of the 88th annual Daniels Day Family Reunion set for 3:30 p.m. Sunday at Bethany United Methodist Church in Wanchese. The featured speaker is Alex Gottshalk, who grew up in Currituck County and had written his senior thesis on Basnight while attending the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The public is welcome.

The Manteo Democrat was a huge force on the Outer Banks, where his family went back generations. When I realized who I was talking to on that early spring day, I was taken aback. I was a newcomer to North Carolina, and Basnight knew nothing about me.

But just days before, I had called his office to complain about a local health food store banning children from coming inside the building. Soon enough, his chief of staff had followed up with helpful information. I learned that constituent service was not a periodic campaign pledge to Basnight, it was a practice.

From his earliest days in the public eye, Basnight ended up being a lot more than his humble style revealed.

Miller said he first encountered Basnight around 1986, when he talked about the importance of estuaries at an early meeting about the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership.

“You know, he’d been in the development business in Dare County,” Miller said, referring to the Basnight family construction company. “He really emerged over the years. He was such a quick study and learned as he went.”

As time went on and Basnight got a deeper understanding of an issue, Miller said, he could become as much of an advocate for environmental rules as sometimes a critic.

“He really emerged over the years. He was such a quick study and learned as he went. I think some of these early concerns about how we were managing the environment, as he got more deeply into the issue, he began to better understand the rationale and was as much of an advocate for these rules as sometimes a critic. “

Miller worked with Basnight on numerous environmental issues, including water quality and oyster restoration, and witnessed his active engagement on environment protection.

He was critical of the state Department of Transportation’s use of sandbags as a Band-Aid approach, Miller recalled. He disliked them for “hardening” the beach, and favored beach nourishment as a more compatible approach to protecting the roads. He championed passage of legislation that put into law the state Division of Coastal Management’s regulation banning seawalls.

In 1994, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Coastal Area Management Act, Basnight gave a talk at a conference in Wilmington in support of more state investment in land acquisition for environmental protection. By the next year, he initiated work on legislation creating and funding what would soon be known as the Clean Water Management Trust Fund.

“But that was the first time in public that he really spoke about the need for such an initiative,” Miller said. “And then he made it happen.”

“It definitely put us on the map in terms of state investments,” he said. “Up until that time trying to find money to buy environmentally sensitive properties or to do habitat restoration was really, really difficult to get any state money to do that. And for a number of years, they had more than $100 million to spend.”

Although there was concern after Basnight retired that the trust fund — regarded as one the most important state environmental stewardship programs — would be eliminated, it not only survived, but it is continuing to grow in popularity as a bipartisan program.

But Basnight “had his hands in so many things,” Miller said.

“I think he was always an advocate for what he viewed as sort of the normal working person in the state,” he said. “So he saw things through the eyes of ‘What does it really take to improve the way of life in communities?’ And he wasn’t shy about trying to give resources to the causes.

“He was a hands-on individual. He could be your best friend or your worst nightmare.”
That rapport was likely a big reason for his effectiveness as a politician.

“I think he related to the people he was representing very closely. They were very important to him. And it is through his understanding of their needs and perspectives, he tried hard to represent them. At the same time, he liked to learn new things and advance new ideas. He wasn’t stuck in the past.”

He had the legislative building switch to LED lighting and to use real silverware and compostable paper products. He embraced living shorelines early on. He pushed for energy efficiency. He banned plastic bags on the Outer Banks, a measure since repealed.

“He tried to understand really what was behind the environmental concerns. I think he wanted common sense tech solutions. He wasn’t in favor of regulating people out of business or making it so tough that people couldn’t comply. If it made sense and if it was practical and it could be done, he wanted to see it done. “

Rolf Blizzard, who had served as Basnight’s chief of staff, said that Basnight’s visionary environmental policies were directly influenced by his life near, on and in the Outer Banks’ ocean and sounds.

“I think it was a genuine appreciation and respect for the water and what it provided that drove that environmental support,” he said in an interview.

But Basnight was able to understand the comprehensive nature of what it took to clean up the environment, and was willing to apply policy not just to where the problem was, but what was creating it.

Blizzard said that Basnight always liked to be outside. Even in Raleigh, he would change into his shorts and T-shirt and take a walk for a couple of hours. At the Outer Banks, he’d walk on the beach and jump into the ocean for a swim.

Blizzard would accompany the senator when they drove back and forth across the state, and most of the time Basnight would drive. Their talks along the way covered multiple subjects, including Basnight urging Blizzard to marry his then-girlfriend Ashley.

“Those rides with him were just legendary,” he said.

Blizzard said that Basnight’s impressive constituent service was inspired by Republican U.S. Sen. Jesse Helm’s office, where anybody could call and they would get help. Basnight expected his staff to not only be responsive, he said, but also to “press the bureaucracy.” It was not unusual for Basnight to answer the phone at the office if his staff couldn’t pick up quick enough.

“We were probably getting a couple of hundred calls a day in the office,” he said. Blizzard joked that instead of hiring a lobbyist, people could just go buy a $16 meal at the family restaurant in Nags Head, Basnight’s Lone Cedar Cafe, and chat with the senator, who routinely greeted customers and even served tables.

“Every Monday, you knew there was going to be a crush of calls coming in because he would be in the Lone Cedar pouring tea over the course of the weekend,” said Blizzard.

Basnight saw helping people as not only a rewarding mission, but as a responsibility.

“I mean, his support of the university system was legendary, but his just everyman approach, to being able to connect and build relationships regardless of your status in life was honestly what his legacy was,” Blizzard said.

But Basnight also went to bat for state agencies, fighting for more funds or staff.

“He fought just as vigorously for the bureaucracy,” he said.

For his part, Gottshalk, who never got to interview Basnight, said that the environment was the winner in the senator’s mastery of politics.

“The best benefit that Basnight had with respect to the environment, besides just caring about it, was the fact that he knew how to navigate the system. And so rather than just enact programs, he funded — and knew how to fund — the programs.”

The last time I saw the senator was a few years after he retired, standing at the takeout counter at a Nags Head eatery. He was wearing a salmon-colored polo shirt, and looked trim and tan. When I greeted him, he responded warmly and we shared some small talk.

“It’s so great to see you,” I said, as he grabbed his order and turned to leave. “We all miss you.”

Basnight looked directly at me, smiling his crooked grin

“Oh, bullshit!” he said, chuckling.

That’s when I knew the master politician really had retired.

You’re thinking of trying to catch a big flounder without leaving the inlet. You’ve got kids who can’t go in the ocean, but you still want a big one. For fishing guide Capt. Rick Patterson of Emerald Isle, fishing is all about family.

Patterson comes by his knowledge through a lifetime of angling. A Burlington native, he started out as a young man fishing for bass with his father, Richard Patterson who died in 2016. He credits his father for getting him into fishing.

“My dad bought a bass boat back in the early ’90s and we really got into it. We fished most of the lakes of central North Carolina,” he said.

This led Patterson to start fishing in bass tournaments across the state. Like many, he found that traipsing around from lake to lake for tournaments is not really viable for more than a select few. So, he adapted his love of fishing and his expertise learned from competitive bass fishing and directed it towards saltwater fishing.

“We had been coming down to the coast as long as I can remember, and I got the crazy idea of becoming an inshore fishing guide. After Tara and I got married we moved to Emerald Isle in 2001 and I started guiding in ’03,” Patterson said.

Patterson soon made an impact in the area. He immediately started making a name for himself by catching huge flounder, and his enthusiasm was contagious.

“I really enjoy guiding people. Always fun watching people catch a big saltwater fish for the first time,” he said.

Patterson said his true passion is his family, and his wife Tara and daughter Katie, 12, have been known to get out there and catch a big fish from time to time themselves. A few years back it was a common sight to see Patterson and his father plugging for red drum and trout in any of the Carteret County waterways. He truly enjoys seeing kids on the water.

“To get kids excited about fishing, you have to target something they can catch. It has to be fun.”

This means that plugging for trout no matter what may not bet the best thing and simply rigging up a light rod for croakers and pinfish might be a better option.

“Most kids, especially younger ones, have a short attention span. Many guys make the mistake of keeping them out too long and fishing for what they want, instead of something the kids can catch,” Patterson said, adding what could be a primer on parenting in any situation: “Patience and making it fun, are the two most important things.”

If you ever spend a day on the water with him, you will quickly see Patterson demonstrate his wealth of information and knowledge. He said that part of the reason people hire inshore guides is to learn and take things that the guide shows them and apply it for themselves the next time they go.

“The best advice I give is do research and spend as much time on the water as they can,” he said. “Most people have no idea of the days and days that other guides and I have spent on the water over the years figuring out what will work and when.”

Tiger Woods didn’t get to be a great golfer by winning the Masters Tournament, he won the Masters because he had already done the work to become a great golfer.

It’s no different for fishing, Patterson said. “You have to put your time in and learn about everything from the tides to fish movement, bait movement, and a million other things.”

Patterson is excited about fishing and generally helpful to anyone who seeking advice or tips. He’s given numerous talks at fishing gatherings, passing along his decades of experience. Among his words of advice, “In general, the most important thing to prepare for a good day of fishing is to make sure the boat and equipment are in good working order and to make sure the bait is good.”

He added that having the right bait is the most important thing to catching fish, whether natural baits or artificial lures. Matching those to the fish and the conditions makes a huge difference. Next is knowing your habitat and the conditions.

“You have to know what the tide is doing.”

In marshes and creeks where Patterson spends most of his time, “Some places hold fish at certain stages of the tide and then not at others.” If a place has good tide and bait and you don’t catch anything, “Come back and fish it again at a different tidal stage.” That just come from time on the water. New anglers in saltwater don’t always understand that. “Once you figure out the tides, you will catch fish.”

His favorite ways to fish involve artificial lures. He uses live bait much of the time when fishing with clients.

“Shrimp and mud minnows under popping corks, but if you can get live shrimp, that is the best. Shrimp will catch everything that swims in the marshes,” he advised.  But when it comes to catching fish for himself, he loves to fish a topwater plug for reds and trout. He also has a propensity to use the plastic jig tails that have the natural fish flavoring in them. “Jigs with Gulp will catch all three when fished in the right spots.”

Looking ahead, Patterson plans on staying right where he is.

“I hope to still be guiding and I don’t plan on letting up anytime soon,” he said. “As long as I’m healthy and able to get in and out of the boat, I’ll be chasing redfish, trout, and flounder.”

Allie Best never thought about studying birds while pursuing an undergraduate degree at a liberal arts college nestled on the banks of the Hudson River in New York.

By her senior year at Marist College, she knew she wanted to continue her studies and earn a master’s degree. And, she was really interested in conservation.

When she started making the rounds, reaching out to a number of professors at graduate schools she was eyeing to mark the next chapter in her academic pursuits, Best ended up having a conversation with an assistant professor at a university that she credits her parents for putting on her radar.

“Really it was a stroke of luck,” Best said in a recent telephone interview.

Ray Danner, an assistant professor of biology and marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, had what he thought would be a research project that would work well for Best.

“We talked about how I had never worked with birds before, but I just really enjoy wildlife and I told him I could see myself enjoying this, but I have never really thought about studying birds,” Best said.

That conversation fueled Best to make her way from Poughkeepsie, New York, south to Wilmington, where she immersed herself in a lab and in the field, catching and tagging birds. She recently wrapped up a 14-week field research project monitoring least terns with fellow students and Danner on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

“It was amazing,” she said. “I paid attention to (birds) before just as someone enjoying nature and then really being able to understand more about them just opened my eyes to this whole new world of ornithology and I really, really enjoyed it.”

As Best enters her second year of graduate school later this month she does so with the distinction of being one of two recipients of the North Carolina Space Grant and North Carolina Sea Grant, a fellowship awarded to students whose research explores challenges facing the state’s coast.

Best was awarded the $10,000 grant to study the shrinking habitat of coastal plain swamp sparrows, palm-sized birds that breed in coastal marshes primarily from New Jersey south to Delaware and Maryland.

In 2007, scientists discovered that these tiny birds winter on the southeast Atlantic Coast between North Carolina and South Carolina.

Hyde County, the area of focus for Best’s research, is the center of the coastal plain swamp sparrows’ wintering range.

“This subspecies is going to be getting a lot of attention in the near future, I believe, from conservation organizations,” Danner said. “They’re declining and they’re one of these species that has small population size, small range to start with and very specialized habitat.”

Best will use a combination of technology and data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to forecast the effects of sea level rise and create models of those projected impacts of the birds’ habitat.

Coastal plain swamp sparrows prefer high marsh habitat, which is less adaptive to sea level rise because, unlike low marsh habitat, it does not flood with high tide and become exposed at low tide.

“I think it’s really important to understand how different sea level rise scenarios are going to affect these species in order to inform management decisions,” Best said. “To be clear, all marsh species are at a major threat here.”

In 2003, the United States Geological Survey recommended the coastal plain swamp sparrow be listed as a subspecies of concern by state and local governments because of its small population size and habitat.

Danner describe Bests’ research project as one where she will develop an intimate understanding of the birds’ habitat needs.

“You can imagine us attaching little radio transmitters to birds and following them around,” he said. “Now she’s analyzing those data to figure out where the birds go, what sorts of plants they use, what sorts of habitats they’re in. She uses satellite imagery to describe the habitat where the birds are found.”

Best, former captain of UNCW women’s basketball team, will use imagery to describe how much habitat exists in a region, then apply sea level rise models to that region to determine how much of that habitat will exist in the future.

“Marsh habitat’s being lost from a lot of different causes from developments and sea level rise and I think a lot of us are at the point where we see sea level rise is happening, there’s no disputing that anymore,” Danner said. Now it’s time to start making smart plans about adaptation. That’s really what Allie’s work focuses on. She’s not going to stop sea level rise. We’re just trying to help conservation managers decide how that we can adapt to it.”

Reprinted from the Outer Banks Voice

A little over two years ago, “Trail” Marshall was drinking a 12-pack of beer a day, watching TV and not liking life all that much.

“I’d been watching TV and, everybody hated everybody. Everything was just so bad,” he told a gathering who welcomed him as he completed the 1,175-mile North Carolina Mountains-to-Sea Trail May 6 at Jockey’s Ridge State Park

So he decided to go for a walk … well, hike, beginning with the Appalachian Trail in June 2020. That was a 406-day adventure. With that behind him, his next goal was the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, bringing him to the eastern end of the trail at Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

He spent an extra day exploring the Outer Banks, stopping by Kitty Hawk on Saturday to hike along the Kitty Hawk Woods Birch Lane Trail for about a mile, remarking: “I don’t like swamp trails, but that was really pretty.”

Marshall officially began his Mountains-to-Sea Trail trek at Clingmans Dome, 6,643 feet above sea level in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, just after the New Year. Five months to walk from the mountains to the sea through the heart of North Carolina is a good pace — particularly in the winter when snow changes everything.

“In the snow in the mountains, you’re kind of in a haze where you’re not thinking anything. You’re going like that for hours. Once you finally get to where you’re going, you look back,” he said. “I saw some amazing ice formations in the trees … sunsets over mountains. And it’s just so quiet out there and so peaceful.”

As he hiked, Marshall found a very different reality than the one he had been watching every day — people were kinder and far more generous than what he had been witnessing on TV or the news.

“Along the way, there were so many good people, selfless people, people who had no reason to help. No reason to stop and give me a bottle of water, to stop and say, ‘Hi, you inspire me,’” he told the people gathered to greet him at Jockey’s Ridge.

Marshall began to chronicle his journey, writing eloquently about what he was seeing and experiencing. On his last full day, he wrote that, “I made the most of it with a beautiful 25-miles hike up the beach and around the Pea Island Wildlife Refuge and then over the terrifying, electrifying, stupefying, high-flying excitement of walking over the Marc Basnight Bridge. A three-miles-long masterpiece of art and function that traverses over the Oregon Inlet. Sheer terror for the first mile and then the terror subsided, and awe set in. What a lovely view! For miles … But can I expect anything less from the Outer Banks? The last 70 miles has been nothing short of spectacular!”

Kitty Hawk Town Manager Andy Stewart began following Marshall’s journey, providing updates on his approach to the Outer Banks. Stewart mentioned that the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau had made a small donation to help Marshall along.

There was a small ceremony at Jockey’s Ridge, when Nags Head Public Information Officer Roberta Thuman presented him with a Proclamation Honoring “Trail Marshall.” And at a gathering on Saturday, Kitty Hawk Mayor Craig Garriss gave Marshall a Kitty Hawk baseball cap and a license plate, telling him he’d been following him for some time on Facebook.

It was Marshall’s writing on his Facebook page that attracted attention from many people, more than 11,000 followers. And at Kitty Hawk Park, he became very emotional describing how he came to understand what his journey could mean to others.

“I get messages from people who are sick or dying,” he said. “They just need an encouraging word from me to tell them to keep fighting. A guy sent me a message last night. He’s having major surgery tomorrow. They’re taking out his pancreas and a few other things. I’ve been telling him to keep fighting. I got a message last night, ‘Congratulations on finishing your hike. I’m going to beat this just like you. I’m going to keep fighting.’”

“Everybody’s got a story,” he added. “If you take the time to just talk to them, they’re more than happy to tell you what it is. Whether it’s good or bad … sometimes the folks … just need something to believe in.”

He discussed the why of his hikes and writing about his time on the trail at Jockey’s Ridge and Kitty Hawk Park, and walking along the Birch Lane Trail, the subject came up again.

“People ask me why,” he said. “The real question is, why not? It’s a lifetime of reasons.”

This story is provided courtesy of the Outer Banks Voice, a digital newspaper covering the Outer Banks. Coastal Review is partnering with the Voice to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest about our coast.

Reprinted from the Ocracoke Observer

Even though he says his first attempt at decoy carving yielded “the ugliest bird you ever saw,” the folk-art form grabbed John Simpson back in 1975.

Simpson, who is the featured carver at this year’s Ocracoke Waterfowl Festival from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 23, at the Berkley Barn, is also the president of the Ocracoke Island Decoy Carvers Guild that he helped co-found in 2018.

This will be the fourth festival, which draws carvers and aficionados from all over the eastern seaboard.

In addition to organizing the event, Simpson will have a booth to show his carvings, many of which these days are shore birds.

But duck decoys are the main heritage of island carvers and that’s where Simpson started as a teenager back in 1975.

“I always enjoyed piddling with wood and my interest in carving took off by hanging out as a young person at Corky’s Store on Down Creek Road,” he said. “Wilbur Gaskill would sit on the steps carving little birds and sold them to visitors as novelty items for $3. He had me sit next to him and showed me how to carve.”

That first attempt at carving was “out of cork from an old coastguard life jacket and it was the ugliest bird you ever saw,” he said. “It was a scaup and I chose it because it was the easiest to paint with just white, gray and black colors.”

But he comes from a family of decoy carvers, so he couldn’t give up.

He is related on his mother Patsy Gaskins Simpson’s side to one of Ocracoke’s carving legends, Gary Bragg (1881-1954).

Since that self-described inauspicious beginning, Simpson has carved hundreds of waterfowl and shorebirds.

Simpson also paints two-dimensional works and even though he has honed that skill, he says painting his carvings is his toughest challenge.

“I know it might seem funny, but I have to be in just the right mood to do the painting,” he said.

A highlight of the Waterfowl Festival is to celebrate a featured carver who gets to choose the festival’s featured species, and Simpson chose the northern pintail.

Previous featured carvers, David O’Neal, Dan Robinson and Nathan Spencer, all attribute their love of the art and their carving skills to mentors, family members and neighbors.

Robinson, who was the chief at the Ocracoke Coast Guard station, took him under his wing, so to speak, teaching his carving techniques.

Simpson’s early carvings might not have been as bad as he describes.

At least one of them was an inspiration for last year’s featured carver, Nathan Spencer.

Some years ago, Nathan and his wife Janet cleaned out a shed for his cousin Patsy, Simpson’s mother. He came across one of Simpson’s carvings of a bird in flight that he made when he was very young.

“I brought it home and studied it and I thought, ‘I can do that,’” Spencer said.

It is not only carving, but Simpson has a love of the history of decoys and has built a personal collection of carvings by visiting many waterfowl festivals over the years.

“My first decoy festival goes back to 1975 in Virginia Beach,” he said. He immediately took to the fellowship of carvers, noting how helpful everyone was by sharing carving techniques.

Two of the most famous master carvers in North America are the Ward brothers, Lem (1896-1984) and Steve (1896-1976), who lived in Crisfield, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore.

Simpson fondly recalls meeting Steve at a decoy festival in Salisbury, Maryland, in 1975, who even at that young age, encouraged Simpson to become a carver.

Waterfowl decoys are now considered Americana folk art and some carvings have skyrocketed in price rising to the six and even seven figures.

Simpson’s island roots go way back.

His great grandfather, Joseph Merritt Burrus, was the second to last light keeper for the Ocracoke lighthouse and the last one to serve under the U.S. Lighthouse Service from 1929-1947.

Recently, thanks to some genealogical sleuthing by Philip Howard, Simpson discovered that he is an 11th-generation descendant of William Howard, the alleged quartermaster for Blackbeard.

Simpson graduated from Ocracoke School in 1978, in a class of seven. The following year, he took a job with the U.S. Postal Service in Elizabeth City, which led him to Washington state in the mid-1980s.

Upon leaving the postal service in 2013, he returned to Ocracoke and soon thereafter started a music show on WOVV, Ocracoke’s community radio station, that he continues today, now called “Classic Cuts and Such with John in the Studio,” broadcast from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturdays and rebroadcast Tuesdays from 2 to 4 p.m.

Simpson also has a thriving island fig preserve business with Trudy Austin. So, it’s not unusual at island events which include vendors, to see him with a large table covered with his artwork, carvings, fig trees and fig preserves.

The Ocracoke Island Decoy Carvers Guild’s mission is to pass on the fine art of bird carving to others and it holds monthly meetings to which all are invited to attend.

This story is provided courtesy of the Ocracoke Observer, a newspaper covering Ocracoke island. Coastal Review is partnering with the Ocracoke Observer to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest along our coast. 

Editor’s note: Some outdated racial terms that today are considered insensitive or offensive are used in this story, not out of disrespect but solely because of their appearance on official records.

Growing up, she was urged to not speak of her Indigenous roots.

“In our family, we were told not to talk about it,” recalled Marilyn Berry Morrison, chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe of the Algonquian Indians of North Carolina.

This fear, which “has been embedded” from generation to generation, is often still found among local Roanoke-Hatteras descendants today.

“We have active tribal members who don’t want to put in their paperwork to make them an official tribal member,” Morrison said.

Centuries of fear of forcible removals, government-sanctioned land-stealing and even government-sanctioned murder took its toll.

“Many years ago, if you claimed to be Indian or Native American, you were killed, OK? So that fear has trickled on down through generations,” Morrison explained. “Even having President Theodore Roosevelt say that ‘a good Indian is a dead Indian’… it really had a tremendous impact on being called Native American. And that is who we are.”

She has become an outspoken advocate of the tribe and believes others will follow suit.

“I believe in time we’ll get rid of that (fear) once they accept who they are and know who they are, and speak about who they are,” she said. “That will give them the confidence that I feel is what impacts the feeling of fear.”

Morrison has led the effort for official state tribal recognition for the past 12 years — an involved, frustrating process that inherently doesn’t make sense to her.

“We have a rich heritage and have been able to prove and establish who we are, and we just don’t know understand why it is taking so long,” said the Elizabeth City resident, whose parents and both their families were from Manteo.

“Our families never left,” she said of many members and descendants of the Roanoke-Hatteras tribe.

They were the subject of anthropologist Frank G. Speck’s field studies in 1916, when he noted the Indigenous ancestry of the local Berry, Daniels, Pugh and Wescott families, according to the nonprofit Algonquian Indians of North Carolina Inc.’s website. Speck wrote in 1924 that more than 100 Indigenous descendants lived on the islands.

Between the 1890s and 1900s, Morrison’s ancestor, Joseph Hall Berry, along with Lemuel Collins and Thomas Scarborough, bought property in Roanoke Island’s Butt Swamp area — land that “would become the center of the distinct Indian community on Roanoke Island,” according to ncalgonquians.com.

Archaeological research shows that Native Americans have lived in northeastern North Carolina “for at least 10,000 years and probably longer,” according to “Archeological Studies in the Northern Coastal Zone of North Carolina”by David Sutton Phelps.

That’s 41 times the length of the United States’ existence as a country.

And long before conservation efforts were ever dreamed of — or needed —stewardship was simply an innate part of everyday life, Morrison said.

“The forests, the swamps, the rivers, the landscapes were all nurtured by our people,” she said.

“We lived with nature, and everything that we had came from nature — our food, our clothes, our shelter — and we were appreciative of that,” she continued. “Our creation story also centers around the ocean, the sand and the coast.

“Hatteras was our fishing ground, and Roanoke was hunting grounds,” she said. “You have lot of mixture or intermarrying between the tribes, and that’s one reason why we carry two names: Roanoke-Hatteras.”

Algonquian was the language all local tribes spoke; each was part of the Algonquian Nation.

“The North American continent was divided up in nations,” she said. “There was an early treaty, so I’m told, that required each nation to protect a certain portion of the continent. The Algonquian Nation is the east gatekeeper, so it was our responsibility to protect the east land that runs from Canada through the southern tip of Florida.”

She added: “So I guess we didn’t do a good job by letting the Europeans get in and mess up our land.”

The first English venture into North America was at Croatoan, present-day Hatteras.

“The original name was Croatoan, which was changed to Croatan; and then the English for some reason changed it to Hatteras in the early 1700s,” Morrison said.

Historically, Morrison said the tribe gardened, hunted and fished, using bones and shells for utensils and regalia. Tanned animal skin and fur became clothing.

“We also only took from the land what we needed, and there was no waste; so conservation is key,” Morrison said. “Mother Earth was sacred to us, so we didn’t have to worry about trashing. We were a very clean people.”

The Roanoke-Hatteras also worked with natural environmental transitions.

“Everything was free-flowing,” Morrison said. “Water flowed in one direction, so you know not to block that off. It wasn’t until we had all this development that we disturbed Mother Nature.”

Morrison continued: “We are keepers of the land. It hurts to see that they built a dog park on sacred land up at the airport (in Manteo), and it further hurts seeing developers coming in and ruining Nature’s land. That strips the animals of their homes and also kills our forests and wetlands. The greed of man is a downfall.”

She suggests taking small steps to help address climate change.

“If we learn to reduce and reuse and recycle, and buy less stuff — and only buy what you need — that would be a good thing we can contribute to help address this global issue,” Morrison said.

Sharing with Others: A Way of Life

Centuries before the phrase, “Southern hospitality” was coined, it was an intrinsic cultural practice of the Indigenous people here.

In 1584, foreigners arrived at the coast of present-day North Carolina for the first time.

Chief Wingina ruled several tribes then, including the Roanoke-Hatteras, with more than 30 sub-chieftains under him. His wife stood on the shore and invited in these Europeans, according to tribal oral history.

“She welcomed them in the village; and, because they didn’t know what she was saying, she had braves come out,” Morrison said.

The braves swam out and carried these foreigners in on their backs, then washed their clothes and fed them, she explained. Some stayed, but when their rationings were depleted, they left. Following a disagreement about a silver cup, the foreigners beheaded a tribal chief – but not Wingina, who was also beheaded, but later.

“After we had taught them how to survive on our land and opened our homes to them, they in turn beheaded our chief,” Morrison said.

David Stick wrote in “Dare County: A Brief History” that soldier Ralph Lane led 107 men in the second English expedition to the area, staying on Roanoke Island through the winter of 1585-86.

Lane depended on the Native Americans to provide food for him and his men as they searched for gold in the sounds and rivers to the west.

“Despite their friendliness Lane considered the Indians savages and barbarians and treated them in a high-handed manner, culminating in a surprise attack on an Indian village in which a Roanoke chief and several other Indians were killed,” Stick wrote. “From then on the Roanoke Indians refused to give further help to the Englishmen and by spring Lane’s forces were suffering from an acute shortage of food.”

Lane’s attack on the locals who were feeding him didn’t make sense to the tribe then, or now.

“It’s hard to understand what their plight was,” Morrison said. “Many books tell us we were ‘savages.’ We were not the savages. We didn’t scalp. That was not our custom; that was a custom that was brought here.”

Wanchese viewed the Europeans “as being not very good for us, and he also helped Wingina see it that way,” Morrison said. “I know things separated, especially when Manteo was made ‘Lord of Roanoke;’ that didn’t really sit well with us, followed with Wingina being beheaded.”

She added, “Manteo is a touchy subject with me because I look at him as being a traitor. He sold us out.”

The custom of hospitality nonetheless lived on, according to Morrison.

Algonquian practice at hunting quarters was for all to partake of any game killed, so “all fare alike,” F. Roy Johnson wrote in his 1972 book, “The Algonquians: Indians of That Part of the New World First Visited by the English.”

Morrison’s grandfather, commercial fisherman Capt. Josephus “Joe” Berry, staunchly practiced that ethic. His longtime mate William K. “Billy” Brown’s 2006 book includes “the things he learned from my grandfather,” Morrison said. “A number of the things that he learned were Native American customs in regards to trapping, fishing, hunting (and) just how to conserve.”

“As a fisherman, Joe Berry was one of the very best,” Brown wrote in “Mullet Roar and Other Stories by an Outer Banker.”

“Joe had one habit that may have been a weakness or strength, depending on how you looked at things,” Brown wrote.“Whenever Joe found fish, he always called other boats that were in the area and invited them over to share in the catch.”

He continued: “I used to say, ‘Captain Joe, maybe we should catch a few before we call anybody.’ He’d always say, ‘I was not raised that way, Bill. I was taught to share my good luck with others.’ Every captain at Oregon Inlet knew this about Joe and respected his rare generosity.”

‘They Killed Us on Paper’

The 1940 Census lists Capt. Joe Berry and his family members each as “Negro” — including son Wheeler C. Berry, Morrison’s uncle, who would later become a Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe elder.

But racial categories eliminated Indigenous people as effectively as the many other government-sanctioned means, including the Trail of Tears, employed for this purpose.

In Morrison’s father Joseph Berry’s family, “prior to the 1900s, every member in his mother’s and father’s household was listed as white; and then they changed it to Black,” Morrison’s older sisters told her.

“Believe it or not, on my mom’s wedding certificate it says she was white,” Morrison said. “It says in her early years, she was mulatto, and then she became Black. So, when we ask genealogists to work with us, they are ready to tell us, ‘Oh, well, you aren’t Indian.’ How can they tell me who my ancestors are when I know who I am? That’s another way they killed us on paper. The records are not correct.”

Only her cousin Eagle Collins, who is in his 60s and was born in Hawaii, has a birth certificate that includes “Native American” on it, Morrison said.

Her family spans all skin tones — “from the whitest of whites to the blackest of Black,” she said. “We have blue eyes, green eyes, gray eyes, but we’re all the same blood.”

A 1991 article by Susan Greenbaum, “What’s in a Label? Identity Problems of Southern Indian Tribes” published in The Journal of Ethnic Studies, confirms this pervasive issue for Indigenous Southerners.

“In Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, and other southern states, the terms ‘mulatto,’ ‘colored,’ and even ‘black’ were frequently used to designate either full-blooded Indians, or mixtures of White and Indian. After the removals, ‘Indian’ ceased to be an operative census category in most counties in the south,” Greenbaum wrote.

“Indians who remained were categorized somewhat capriciously among the various remaining options,” she continued. “Designations were highly unstable; the same person could shift back and forth between Black, White, and mulatto.”

Greenbaum found in 1896-1902 poll tax records for the Mowa Choctaws in Alabama that 62% of tribal members “had been enumerated as both white and colored at different intervals during that brief period.”

During the country’s era of enslavement, Native Americans were often listed as “free persons of color,” and they sometimes “bought” enslaved Africans in order to rescue them. Europeans attempted to enslave Native Americans, but because they knew the land better than the foreigners, they were able to escape. The Africans, brought from another continent, did not have that advantage, Morrison explained.

One distant relative, Abijah, bought her husband Solomon; “and at her death, she willed her husband to her son, to make sure that he would never be enslaved again,” she said.

Because there were laws against Native Americans marrying white or Black people, “that was one way they got around it,” she explained. “And she was not the only one.”

According to oral history tradition, Morrison’s great-great-grandfather, Rev. Zion Hall Berry, planted more than seven churches in northeastern North Carolina — always by waterways — and facilitated escapes for formerly enslaved persons. These churches ranged from Haven Creek Baptist Church in Manteo to Antioch Baptist Church in South Mills to Corner Stone Missionary Baptist Church in Elizabeth City.

Morrison believes in correcting the untruths regarding Indigenous history: “We have a story that has gone untold far too long.”

“Those who are standing in fear need to stand boldly and speak about our culture, our heritage and tradition,” she continued. “We need to start speaking out boldly so we can reconstruct all these lies and start telling the truth about what actually happened. That’s the only way our children are going to be enlightened and learn to grow and be able to pass these truthful stories on to their children in the future.”

The Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe hosts an annual powwow in August that is open to the public, which was cancelled the past two years due to COVID-19. The tribe is planning one for 2022. Other future hopes include creating a museum for public display of tribal artifacts and building a senior center for older relatives.

Morrison said the tribe welcomes monetary or land donations toward these goals. For more information about the tribe, visit www.ncalgonquians.com.

Dr. Ben Speller, a retired professor and dean of the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University, left his family’s farm in Bertie County in the 1950s, but his journey eventually led back to his childhood home where he stays active in the community.

That journey includes a history degree from what is now North Carolina Central University but was known as North Carolina College when he attended. He earned a master’s in library science and a doctorate in management information systems, both from the University of Indiana. And he has worked for the state and the federal governments. His work has been credited as inspiring the creation of the state’s African American Heritage Commission.

Having retired in 2003, Speller serves on the board of directors for the Roanoke Island Historical Association, the nonprofit group that produces “The Lost Colony” outdoor drama. He is secretary of the Edenton Historical Commission and board vice president with Bertie County Hope Plantation.

“The reason why I’m in a lot of different places is because I believe in collaboration. I try to see the opportunities in different places to develop what the communities need,” Speller recently told Coastal Review.

His range of interests includes everything from the intricacies of government budgeting processes to his multi-racial heritage and the state of race relations today. Cheerful, outgoing and friendly, his observations are often delivered with a smile and a bit of laughter but also with the seriousness of a history scholar and archivist when discussing present-day problems that are deeply rooted in the nation’s past.

Race relations throughout history and race itself aren’t always as clear as black and white, Speller has learned.

“I’m from a mixed-race family. I have family members that — generally I’m talking about my white ones — that don’t want anybody to know that they have any Black relatives,” Speller said.

Speller was born in Bertie County in 1940.

“I grew up on my grandfather’s farm,” Speller said. “His father was an only child, which is quite unusual for an African American family. I don’t know how he got his economic situation, but I would say he was middle class. I mean, he had more economic resources than most African Americans of that time.”

Those resources factored in during his grade-school education that was spent entirely in segregated schools. Although school funding and supplies were often lacking, the level of instruction and quality of teachers were on a par with the white schools, he said.

There was the chemistry teacher with a degree in chemistry who was also a coach at the school, but as his coaching duties took over, the home economics teacher filled in as chemistry teacher.

“She was really better than he was. She later went to medical school,” Speller said.

Speller’s grandfather, however, felt more was needed.

“My grandfather … he had a classical curriculum and he thought that we (Speller and his brother and sister) should have it too,” he recalled. “When we got to a certain age, they didn’t have German, and he thought we should have German and I went to Philadelphia during the summer and took German at one of the year-round schools there.”

After high school, Speller’s education continued at what is now North Carolina Central University, a historically Black university in Durham. At that time, N.C. Central was called North Carolina College at Durham.

Speller was a history major and in 1961, after only three years, was close to completing his degree requirements. He needed two more courses but those were offered only at nearby Duke University, which wouldn’t admit its first Black undergraduates for another two years.  

On Speller’s behalf, North Carolina College President Alfonso Elder spoke with Duke University’s president.

“They ended up wanting me to take some courses in the history department, but the history department did not want to accept a Black (person) at that time,” Speller said. “So, I ended up finding two courses in colonization of Africa in the department of history in the (university’s) school of religion.”

Speller said those two courses were essential to his understanding of the role of race, religion and politics in the world.

“That opportunity gave me a different perspective on looking at the colonization of this country, and also the current and past caste system that we have,” Speller said. “It made me realize that most of what was going on was really for economic reasons. You could really see what was going on. Even though the missionaries were there to proselytize, it appears that they were they are also for economic reasons.”

This kind of perspective has become especially controversial in terms of America’s history. The term critical race theory has evoked fiery passion during the past year, especially among those who most adamantly oppose the concept without a clear grasp of its meaning. 

The American Bar Association defines critical race theory as a practice that emerged among legal scholars that examines how race and institutionalized racism created and perpetuates a system that relegates people of color to the lowest tiers of society.

For Speller, critical race theory is not an academic construct — it’s just reality. 

“When somebody talks about critical race theory, I say, ‘We didn’t have to deal with critical race theory, we knew exactly what it was.’ It was a fact, it wasn’t a theory,” he said.

Speller has extensively researched his family’s history and that of other families and concluded that economic and social divisions are clear even where racial lines may be blurred.

Speller’s family research goes back to the 1640s and has turned up family connections that in some cases were never acknowledged. Links include a former North Carolina governor and a number of prominent white families.

“I have a whole slew of family members that have mixed race, but they were never slaves. I mean, a whole bunch of white mothers,” he said. “The ones I know claim they are white or believe they are, but there may be some mixed blood in there.”

His paternal grandmother was named Outlaw, and her father was of mixed heritage, “and his father was one of the Outlaw sons of one of the large plantation owners of Bertie County,” Speller said.

The Outlaw surname was what sparked Speller’s family research. He had been contacted by a woman from Texas who was an Outlaw descendant, and she was looking for a family church that had been in either Chowan or Bertie County. She told him that as she was researching her family tree, she discovered Speller’s family seemed to be connected.

“She said, ‘Whatever I find here, I’ll send to you. We are almost identical, in the same situation.’ And then I took it from there and went back to the assessor’s records and all of the records back to the 1640s and got it together.”

Along the way he relied on public records and genetic testing as research tools, but there was at least one other trusted source of information.

“The females know (family histories) better than the males. Every time we do editing of our history books on Bertie (County), … they tell everything. I found out that the white females in the area know more about the history of these situations than the men think they do,” he said.

KITTY HAWK — Condensation from the air conditioning unit is what sparked Tom and Vickie Byers to begin capturing water runoff.

“The condensation lines from your AC lines that are always dripping outside everybody’s houses, they’ll fill up a 75-gallon rain barrel in about two days,” Tom told Coastal Review last week.

“If you ask how we started, that was the first way that we started, collecting the water from our AC,” Vickie added.

The idea behind it, though, began much earlier.

“It’s been with me all of my life, conservation, water quality, and I guess just being here (in Kitty Hawk), being surrounded by water for 27 years,” Vickie said.

For the couple who have lived on the Outer Banks for more than 30 years, seeing the changes that have occurred during that time spurred them to action.

“Over the course of time, just watching another new house, another new retail operation, another new … and the available land here in its natural state continues to decrease. Just in our short time, watching the degradation of water quality that occurs,” Tom said of their concern for the environment. The Byerses’ interest in minimizing their home’s impact drove the couple to create a rainwater system for the whole house and property, but there was another motivating factor as well.

“When we purchased the house, the yard was fertilized and taken care of meticulously. Out of ignorance, I guess, I put in a system with 75 sprinkler heads. When we got our first quarterly bill, I almost fell over,” Tom recalled.

So, the couple decided they had to do something different. At first, they turned to well water, but that didn’t work.

“It just burned very plant that it touched because we were using a spray system,” Vickie said.

It was about 10 years ago that the couple began the process of capturing water. Over time, their idea has evolved, and rainwater is now used for everything from flushing toilets in the Byerses’ home to irrigating the lawn and plants.

And it began with capturing the condensate from the air conditioner, which the couple soon realized wasn’t going to be the long-term solution.

“We very quickly realized, when Vickie’s running around with her little watering can for an hour, filling it out of a barrel every day wasn’t going to work for us,” Tom said.

What the Byerses found as they thought about putting in a larger cistern and a watering system, was that there didn’t seem to be a lot of knowledge about what they wanted to do.

“Initially, we went to some talks by different organizations and the North Carolina Coastal Federation and even the town (of Manteo). They had a pickle barrel with a spigot on the bottom and we tried utilizing that,” Tom said. “Maybe for an average house with a couple tomato plants and a couple flowers, it works.”

But for what they wanted to do, there seemed to be a lack of local expertise.

“We were trying to pick their brains and they were trying to challenge us saying, ‘Well if you figure it out, call us,’” Tom recalled. “It was a very novel concept.”

What took shape was an integrated system using rainwater runoff from the roof and any place that it could be collected. The water would be stored in cisterns and the cisterns would be connected to the sprinkler system with the 75 heads.

But the Byerses didn’t stop there. They also connected the cisterns to the house to be used for outdoor showers and flushing toilets.

“What we’ve done is completely transition over to all of our sprinkler heads — everything here is all cistern water. Instead of one hose bib we have two. We have a city water hose bib,” Tom said.

“Every spigot that you see around that is red, and I think they’re 13 outside, red equals cistern water,” Vickie said.

It took some innovative thinking to get to where they are now. One of the biggest challenges was finding cisterns large enough to fit their needs. Outer Banks Distilling, a small Manteo distillery making rum, was the answer. Their sugar water was delivered in 275-gallon containers. After the liquid was drained, the company had no use for the containers and was glad to work with the Byerses.

There are four cisterns under the house now.

Filters were needed for the rainwater. Coming off the roof, the water collected anything that was there: leaves, dirt, twigs.

When asked, the couple doesn’t have a clear cost estimate for the system, mostly because there were some missteps along the way.

Although some of the benefits of their rainwater system are not apparent, the Byerses’ flower garden and lawn are lush, visible examples. The flower garden is almost all native plants, something that makes Vickie, who is a North Carolina Cooperative Extension-certified master gardener, particularly proud.

Pointing to a North Carolina Sea Grant coastal landscaping brochure, she said, “I think I have 98% of what’s in here.”

The plants flower at different times of the year, resulting in an burst of colors that changes with the seasons. And because they are native to the area, the garden requires less care and upkeep, and blooms reappear year after year.

It’s part of what the Byerses see as an example of what almost anyone can do to protect the environment, simple steps that make a difference.

“There’s so many things that can be done,” Vickie said. “Like the native plantings, having trees around, like a pervious sidewalk — there’s just so much the layperson can do. Rain barrels, tying your AC lines into rain barrels, that’s a big one.”

Learn more

The Byerses said they welcome contact from others who wish to know more about the technical aspects of their system. Email Vickie at victoriabyers123@gmail.com, and Tom can be reached at soundddog12@gmail.com.

BOGUE BANKS — Now that he has seen and photographed the crystal skipper, Dr. Jeffrey Glassberg, of Morristown, New Jersey, a one-time molecular biologist and current president of the North American Butterfly Association, can subtract one more butterfly from his quest to see every resident butterfly of the United States.

The crystal skipper is not a well-known butterfly. It only lives in a 30-mile stretch of barrier islands from Fort Macon State Park to Hammocks Beach State Park, an area tourism marketers long ago dubbed the Crystal Coast.

Although it was not identified until 1978 or given its own species name, Atrytonopsis quinteri, until 2015, the crystal skipper, named for the marketing term, is fairly common where and when it appears.

“It’s very local. It’s only found right around Fort Macon and Bogue Island. Just a very small area,” Glassberg said during his visit here last week. “When I was there, in an hour, I saw 30 of them. On one thistle I saw six of them.”

The crystal skipper’s brief life cycle, though, makes its appearance somewhat rare. The nonmigratory butterfly appears annually in April and May, mates and a new brood appears in July and August. The July and August broods over winter, reappearing in April and May.

The species does not live anywhere else, and evidently cannot.

The seaside little bluestem is the only host plant for the crystal skipper. The butterfly lays its eggs on the plant’s stems and when the eggs hatch, the plant provides food for the larvae in its first stage of life. The plant only lives in the sand dunes of coastal North Carolina from the Outer Banks to the Bogue Banks with the heaviest concentration along the Bogue Banks.

There are concerns about the long-term outlook for the species. It thrives, evidently, at Fort Macon and Hammocks Beach state parks, where habitat is protected. However, along areas of the Crystal Coast, where development has divided natural habitats, the butterfly is not seen as often, and there are efforts to plant seaside little bluestem to increase habitat.

The family of skippers is widely distributed with some 3,500 distinct species distributed worldwide, mostly in Central and South America. They are usually a smaller butterfly, so the crystal skipper stands out because of its larger size.

“Most of them are smaller than the crystal skipper,” Glassberg said.

It is also one of the more striking butterflies in the skipper family, said Glassberg.

“They just are beautiful. A lot of people see the picture and they think that looks like a moth. But I think it’s pretty snappy looking. There’s lots of skippers that are plainer than this one, which is very striking,” he said.

With the sighting of the crystal skipper, Glassberg crosses another butterfly off his list of seeing every butterfly that is a regular part of the United States.

“There’s something like roughly 600 species of butterflies in North America that are resident,” he said. “I’m trying to see all of the resident butterflies. I’m making an actual concerted effort to see them.”

The quest began after his wife died, he explained.

“My wife of 45 years passed away 10 and a half years ago, so I have to do something for fun,” he said, although it has only been in the last four years that he has made the intensive effort to see all the butterflies.

“I’ve had to be everywhere,” he goes on to say. “I’ve gone to Alaska a bunch of times. I had to go to the top of the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. I’ve been to Hawaii. I’m going back this November. It’s a difficult quest but as they say someone has to do it.”

The numbers on the list have dwindled to a very manageable figure.

“I’m at this point I’m missing about 15 or so,” he said.

He’ll be back in North Carolina in early May, this time in the mountains looking for the Appalachian tiger swallowtail. The trip will also give him a chance to visit with his son who lives in Charlotte. Earlier in the year, before he was on the Bogue Banks, he was in California where he had a chance to visit with friends and look for another butterfly.

He first became intrigued with butterflies when he was 5. It has been a lifelong fascination that persisted through his career as a molecular biologist and marriage. It is something he cannot explain, but it is real, nonetheless.

“They’re beautiful, their lives, they’re ephemeral,” he said. “They, of course, undergo this remarkable transformation, metamorphosis. There’s something about being in a beautiful field with flowers filled with butterflies. It just makes me feel good and relaxed. I was married 45 years. I passionately love my wife. She was a brilliant scientist, and she was beautiful and she was warm, and she was all those things. But none of those things are why I loved her. I loved her for some inexplicable reason as I think most people love people. And that’s the way it is for me and butterflies.”

Read more about the crystal skipper: Crystal Skipper Earns Species Status

This is shaping up to be a big year for Walker Golder.

As he settles into his new job as the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust’s executive director — in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, no less — Golder is preparing to start a new chapter in his personal life: seeing his son off to college.

“It’s going to be tough,” Golder said in a recent telephone interview. “Some families may look forward to it. That’s not my position.”

Of the universities to which his son and only child, Will, has been accepted, the halls of the Georgia Institute of Technology, more commonly known as Georgia Tech, in Atlanta appear to be calling a little louder to the aspiring aeronautical engineer.

Not exactly following his father’s career path, but that seems to be just fine with the man who has spent more than 30 years working to conserve and preserve the habitats of coastal birds.

After all, Golder’s parents encouraged him to pursue his interests as he grew from a curious boy who spent countless days exploring the waters, marshes and shores near their Wrightsville Beach home through to his college years studying wildlife biology.

“My family was fully supportive,” he said.

A little more than three decades with the National Audubon Society, where he held roles including deputy state director of Audubon’s North Carolina state office and program director of the Atlantic Flyway Coast Strategy, has made Golder somewhat of a household name in these parts.

He’s shared numerous times how growing up in Wrightsville Beach, a place that was like his own private paradise in the days before seemingly the rest of the world caught on to its charm, played a pivotal role in the man he is today.

So, when asked “What can you tell me that I can share with our readers that most people don’t know about you?” his answer: “I kind of put it out there a lot.”

“What do you not know? It’s no secret I grew up in Wrightsville Beach. It was an incredible place to grow up as a kid. It was very different then than it is now and as a young kid getting to explore the water, and explore the marsh and explore the beach, especially areas of the beach that were still natural, there was never a dull moment. There was never a lack of recreation and my recreation and my interests really revolved around the water.”

He’s been an angler since he could hold a fishing pole. His father taught him how to operate a boat, giving him the opportunity at a young age the ability to access and explore the marsh and tidal creeks winding along the coast.

In the summers, Golder’s parents would buy him a season pass to fish off Johnnie Mercer’s Pier. He could see his house as he waited for a bite from the marine life teeming under surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

By the time he was a preteen, he was an avid surfer. Outside of school, he spent his teenage years teaching sailing and swimming through Wrightsville Beach’s parks and recreation department.

“But still I was fishing, surfing, exploring at every opportunity,” he said.

Somewhere along the way, Golder picked up his father’s camera and another passion blossomed for the young boy.

While in high school, he was exposed to natural areas throughout the state, carrying a camera to document his adventures, be it canoeing down the Black River or hiking the Appalachian Trail.

“I always had a camera with me and I always will,” he said.

His photographs have appeared in dozens of publications, including several books and magazine covers.

He and his three younger siblings – two sisters and a brother – did not necessarily have similar interests, but they were a close family.

“Still are to this day,” Golder said.

When he started his freshman year at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, he did not expect to stay past a couple of years, perhaps transfer to a university with a larger wildlife biology program.

Uncertain of what job opportunities may await him after graduation, he took a diversity of courses, including education classes in the event he might end up teaching at a parks and recreation department.

But an invitation from a professor during Golder’s sophomore year would alter any plans to transfer.

Now-retired professor James Parnell, a staple within the university’s biology department, asked Golder if he’d like to spend the summer traveling the North Carolina coast to survey nesting water birds.

Golder was so intrigued he decided to stop teaching sailing and take Parnell up on the offer.

Being part of that research team, seeing the entire North Carolina coast, visiting every water bird colony and counting every nest of every species, “just was tremendous,” Golder said.

“To me, every single day of that summer was an ‘Oh wow!’ moment,” he said. “Whether we were counting pelican nests and seeing what that looked like — even though I grew up at the beach I’d never seen anything like that — or a wading bird colony, or a colony of least terns that may have had three or four thousand nesting pair on a small island, every single day was just an ‘Oh wow!’”

“To me, every single day of that summer was an ‘Oh wow!’ moment.”

You could say the rest is history.

While Golder was in graduate school at UNCW, Audubon was beginning to develop a plan to broaden its sanctuary program in the state.

Golder’s graduate research on white ibises was funded through a grant Parnell received from Audubon.

Golder was finishing his master’s in 1989 when Audubon advertised the position for its first coastal coordinator.

“Being the first full-time employee for Audubon in North Carolina, at least in the modern era, there was an awful lot to do,” he said. “I was given a list of (privately owned) islands and told to go get them. Interacting with landowners and acquiring those islands and bringing them into the sanctuary system was what I spent my time doing over the first decade.”

Eventually his worked broadened beyond North Carolina to the entire Atlantic Coast.

He wasn’t looking for a new job when he heard someone during a conference call mentioned Coastal Land Trust’s founding executive director Camilla Herlevich, someone he considers a longtime friend and mentor.

When he saw the announcement for the position a short time later, he said he thought, “Wow, that could be really great.”

“I’ve always had a passion for land conservation,” Golder said. “My first job at Audubon was land conservation. It’s incredibly rewarding. You get to see the tangible results of your work. I think it gives me an opportunity to apply what I’ve learned by working with colleagues nationally and internationally. I just want to reiterate what a special place I think the North Carolina coast is and I feel like I have just been incredibly lucky to be a part of it and to still be a part of it. I hope the work that I’ve done in the past and the land trust will do in the future will provide opportunities to young kids who are exploring the state for themselves and for their families so that they can see what a special place we live in.”

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

A retired state trooper named Bobbie “Bob” Edwards sent me a message a few weeks ago. He told me that he had read my recent story about the bombing of an African American church in eastern North Carolina in 1966. He said my article had brought back memories. He had seen the church explode, he told me. He had been the only eyewitness.

Mr. Edwards had been stationed in Craven County, North Carolina, between 1965 and 1971. On the night of the church bombing, he was in his third year of what would be a 32-year career in the State Highway Patrol. Now 81 years old, he has retired to Yadkin County, North Carolina.

Mr. Edwards and I exchanged a few messages and then we arranged to talk on the phone a couple days later. When we did talk, the first thing that struck me about him was the way his voice sounded like the people I grew up with. I could tell that he was from eastern North Carolina.

The second thing that struck me about him was something else about his voice. I know you can’t always judge a person by their voice, but what I heard was a special kind of decency and kindness.

* * *

I only learned the real story of the church bombing a few months ago, when an African American gentleman named Chris Johnson got in touch with me. Mr. Johnson is a retired army first sergeant who lives in Texas now. His family belonged to the Cool Springs Free Will Baptist Church at the time of the bombing. His memories revealed the story of the church bombing for the first time and formed the foundation for my article, “The Bombing of the Cool Springs Free Will Baptist Church.”

Unknown persons — almost assuredly Ku Klux Klansmen — bombed the Cool Springs Free Will Baptist Church in Ernul, North Carolina, on April 9, 1966. Trooper Edwards was only 24 years old at the time. He is white, like all state troopers were at that time. He had grown up on a tobacco farm in a little crossroads called Contentnea, just outside the town of Kinston, 30 miles to the west of Ernul. He had been raised, he said, “in a Christian home.”

He had been on patrol that spring night. It was about 11:30 in the evening, and he was driving slowly down the Old Brick Road, which local people also call the “Nine Foot Road.”

The road dates to the 1700s and is part of what many years ago was called the King’s Highway or the Post Road. The road ran all the way from Boston to Charleston. There are not many places where you can still drive on the old bricks, but Ernul is one of them.

An old legend says an enslaved man with no legs built the section of the road that passes through Ernul. They say that the man worked on a low platform that had wheels, and he built the road with bricks that were used as ballast stones on ships that came up the Neuse River.

The Old Brick Road in Ernul is still only 9 feet wide and when two cars meet, one has to pull onto the shoulder.

Edwards told me that night was very dark. Ernul was just a tiny little place. It didn’t have any street lights and the only businesses were a country store and a roadside inn out on U.S. 17, a two-lane road. The Cool Springs FWB Church was set back in the woods anyway, he told me, so he was used to it being dark and quiet that time of night.

He told me that the explosion shook his patrol car like an earthquake. At first, he thought that somebody was shooting at him. He slammed on his brakes, rolled onto the ground next to his patrol car with his revolver drawn and prepared to defend himself.

That was when he saw what had happened. “The whole front of the church was blown out,” he remembered. There were splintered boards and broken pews and Bibles and hymnals scattered everywhere. He knew instantly that the Ku Klux Klan had done it.

He looked closer and found no fire and nobody had been in the church at that hour. He returned to his patrol car and radioed headquarters. Sheriff deputies and FBI agents soon showed up, and they told him that they would handle the crime scene and he could go back on patrol.

* * *

Edwards remembered that the church bombing occurred in the early days of school desegregation in that part of Craven County. Racial tensions were high, and there had been a good deal of Ku Klux Klan violence.

A few days after the church bombing, the principal at the Farm Life School in Vanceboro, a small town 10 miles north of Ernul, reported that the school had received a bomb threat. Students and teachers were evacuated and sent home. No bomb was found.

Two days later, unidentified white men threw stones at Black children trying to get on a school bus. Another morning a carload of white men tried to force a school bus to the side of the road. They targeted the bus because some of the schoolchildren were Black. White children and Black children had never gone to the same schools in that part of Craven County, so they had never previously ridden the school bus together.

The bus driver managed to get away from the white men. Instead of continuing his route, he returned to the school without picking up the children on the rest of his route. The principal called the State Highway Patrol and Edwards was one of the troopers that answered the call.

When the bus driver returned to his route, Edwards followed the bus in his patrol car. On subsequent days, he rode on a school bus carrying a riot shotgun. For the next two weeks, he and other state troopers rode on every local school bus. Patrol cars followed the buses as well.

* * *

Edwards recalled that the Ku Klux Klan held a rally and a parade in Vanceboro two weeks later. He remembers Klansmen being on one side of the town’s main street and outraged Black citizens standing on the other side of the street.

At the end of the rally, gunfire broke out. Edwards was on duty there, but he could not tell whether the Klan or the Black citizens fired first. He did know that for a time there was a good deal of shooting. The state troopers and the local police eventually restored the peace. They didn’t arrest anyone, but they did confiscate rifles and other weapons.

Edwards told me that other state troopers confided to him that some of the local sheriffs and their deputies sympathized with the Klan. He had also heard that at least some of them were KKK members. He said that he did not know for sure if that was true though.

I asked Edwards about his own racial views in the 1960s and now. I also asked him about his outlook on the civil rights movement and the Ku Klux Klan when he was stationed in Craven County.

He told me that he often felt caught in the middle during those years. The Klan detested state troopers, he said, and most Black people looked at the troopers with deep suspicion and often as enemies of the African American community. (The State Highway Patrol, by the way, only began accepting Black recruits in 1969.)

“I just tried to do my job and be fair to everybody,” Edwards told me. He said that he had been raised a Christian. “You’re supposed to love your fellow man and I tried to do that,” he told me.

I told him that I had heard those words from many other white Christians, including men that had been Klansmen in the 1960s. I told him that I was inclined to be skeptical. But I have to admit: there was something about the way that Edwards said those words that made me believe him.

* * *

Edwards remembered the man that was head of the Ku Klux Klan in that section of Craven County in the 1960s. His name was Raymond Mills, and he and two other white men had been charged with setting off a series of bombs in New Bern in 1965. New Bern is 15 miles south of Ernul and is the seat of Craven County.

The bombs targeted a civil right meeting at an African American church and a mortuary owned by a local NAACP activist. Mills and the other two men originally faced federal and state charges. However, federal authorities withdrew their charges, and the men pled guilty to reduced state charges and were given only probationary sentences.

“The Klan, seemed like every time they got charged with something, they’d get out of it,” Edwards recalled.

Many local people were convinced that Mills was also behind the bombing of the Cool Springs FWB Church. Nobody was ever charged with the crime, however.

Edwards told me that he had met Mills two or three times. While on patrol, he had stopped him for traffic violations. He said that Mills was much like the other Klan leaders whose speeches he had heard when he was on duty at the public rallies that the KKK held in local farm fields.

“A cantankerous sort,” he said. “Disliked the government.” During the traffic stops, Mills did not want to show him his driver license and did not think that a member of the State Highway Patrol had a right to require him to show it. “He was that kind of fellow,” Edwards told me.

Later that year, a Klansman shot a state trooper not far from Ernul, on the road between New Bern and Bayboro. That happened during a traffic stop.

* * *

Edwards told me that he did not know the minister at the Cool Springs FWB Church, but he did get to know the Black minister at one of its sister churches, St. Joseph’s Free Will Baptist Church. They first met when he stopped the minister because he had a light out on a logging truck that he operated when he wasn’t in the pulpit or otherwise serving his parishioners.

Located 13 or 14 miles north of Ernul, on the other side of Vanceboro, “St. Joe’s” was the site of at least one large civil rights meeting around the time of the church bombing in Ernul. Unknown persons, believed to be Klansmen, had bombed St. Joe’s five months before the bombing at the Cool Springs FWB Church.

Edwards told me about the traffic stop. When he examined the minister’s vehicle registration card, he had noticed that it was due to expire that day. He had told the minister that was the case.

The minister told him that he was aware of the registration’s expiration date, but times had been hard and he did not have the money to renew it. He explained that was why he was taking the load of logs to the mill that day. If he got a good price for them, he’d be able to renew his registration.

Edwards suggested that they pray over the matter. That may seem a little unusual in some places, but it’s the kind of thing that’s not hard to imagine at all where I grew up.

“Maybe we should just pray that you get enough money for that license tag,” he told me he told the preacher.

Sitting in the patrol car on the side of the road, the two men closed their eyes and prayed. They prayed that God might bless them both, but that God might most particularly bless the reverend and help him to get a good price for his logs so that he could renew his registration.

According to Edwards, their prayers were answered. The Reverend did get enough money from the sale of his logs to renew his registration. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Trooper Edwards later introduced the minister at St. Joe’s to the minister at his church.

Edwards told me that he and the two preachers sometimes got together in the weeks after that traffic stop. They’d sit on his minister’s front porch. The two clergymen would talk about the Bible and discuss theology, while the young state trooper mostly sat quietly and listened.

“Start with the church bombing, but bring it ‘round to loving your neighbor,” Edwards suggested to me, when I asked him if he minded if I wrote a little something about his memories of the night that the Cool Springs FWB Church was bombed.

I told him that I would do my best. I was going to tell him something else, too, but I decided that there was no need: he already seemed to know that history isn’t just about the things that we have seen in the past, but also about what we have in our hearts.

-End-

Walker Golder is the new executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust, the conservation group announced Monday.

A native of North Carolina, Golder was with the National Audubon Society before succeeding Coastal Land Trust’s founding executive director Camilla M. Herlevich.

Golder, who spent his youth in Wrightsville Beach, said that the North Carolina coast is his home.

“It’s where I learned the lasting value of protecting the places that make our coast so special, and the importance of land trusts. I believe that conserving natural and working landscapes and investing in land stewardship is one of the best ways to have a lasting impact on natural and cultural resources that are so important to the North Carolina coast,” he said.

“I had the pleasure of working with the Coastal Land Trust on several land protection projects where the missions of Audubon and the Coastal Land Trust aligned, and I am excited for the opportunity to get back to coastal land protection,” Golder added.

Golder attended the University of North Carolina Wilmington for graduate school, where he earned a master’s degree in marine biology. He then began his career at the National Audubon Society, where he held many roles including the position of deputy state director of Audubon’s North Carolina state office. He most recently served as the program director of the Atlantic Flyway Coast Strategy.

“We met good candidates from across the state during our search and are extremely pleased to have found Walker, who brings deep coastal conservation experience and expertise and has had a long professional relationship with the Coastal Land Trust,” said Ann C. Simpson, chair of the executive director search committee and past president of the board of directors of the Coastal Land Trust.

Golder has received awards including the National Audubon Society’s 2013 Charles H. Callison Professional Award. This annual award honors one volunteer and one staff member from Audubon who have made remarkable contributions to conservation through coalition-building, creative thinking and perseverance.

“I am very excited and honored to join the Coastal Land Trust as executive director,” Golder said of his new position. “The work of this organization will shape the legacy that we leave to future generations.”

Golder’s work has contributed to the protection of coastal birds and their habitats, and has established sanctuaries for 35% of North Carolina’s breeding shorebirds. Golder’s photographs have appeared in dozens of publications, including eight book and magazine covers, according to the release.

“Walker’s decades of experience in conservation and deep commitment to the Carolina coast make him a perfect fit for Coastal Land Trust,” said Melanie Allen, president of the board of directors of the Coastal Land Trust. “He has the skill and enthusiasm to lead the Coastal Land Trust’s talented staff into this next chapter.”

Guam is halfway around the world from Chief Petty Officer Sam Lewis’ hometown of Beaufort, but as chief culinary specialist aboard the USS Key West, a Los Angeles-class, fast-attack submarine, his journey began with a high school job back home, washing dishes.

Lewis joined the Navy 11 years ago and was promoted in January to chief petty officer, a rank that carries with it considerable responsibilities. What sets Lewis apart is his job onboard the Key West.

Stripped of the language about feeding officers, admirals and the crew, the job description is simple. “They prepare menus, and plan, prepare, and serve meals,” is the last sentence in the Navy’s job description.

But simple is not easy.

“We have limited space on board.” Lewis explained. “So, we have to load out with much more of the from-scratch items. It’s not advanced foods like corn dogs or something like that. We make our hamburgers from scratch. Even pizza, we make our own dough and our own breads, things like that we have to make pure from scratch.”

Submarine cuisine specialists are considered among the best in the Navy. The job calls for a wide range of culinary skills, matching the expertise of any restaurant chef.

“You have to be well versed in meat production. You have to be a good baker, learn how to make different types of desserts. And then you also have time restraints. You have to make stuff in three hours or six hours — or whatever the time — that you need,” he said.

And it all must be done for crew of 140 to 150, who work 24 hours a day.

Lewis’ journey began in Beaufort, not just because that’s where he went to school – he played trumpet and baritone horn in the East Carteret High School marching band. The journey begins there because that’s where Lewis discovered his fascination with food preparation.

“When I was in high school, I started working at the Duke University Marine Lab,” he said. “I worked there as a scullery person. And I started getting interested into food, and the executive chef there, James Bragan, he kind of took me up and showed me how to cook, showed me pretty much the enjoyment of cooking. That’s where my love for food kind of came to be.”

The food training in the service began after basic training in the Navy’s New Accession Training, or “A School,” as it is usually called. The program also is where it was decided that he would be a culinary specialist on submarines.

“During my A school, they came in and said, ‘if you sign this page 13, you’re going to go submarines.’ And so I said, ‘why not?’ and signed it,” he said.

The decision and assignment aboard the Key West, which is based in Guam and part of the Pacific Fleet, has given Lewis the opportunity to explore different cuisines.

“I do a lot of the Asian cooking. My wife is Filipino, but even before that, I was very into the Asian culture — stir fries and stuff like that,” he said.

His time in the Pacific has provided an opportunity to learn more about the foods of the Pacific Rim.

“When we pulled into Thailand, I did a trade with the Hyatt (hotel chain) and did a training with them to learn a little bit more about the cuisine in Thailand,” he said.

The trade offered Lewis a chance to learn Thai cuisine from the Hyatt chefs, explained Lt. Meagan Morrison, public affairs officer for Submarine Squadron 15.

That training in Asian cuisines led to Lewis’ own recipe, or his creation, along with two other chefs.

“We have is a spicy peanut butter curry that we make. Me and two of my counterparts, we made the recipe. And that was partly from Thailand,” he said.

The food he prepares and serves is one part of his job. There is also ordering ingredients, a difficult process because the Navy’s submarines are underwater for 90 days at a time. Supervising and training his kitchen staff are also a big part of his job.

And then there are the rewards.

“Seeing the enjoyment on people’s faces when you’re feeding them … The goal is when they enter the crew’s mess to eat, there’s a hot meal. Just like at home, you come home from a hard day at work, and somebody has made a hot meal. You sit down at the table and eat. It kind of boosts the day up a little bit,” Lewis said.

Former Elizabeth City mayor, Henry Richard “Rick” Gardner, died Sunday, Feb. 21, 2021, at home. He was 94.

Gardner served as a city councilman from 1989-1991 and as mayor of Elizabeth City from 1993-1999.

His service will be at 11 a.m. Saturday at Twiford Memorial Chapel with Wayne Gardner officiating.

Born in Chesterfield, South Carolina, March 18, 1927, to the late John Gardner and Amy Shaw Gardner, Rick was one of 12 children, seven brothers and four sisters. He was the husband of Lydia Worsley Gardner.

Gardner graduated from Chesterfield High School in 1944. He served his country in the U.S. Army and the Merchant Marines in the Atlantic and Pacific War Zones during World War II. Working at Southern Bell Telephone Co. from 1948 to 1955, he then joined Gardner Construction Co. as the office manager until he was appointed corporation president in 1961. In 1983 Rick founded the Rick Gardner Co. Inc, a company specializing in commercial and industrial construction in North Carolina, Virginia and Florida.

Gardner served on the board of directors of the former Centura Bank, the Elizabeth City State University Foundation, the Elizabeth City Chamber of Commerce, Friends of ECSU, and as chairman of Coastal Resources Advisory Council. He also served on other boards and committees such as chairman of the Pasquotank Board of Elections, chairman of the North Carolina Seafood Industrial Park Authority, member of the Girls Club Board, and a former member of the Elizabeth City Council.

In 1994, he received an honorary degree presented by Elizabeth City State University. He was also in various fraternal organizations.

The Tillett Cemetery is on a low ridge next to Old Nags Head Woods Road in Kill Devil Hills. There’s a chain-link fence around it, but it’s a beautiful setting, surrounded by pine and live oak. The land from the cemetery to Roanoke Sound is now part of Nags Head Woods, but at one time it was a thriving farm.

Rad Tillett has taken on the task of tending to the cemetery. He’s 84 and has lived on the Outer Banks his whole life. His grandfather, Isaac E. Tillett—“Mr. Erb”— who was born in 1865, had farmed the land and raised a family with his wife, Maggie S. Tillett. Maggie lived from 1874-1953.

Rad then pointed to a heavily worn headstone with the dates 1762-1829. “This one here, it’s Thomas Tillett. He started the whole thing,” he said recently.

He then pointed to the headstone next to it.

“This was his wife. She was an Indian. Most of us around here have some Indian blood in us,” he said.

Rad’s grandfather, Isaac Tillett, died in 1948. He has five years of good memories of the farm and his grandparents, he said.

The cemetery holds numerous tales, but some might be difficult to prove.

There’s Capt. Samuel Tillett, the son of Thomas, who was in the Caribbean when he contracted yellow fever. Realizing he might die, the captain gave instructions on how his body was to be sent home.

“He was supposed to be brought back in a casket filled up with rum,” Rad said.

But then there’s another Isaac Tillett, “who departed this life” Nov. 3, 1851, who shares the name but probably isn’t Rad’s close kin.

“It don’t belong here,” Rad said of the the headstone, explaining that his cousin, Norris Austin, had added it while building the fence around the graveyard.

“This lady up in Currituck … told him (the headstone) was in the trash pile up there. He went and got it. He didn’t know if we were kin to him or what, so he put it here,” he said.

Roanoke Trail

The Roanoke Trail in Nags Head Woods cuts through the heart of the Tillett land.

The trail is a wide, packed-earth path beneath towering pine and hardwood trees. The trail feels like it’s been in place for some time, but Rad has different memories. Pointing to the cemetery, he said that people coming from the north — Kitty Hawk or Kill Devil Hills — would have taken a lane that passed behind the cemetery. From the south, there was another lane that accessed the property off Old Nags Head Road.

But the biggest change, Rad said, are the trees.

“It was all open,” he said. “These trees weren’t here when I was little. People won’t believe that. I can’t hardly believe it myself.”

“It was good farmland. They raised everything — butchered the cows and pigs, salted a lot of it and then smoked it. They had a smokehouse,” he remembered.

There were also sheep at one time, and chickens, ducks and geese. He pointed to a low, heavily forested rise.

“This whole place would be pasture. It went 5 acres down to the water. When I come along, he just had two cows and a bull, just a little to keep him going. He’d kill one in the fall. He’d sell that,” he said.

Mr. Erb didn’t have much choice in selling the meat, Rad noted.

“He didn’t have a refrigerator. He didn’t have power back here. I don’t know how he did it,” he said.

According to Rad, no one back in Nags Head Woods had power. He tells the story of a house his father Herman Tillett, who was a contractor, built a little after his grandfather died.

“My daddy built a house back here back in 1950, right on the water. Put a Delco (generator) back there,” he said.

He pointed to the other side of the trail, where at one time there had been a fence. That was where the produce was grown.

“It’s not high. It’s good land,” Rad said. “He grew corn, potatoes, carrots — just about everything.”

The potatoes were the cash crop.

“My daddy and I dug potatoes,” he recalled.

And, as tourism became more a part of the Outer Banks economy, Rad’s grandfather would make the trip into town.

“When Nags Head picked up, they started building houses on the ocean. He’d go down there with a horse and cart with vegetables all summer. He’d raise them here, take them down there,” he said. “He didn’t drive. My grandmother drove. Just the horse and cart — my granddaddy never did drive.”

The corner of the Tillett house is marked by perhaps a half-dozen of the original bricks. It was a fairly large house; it had to be to accommodate the size of the family.

“They had 12 (children), but two of them died. They raised 10. And then he had one son that was older that my grandma looked after. He was born before my granddaddy got married. That wasn’t supposed to be told. But that was the way it was,” Rad said about his grandparents.

There were two hand pumps for water, “One in the kitchen, the other on the porch.”

Rad walked around to what would have been the kitchen.

“The kitchen was in back of the house — separate,” he said.

He walked around to the other side of the house and pointed to a pit in the ground overgrown with vines.

“That hole, there, that was a dugout potato house with sides on it, put down in the ground about 4 feet. It had a sharp roof on it. They put straw on the roof. They put potatoes and stuff in it in the winter. It wouldn’t freeze,” he said.

At one time, there was a barn across from what is now the Roanoke Trail, although all evidence of the barn is gone. Rad pointed to the faintest indentations visible in the undergrowth, saying that was the road from the house to the barn.

There is, though, better proof that the road existed. About 200 yards past the house, there’s an open marsh with a wooden bridge crossing it. North of the bridge there is a line of low trees that seems out of place in the marsh.

“See where those little trees (are) across there in a line? That was the road. I know he put that in there with just his cart and sand. It would get back there from the pigpen to the water. The barn was just a little bit farther,” Rad said.

The road leads to a huge live oak that historians have said was used to drain the blood from an animal after it had been slaughtered.

“All you do is run line over the (tree) limb and just hang it there,” he said.

Rad never saw the oak tree used – instead, he recalled a “big straight tree with straight limbs” close to the house. But he has not been able to find that tree again.

Roanoke Sound is just a short walk past the live oak. The shoreline is marked by soft white sand. The shallows are marked by leafless trees, bleached almost white by the sun.

“This was right different. That white sand went all the way out there. You can see the trees have died. There was more oak here,” Rad said. “When I was little, it was 60 feet or 50 feet farther. And white sand. Oh it was a nice one, a nice beach.”

Rad’s granddaddy passed away in 1948, his wife five years later, and the property was sold.

“The people who bought it, they were cousins, I think. They lived in Coinjock,” he said. “They just thought they’d have a summer home.”

But vandals broke into the house and ultimately burned it down.

“This was just such a shame,” Rad said.

In 1974, Nags Head Woods was designated a National Natural Landmark, and The Nature Conservancy took over management of the land, which Rad said has worked out well.

“The Nature Conservancy, I think they’re doing a pretty good job,” he said.

Note from the author: This is the first chapter of Shark Hunter: Russell J. Coles at Cape Lookout. The rest of the story will be posted on davidcecelski.com in its entirety over the next few weeks.

A few years ago, a gentleman in Virginia, Walter Coles Sr., invited my daughter and me to visit his family’s archive of research materials related to his uncle, a world-renowned shark hunter named Russell J. Coles who did the bulk of his shark hunting at Cape Lookout between 1900 and 1925.

The invitation was extremely generous. Russell Jordan Coles was a fascinating figure. Every summer for that quarter century, he left his tobacco brokerage in Danville, Virginia, and moved onto a houseboat in the quiet waters of Cape Lookout’s bight.

While there, he grew obsessed with sharks. At first he pursued them with rod and reel. Later, he hunted them with lances and harpoons, and eventually he even employed heavy nets and trot lines. Over the years, he hunted and killed hundreds and possibly thousands of great whites, hammerheads, tiger, thresher, nurse and other sharks at and near Cape Lookout.

Of course one can look at that kind of slaughter as a multitude of acts of great courage and feats of death-defying daring or as acts of brutal carnage and ecological ruin. It might have been both.

Coles was not only a big game fisherman though. He had studied a little medicine before he left — or was asked to leave — the Virginia Military Institute after a prank in which he tried to blow up the school’s arsenal with an extraordinarily large quantity of dynamite. He never finished his degree and he had no training in ichthyology, or the scientific study of fish, at all.

Yet sharks and rays fascinated him and he probably observed them in their natural habitat as much or more than any other man on Earth.

He came to Cape Lookout seeking to test his manhood and collect trophies. But the sharks and rays got under his skin and he soon began to study their habits in the wild. After building a laboratory on his houseboat, he even began dissecting his fallen prey and studying its anatomy and physiology.

At that time, the scientific study of sharks and rays was still in its infancy. Very few biologists had studied sharks in the wild, the first scientific study of shark behavior was yet to be written and many leading shark experts knew them only as preserved specimens.

By virtue of his field experience, Coles was uniquely well placed to make a pioneering contribution to the field.

By 1910, several of the most knowledgeable shark experts at museums and universities in both the U.S. and Europe were corresponding with him and he had become one of the country’s leading authorities on sharks and rays.

He developed an especially strong relationship with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

To this day, marine scientists on both sides of the Atlantic use specimens that he collected at Cape Lookout in their research.

Marine biologists also continue to use his scientific writings, and even marine biology students learn about at least one aspect of his research — his pioneering observations on the cooperative hunting behavior of sharks.

At Coles Hill

My daughter, Vera Cecelski, who is also a historian, and I accepted the invitation of Russell Coles’ nephew Walter Coles Sr. and his wife Alice with great gratitude. To our knowledge, no other scholars had previously been granted access to the family’s archive.

In the winter and spring of 2014, we made two trips to Coles Hill, the family’s ancestral estate in Chatham, Virginia.

Today, Coles Hill is a beautiful place with quiet country roads and hundreds of acres of broad pastureland, fields and orchards.

The family has been at the center of a controversial proposal to build a uranium mining and milling facility at Coles Hill, however. You can get a taste of that controversy in articles in The Washington Post here and in Bloomberg News here.

Chatham is a small town in the south-central part of the state, in the lovely rolling hill country between Danville and Lynchburg.

The library occupies a room in the Coles’ home, a Georgian brick manor built circa 1817 just outside of Chatham.

The family’s roots run deep into America’s history. George Washington stayed with Russell Coles’ grandfather on his southern tour in 1791. James Madison signed that grandfather’s commission in the army, and Thomas Jefferson signed the family’s land grant.

The house is built of Flemish bond brick made at Coles Hill, presumably by enslaved laborers, and on one side of the mansion are gardens that lead down to the family’s burial ground.

Inside, Vera and I marveled at the family’s treasures, including one of the hand-forged harpoons that Russell Coles used to hunt sharks and giant manta rays and a breathtaking collection of antebellum furniture built by the great African American furniture maker Thomas Day of Milton.

After visiting with the Coles and hearing several family stories about Walter Coles Sr.’s Uncle Russell, we settled into the archival materials from their library.

The Teddy Roosevelt Letters

As Vera and I plunged into the family’s library, we quickly discovered that the collection of materials on Russell Coles is matchless. It includes his journals and diaries, reams of private correspondence, unpublished writings, many photographs and an assortment of field notes on his observations of sharks, rays and other marine fishes at Cape Lookout.

It also includes copies of the articles that Coles published in natural history journals and magazines, some of which are now quite hard to find, as well as albums of newspaper clippings about him.

Russell Coles was also a close friend of Teddy Roosevelt’s. I imagine many scholars would consider the letters between Coles and Roosevelt to be the collection’s highlight.

In those letters, Roosevelt and Coles discussed their plans for a giant manta ray hunting expedition in Florida, their dream of fighting in World War I with a battalion of old codgers like themselves and much else.

Even when I wasn’t reading their letters, I often thought of Teddy as I browsed Coles’ papers.  The two men’s physical resemblance, for one thing, is striking, though I noticed that his contemporaries more often compared Coles’ appearance to that of President Taft.

But more relevantly, the great themes in Roosevelt and Coles’ lives often seem to have been one and the same.

Both had an unquenchable thirst for adventure and exploration and an avid curiosity about the natural world.

Both possessed indomitable wills and unyielding, often reckless desires to hunt and conquer, and not just sharks and other wild animals. Both had tremendous appetites for life that could not be satisfied.

Both men also felt a never-ending restlessness. They had urgent, boundless needs to know what was most primeval in their own hearts and, I think some would say, to steel themselves against the things they feared most.

They spoke the language of colonizers and imperialists: to explore, conquer and hold dominion.

No matter how frail they grew in old age, even when Roosevelt neared his end and could barely get out of bed, the two men still shared a dream of taking up arms and going to Cape Lookout to fight monsters in the sea.

A Man with a Harpoon

When Vera and I said goodbye to our extraordinarily kind hosts and left Coles Hill for the last time, our heads were full of a hundred images.

Now, several years later, one of those images stands out most to me: Coles, the aging hunter, rising on his houseboat in the early morning light, as he did again and again, and taking a whaleboat into the breakers several miles out along the great shoal south of the island’s lighthouse.

Large numbers of sharks congregated along that shoal. Coles would stand in the whaleboat’s prow with his harpoon, made by his own hands in his own forge, and go after them until he was exhausted and the sea blood red.

He would do this for an hour or two, and then he would come back to the houseboat and have his breakfast.

At Coles Hill, Vera and I learned about a great many other parts of his life, but when I think of Coles, I picture him on that shoal: the lone boat, the dark red waves, the great sharks and a man, far from young, wielding a harpoon, striking left and right, left and right, as if nothing else in the world could make a man feel more alive.

Coastal Review Online is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

NAVASSA – Before industry brought the promise of jobs and hope of economic viability in this small town, enslaved West Africans worked in rice fields that peppered the landscape.

Cultivating rice was a demanding, tedious process — one that was a foreign concept to English colonists, but not to the men and women plucked from their tribes in the rice growing region of West Africa.

Today those slaves and their descendants, the Gullah Geechee, are nationally recognized through the establishment of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which runs up the southern Atlantic Coast from St. John’s County, Florida, to Pender County.

Their stories and rich culture are shared at some of the very plantations and one-time isolated barrier islands on which they were enslaved.

Navassa aims to become another voice of the Gullah Geechee by establishing what would be the first cultural heritage center in the state dedicated to preserving the stories of those slaves who worked the rice plantations along river banks in southeastern North Carolina.

The center would be a source of pride in a town that has suffered at the hands of the very thing it at one time counted on — industry — to spur an economic boost it still desires today.

“It would be a way for my folks to identify themselves to the world forever,” Eulis Willis, the town’s longtime mayor, said of a cultural center. “It would be a way to help us achieve some independence.”

An ideal spot for the proposed Moze Heritage Center and Nature Park is within an 82-acre plot identified as the eastern uplands portion of the former Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. site.

It’s within this part of the property off the banks of the Brunswick River and Sturgeon Creek that some of the rice fields owned and managed by a member of the prominent and powerful South Carolina Moore family thrived.

In 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added the property to its National Priorities List of federal Superfund sites.

The EPA, state and various trusts have for years been investigating the extent of the contamination and discussing sufficient ways to remediate that contamination. Those agencies and trusts have been working with the townspeople to determine future uses for the property.

Years before this collaboration began, Willis was toying with the idea of creating some type of ecotourism in the town.

“Trying to reestablish the town itself, I realized that for us to live a decent life we had to try to develop in some way our own economy,” he said.

It wasn’t until 2006, when he was one of five North Carolinians selected to be on a committee to oversee the development of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, Willis thought about tying in the Gullah Geechee’s history in southeastern North Carolina as a tourism draw for the town.

“I got on the commission and boy, did my education begin,” Willis said. “The thing that was amazing to me was that in North Carolina we didn’t have as much of the culture. The native North Carolinians (Gullah Geechee) didn’t have as much of the cultural traits.”

That’s because, Willis said, Gullah Geechee in this state were not as isolated as those on barrier islands and remote plantations in South Carolina and farther south.

“We didn’t ever get isolated like that,” he said.

The proposed center and nature park would include walking trails, a pier and kayak launch, and restored marsh and riverfront.

The town has partnered with the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust to acquire land for the project.

Last year, the Coastal Land Trust purchased and began work to restore Reaves Chapel, a church the trust describes on its website as “one of the Cape Fear region’s most culturally and historically significant African American structures.”

The little, wooden church in Navassa was built shortly after the Civil War near the Cape Fear River by those enslaved on the Cedar Hill Plantation.

Edward Reaves, a former slave, owned the parcel the church was moved to by its congregants in 1911.

The church will be restored and used as a gathering place for the townspeople, many of whom, like Willis, have historical ties to the Gullah Geechee.

Revelations of Willis’ heritage have come to light throughout his years of research. He has a great-great-grandmother whose name is listed in a rice-planting book dated 1861-62 from Hickory Hall Plantation.

Willis has traced his family tree to Charley Waddell, who is believed to be the first black man to buy land in Navassa in 1875.

“I’m still not an expert on the culture, but it doesn’t escape me,” Willis said, adding that he feels a kinship with the Gullah Geechee because of his ancestry.

“Here’s an opportunity for my folks to not only save the culture, but make a little money and get a little bit more independence,” he said. “It’s going to take maximum effort from some smart people. I want it to stay owned and operated in this community. I want it to be something that not only we can be proud of, but anybody who comes to visit it will have a good experience.”

Daniel Pullen’s photographs are remarkable for their diversity: iconic images of the Hatteras Lighthouse or a fisherman on the beach early in the morning baiting his hook. There is a photo of a Jeep stuck on the beach, fantails of sand flying into the air as the driver struggles to free himself.

There are images of watermen and women, not beautiful depictions of a day spent on the water, but rather moments captured in time of a culture and way of life.

There is also an image of a little girl, her face filled with joy as she rides a wave and just behind her, her mother smiles just as broadly.

“That photo means so much to me,” Pullen said. “That’s my best friend’s wife and daughter in that photograph. That’s where I grew up surfing. That photo for me brings back memories of learning to surf and boogie board.”

“I’d rather focus on telling the story versus just snapping pretty photos or showing the obvious,” he added.

For Daniel Pullen, photography is the pen, ink and paper of the storyteller. Some of his images are joyous, others reveal a glimpse of life on Hatteras Island where he lives. Some are of the mundane, but all his photos tell a story.

“A lot of the time can you tell the whole story in a one picture,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t do it. Sometimes you have to use a group of photographs.”

It did take him a while, though, to learn how to tell stories with his camera.

He grew up on Hatteras Island, a part of the surf culture and a hopeful artist.

“I was drawing and painting all the time,” he said. “I was doing art shows … and I remember seeing photographers coming here for just a couple of weeks out of the year and they would create these images come back next year with these prints and get it out to book stores and galleries and sell it. And I was like, ‘I live here. They’re here for two weeks and I live here … so I just grabbed a disposable and started taking shots.”

The art background helped but for Pullen, the images he was capturing with a camera held the missing piece of the puzzle.

“The one thing I always struggled with in painting or drawing was composition. With photography it really came relatively easy,” he said.

He eventually bought a single-lens reflex, or SLR, film camera—a Nikon F4—and noticed the difference immediately.

“My photographs may not have gotten better but they looked better,” he said.

If the quality of the images was improving so was Pullen’s understanding of what he wanted to do with photography. He and his wife Kate began shooting weddings, providing him with financial stability; and he found that the camera could do more than just take pictures.

“I love shooting a wedding because you can story-tell,” he said. “That’s easy for me to say because I don’t have to sort through things and edit things. Kate has to do that. I struggle with that and I’m really slow.”

His first weddings were shot with film cameras, as were his early images of surfing and the surf, images that were starting to be noticed for their clarity, vision and composition.

Then the world changed. He had just purchased his latest film camera and was talking to legendary Outer Banks surf photographer Mickey McCarthy about it. Mickey gave him a vision of the future.

“Everybody’s switching over to digital,” he was told.

It took Pullen a while to understand what he had and how to use it. He didn’t have the money for the upper-end equipment. “I couldn’t afford the 500mm lens like Mickey McCarthy had,” he said. But he wanted to be in the water taking pictures, anyway, so a housing for his camera seemed ideal.

“I bought my housing in 2007. I didn’t get a good shot until 2008.  I didn’t know what I was doing. There were people I could have called to ask how to use it, but I was just too prideful to ask them,” he recalled.

He was also becoming more interested in the stories that surrounded him than the art shots of a wave or a lighthouse. When McCarthy died in 2016, he realized how important storytelling and people could been photography.

“I was looking through hard drives for photos of Mickey. I realized I only had 12 shots of Mickey. I had hundreds of photos of waves. And waves don’t age, but people do. I hardly have any pictures of Mickey, but I’d spent hours on the beach hanging out with him,” Pullen said.

It is the people that tell the story in his images. Sitting in his Buxton Gallery, he points to an image of a seine net stretched across the beach, reaching into the water to where a boy is standing. The photograph is striking, iconic in its simplicity.

To Pullen, however, it represents a missed opportunity.

“The actual story was he was fishing with his grandfather,” he said. How much better would that have been with the grandson and grandfather there?”

“I’m more focused on or intrigued … by the peripherals, what you don’t necessarily see in a magazine or online. If I have to stand on the beach and shoot, I lose interest as soon as surfers hit the water. If I can get a picture of a guy in the parking lot, of an interaction in the parking lot, that would mean more down the road,” he said.

Almost all of Pullen’s photographs are of Hatteras Island; it is where he grew up and lives. As his skill at telling stories with his camera improves increasingly he sees how important it is to record the changes he is witnessing.

“The original culture here is dying off. It’s slowly fading away,” he said. “With each generation it dies off. It’s one piece of culture that’s not going to be in existence anymore. The way people talk, the way people dress. It’s very important for me to document the culture.”

As he documents that culture, the tales he tells through the lens of his camera continues to evolve and he look for new ways to tell the stories he is seeing.

“As a writer are you writing the same stuff you did five or 10 years ago?” Pullen asks. “Why am I going to revert back and create images that are old to me or are stale?”

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• Daniel Pullen Photography

Paul Sykes will spend his 77^th birthday outside in the cold and wind, trekking through bramble, squinting up to the morning sky, parsing every cheep, chirp and call, adding another check to his record-breaking run of Audubon’s Christmas Bird Counts that he has participated in since 1953.

He made the 400 mark six years ago, and is at an even 475 now – more than anyone anywhere has ever done. When he completes this year’s bird counts in Virginia and North Carolina, he’ll be closer to his latest goal.

“I’m doing 15 this year, and by next year, I hope to get to 500,” Sykes says in a telephone interview from his Watkinsville, Ga., home.

The 115^th annual Christmas Bird Count will be held Dec. 14 – Jan. 5 in hundreds of locations throughout the continental United States and Canada.

But 2014 is a significant anniversary for Sykes: It will be 50 years since he started the bird count at Pea Island on the Outer Banks as a graduate student at N.C. State University. Sykes will drive from Georgia to the Outer Banks to do the Pea Island count on Dec. 28 and will then head the next day to Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia, which is where Sykes did his first count in 1953 on the day after Christmas. And that is where he intends to be next year when he breaks the 500 mark.

“The Christmas Bird Count in Virginia Beach is always on my birthday,” he says. “I haven’t been home on my birthday in 50-some-odd years.”

Sykes, who also compiles the counts, brings his trusty spotting scope with a tripod and recordings of bird calls. He also provides an abridged list of species he expects to see that particular count so that other participants can tally each bird or groups of birds throughout the day.

Each count — ideally conducted in the morning when it is quiet — is done within a 15-mile radius that is divided into sectors, each with an experienced birder in charge, Sykes explains.

Each person counts what he or she sees or hears, subject to later verification “if something looks out of whack,” he says. Rare bird sightings must be documented to count, but many people use digital cameras to take photographs when possible.

“It’s citizen science,” he says. “It’s not a rigid sampling design. But you can get things like trends from it.”

With a friendly, quick-paced speaking style, Sykes barely hesitates before recalling numbers and facts from long-ago bird counts. Obviously sharp, he is also witty and lacks the hubris apparent in some highly trained scientists. For instance, he takes care not to offend when he has had to reject some claims from bird count volunteers.

“I’m the dictator,” he says. “But I try to be diplomatic, because they’re not scientists. I’m not trying to be mean — it’s not a personal thing. Some people have a vivid imagination.”

Born and raised in Norfolk, Va., Sykes first became intrigued by birds at age 10 when watching the hundreds of feathered creatures who visited his neighbor’s numerous bird feeders. He saved up to buy binoculars and as a young teen started going out regularly with area birders. At 15, he did his first Christmas Bird Count, and by the next year, he was also compiling the findings that were later published by Audubon.

“During my early CBC years I had no idea that they would become a lifelong pursuit,” Sykes wrote in a 2008 piece in American Birds, “but my interest has never diminished.”

Over the years, Sykes has participated in Christmas counts in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.  The only year he ever missed doing any was in 1962, when he was in the Navy and deployed on a U.S. destroyer in the Mediterranean. He has meticulously recorded details of each count in files, including driving time, miles walked and total hours spent in the field. He even keeps track of the hours he sleeps (usually five to seven hours) the night before a count.

A wildlife research biologist for 42 years with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Sykes found his passion for birding dovetailed nicely with his job. For 16 years, he studied the painted bunting, a species of special concern in North Carolina.  At the height of the study, he was using a ton of bird seed — “I would bring in a semi-truck,” he says — at 40 feeders.

He retired seven years ago, but that only gave him more time to go more places to find more birds. This year alone, he has traveled to Panama, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Alaska (twice), California (twice), Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida (eight times). In January, he is going to Guatemala, then in June, back to Panama. He has also bird hunted (with binoculars) in Jamaica, Ecuador, Cuba, Bermuda, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico.

Along the way, he is steadily adding to the list of bird species he has spotted – so far he’s seen 895 out of the estimated 980 species in mainland North America, north of Mexico.

Alaska is great, he adds, because rare birds can stray there after losing their way from Asia. Although he counts species he’s seen elsewhere – (“Oh yeah, I keep track of everything,” he says), those numbers were not readily available.

“It’s a game,” he says. “It’s my hobby. Except my ecological footprint is probably horrible.”

His wife and mother of his three children, Joan, he says, is “a saint” for putting up with his pursuit. Once in a while, she’ll go along for the ride, he says, but she generally dislikes the conditions and the pace.

“She’s a fair-weather birder,” he says.

A retired scientist and a prolific author of scientific articles, Paul Skyes plans to continue counting birds until he reaches 500 Christmas Bird Counts. Photo courtesy of Paul Sykes

Sykes said he revels in the social aspect of birding and enjoys seeing the same friends every year at the counts.

The Christmas Bird Count, founded in 1900, is the longest-running citizen science survey in the world, according to the National Audubon Society. Along with the Breeding Bird Survey, done every June, the data have proved valuable in spotting trends in population and habitat change and determining which birds are in trouble, says Geoff LeBaron, the Christmas Bird Count director for National Audubon Society. The data also are being used currently to help predict and mitigate the effects of climate change on birds.

About 1,900 Christmas Bird Counts are done every year in the United States by about 71,000 observers, LeBaron says. With the United States now covered well, he says, Aububon is working to expand the counts to Latin America, which has many more species and less bird numbers compared to the United States.

LeBaron says that Sykes has been invaluable to the success of the bird counts over the years. “He is just willing to put the effort in,” he says.

Sykes is not only well-known as a deft ornithologist and prolific author of scientific articles, LeBaron says. He’s also an extraordinarily committed birder.

“Retirement is a different sort of concept when you’re talking about someone like Paul,” says LeBaron, who has known him for 27 years. “I think the world of Paul. He’s very enthusiastic. His dedication to everything he does is just amazing.”

LeBaron fondly related two stories that illustrates just how serious Sykes is about “listing” — a birder term that describes the quest to see different species. In 2007, news had reached Sykes that a brown hawk owl had been spotted in Alaska north of the Aleutian Islands. He immediately dropped everything and flew to Anchorage and saw the bird the next morning, beating out everyone except Alaskans.

But Sykes surpassed himself in 2009, right before the Christmas Bird Count, LeBaron recalls. Hearing that a bare-throated tiger heron had been sighted in Texas, he immediately drove there, saw the bird and drove back to Georgia. Then as soon as he returned, he heard there was chaffinch seen visiting a feeder in Massachusetts. He got back in his car and hi-tailed it to Boston, saw the bird and drove back to Georgia.

But then he heard there was an Amazon kingfisher spotted in Texas. So he got right back into his car, drove to the Rio Grande, saw the bird and drove back to Georgia.

“Then,” LeBaron says, “he did the bird count.”

OCEAN – Many people will remember her for helping save Sugarloaf Island, an undeveloped island visible from Morehead City’s waterfront. Books, however, may be the things Sarah Hamilton loved more than environmental activism.

Hamilton, 90, passed away in March of 2013, but the library at the N.C. Coastal Federation’s headquarters here in this small community in Carteret County continues to be a reflection of her touch.

Hamilton made a career out of her love for books, introducing others to the gift books offered. Born in 1923 in Morehead City, she was librarian at three high schools in Carteret County over her lifetime. Todd Miller, the executive director of the federation, remembers Hamilton when he was a student at West Carteret High School.

“She was of the community. She was well known and well respected,” Miller said. “She was just a very sweet woman.”

Hamilton served on the board of the federation for 20 years.

The federation’s “library ladies,” from left, Dot Reist, Sarah Hamilton and Ann White.

She also served on the town planning board of Morehead City and took an interest in environmental issues. During the time she was on the board, there were several proposals to develop Sugarloaf Island. Accessible by watercraft only, the 47-acre island can be seen from the restaurants and shops lining downtown Morehead City’s waterfront on Bogue Sound.

“She was pretty instrumental in saving the island,” Miller said. Hamilton opened the door for the federation to begin working with Morehead City, helping the town apply for funding to buy the island. Sugarloaf Island is now a part of Morehead City’s park system with a floating dock, nature trails and public restrooms. The preserved island is like a good book in a way – it’s a place where you can get away from it all.

Hamilton’s background as a librarian was put to use when the federation was settling into its office in Ocean in 1995 and another former board member, Bob Daland, died, leaving behind his collection of environmental literature. Daland, whom the library is named after, was an active member of the Sierra Club and infatuated with environmental issues, said Miller.

“He gave us the beginning of the library,” Miller said.

The library is one of the benefits of being a member of the N.C. Coastal Federation. There are books and magazines on a range of environmental topics including gardening, crafting with nature, seashells, wildlife and a juniors’ section. Photo: Tess Malijenovsky

Hamilton in 1996 recruited the help of two other local women – Anne White and Dot Reist – to organize and help maintain the library. The three of them, known around the headquarters as “the library ladies,” were recognized in 2006 for their outstanding environmental service to the federation with a Pelican Award.

“She was a gracious lady with finesse under any circumstance. I just admire her so much,” said Reist, of Emerald Isle.

Reist volunteered at the library until 2013, two years longer than Hamilton was capable for health reasons. White died in 2013.

“I really got to know her through politics,” Reist said. “She was a good Democrat and so am I. We used to go to Raleigh often, my husband would drive us.”

The women would visit senators and congressman in Raleigh together, going office to office. Reist said, as one example, they fought for tougher regulations on hog farms, which had open pits for waste that would wash out into the watershed with each storm.

Reist was invited to help organize the federation’s library by typing the catalog cards. In fact, part of the ambiance of the federation’s library is its classic card catalog system that Hamilton installed, said Rose Rundell, a federation staffer.
There is no computer database to tell people where to find a particular book. The federation’s library relies on the good old-fashion system that’s worked since 1876: the Dewey Decimal System. Whether you’re searching a book by title, author or subject, it’s easy to locate the book you’re looking for by pulling the appropriate file draw and flipping through cards in alphabetical order for a classification number.

“Aunt Sarah was all about books,” wrote one of Hamilton’s nephews, Bob Harvey. “I’m not sure she would have the same love of Kindles and iBooks.”

“Having the card catalog system was definitely her touch,” Miller said.

Sarah Hamilton helped put in place the card catalog system that you’ll find at the federation’s library. Photo: Tess Malijenovsky

The catalog system may be old school, but its contents are old and new, from classics like the Audubon Society’s Sibley Guide to Birds to Philip Gerard’s most recent novel Down the Wild Cape Fear. The library features books and magazines for the environmental enthusiast on a range of topics, including gardening, crafting with nature, seashells, wildlife and much more. There’s even a juniors’ section.

And thanks to a contribution made by Harvey, the library will continue to expand its book collection over the next several years. “It just seemed appropriate to donate it to one of the things that she was involved in,” said Harvey.

It was something of a family tradition, Harvey said, for Hamilton to bring her nieces and nephews over to Dee Gee’s Gifts and Books, a shop on Morehead City’s waterfront, the day after Thanksgiving to pick out a new book.

In addition to the federation, Hamilton was also a volunteer for Hospice, Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I think probably because she didn’t have any kids, she got involved with a lot of things that helped other people,” said Harvey.

If you’ve never visited the library before, it’s a cozy nook in the federation’s headquarters, just beyond the entrance and front desk. Three walls of shelved books surround a spiral staircase, plush reading chair and study table. Readers will find a checkout sheet on top of the vintage card catalog cabinet.

There are no late fees here. “We go by the honor system,” said Rundell.

The library is one of the privileges of being a member of the federation. Members simply fill out their contact and library book information and can keep the books for as long as it takes them to read it. Book can be returned in a pile next to the checkout sheet or, if the office is closed, the white mailbox just outside the entrance doorway. You might like to visit if you share Hamilton’s love for reading with a worn paperback book in your hands.

MANTEO — Although they may not see the immediate value of native plants, stormwater controls or plant surveys, most middle school students sure do enjoy being outside and getting dirty.

Mary Ann Hodges works hard to see that they do.

Mary Ann Hodges

The Manteo Middle School teacher and N.C. Coastal Federation volunteer has worked tirelessly to make sure her students not only enjoy working in the school’s rain garden, but learn from it. By strengthening the bond between student and the natural environment, Hodges has shown that the kids can learn from doing something as simple as gardening.

Beginning with the construction of the rain garden in 2006, Hodges, who has been a science educator for more than 25 years, has remained a steadfast advocate for the garden and its place in seventh- and eighth-grade curricula.

In their simplest forms, rain gardens are plantings of robust native species, which can withstand most any weather condition, in a depression in the ground. Runoff that would otherwise eventually flow into nearby surface waters, collects in the depressions and is taken up by the plants. The stormwater then filters through the ground, which removes pollutants and recharges the water table. Hodges has been able to use this design to teach students about water quality, native plants and the natural history of our region.

While a long line of awards trails her name, Hodges is no stranger to excellence. A resident of Dare County for 18 years, she holds an undergraduate degree from Towson State University, a master’s degree in school administration from East Carolina University and was a member of the team that received a federation Pelican Award for Environmental Education in 2006.

It was then that Hodges began working with the N.C. Aquarium in Manteo and the federation to create the middle school’s rain garden.

“The rain garden has enriched the entire school,” she said, “and the students were able to see the evolution of the project – from planning and planting, to maintenance.”

While the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Program provided the initial money for the garden, Hodges continues to write and receive grants for maintenance costs. This funding has ensured that the garden will continue to be a part of the student’s science curriculum for the year.

“As an educator, it’s hard to be up to date on everything going on in the area, and the federation has been very willing to involve our school in their work,” said Hodges.

Manteo Middle School students plant a tree in the school’s rain garden.

A self-proclaimed “willing guinea pig,” Hodges has made herself available and involved throughout all aspects of the federation’s rain garden program to make sure the lessons are incorporated into the students’ official curriculum.

Only, Hodges wasn’t willing to stop there.

“We have actually been able to add more learning tools to the rain garden design,” she said. “I am now using the gardens to show students the concept of volunteer plant growth, population statistics, mapping and other vegetation community dynamics.”

In addition to rain garden maintenance and education, Hodges has been able to have her students participate in water quality labs with the federation, where students test water collected from different areas to better understand water properties and what is required for a healthy system.

“These water quality testing days have provided students with opportunities I don’t have access to here on campus,” said Hodges, “And the hands on work is perfect.”

With volunteers and partners like Hodges, the federation’s rain garden program can continue to grow throughout the region, while inspiring our younger generations to improve and maintain our environmental quality.

While some may not see the benefit of hands-on education immediately, Hodges’ experience has shown that students can use the work to understand and appreciate their natural environment.

“With the federation working at a local level, the students are more aware of local issues, and are able to be better stewards,” said Hodges, “It may not click right away, but it will eventually.”

LELAND — It took a long time for Leland’s Veronica Carter to become an environmental activist and volunteer for the N.C. Coastal Federation, but in a way, it was a role she’d been preparing for most of her life, without knowing it.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., she began her pursuit of a career at Fordham University in the Bronx, as a political science major. Now, some 35 years later, she is finally putting some of that particular aspect of her education to practical use in her multiple roles as a federation board member, volunteer, Coastal Resources Commission member and an ambassador for a safer environment, especially in Eastern North Carolina’s poorer communities.

“She’s one of our most active board members,” said Mike Giles, “and one of our best ambassadors in the Southeast region, getting people involved in our coast.”

Careers in the Army at at the UN prepared Veronica Carter for her current role as an ambassador for a cleaner environment.

Beginning in college, however, Carter’s life had moved in a different direction. She joined Fordham University’s ROTC program, where she earned a commission as a second lieutenant in the Army and began a 20-year career that ended in retirement in 2001. She became an ordnance officer (“not ammunition, but maintenance,” she said) at a time when the Army was looking to develop the concept of a “multi-functional logistician.”

“They decided at the time that rather than have folks (focused) in transportation, or supplies or maintenance,” she said, “they needed to know a little bit about everything.”

She became that logistician, which led to tours throughout the United States, Europe and Korea (twice). Eventually, she returned to New York, where she became a professor of military science, in charge of the Army ROTC program at her alma mater, Fordham. She also signed on as an adjunct professor at New York University, where in 2000, she met a student who worked for the United Nations. She was told that there were “lots of logistics jobs” at the United Nations, and with retirement from the Army about a year away, she began the application process.

“It was a good thing I did,” she said, “because the process took about a year.”

In 2001, now retired as a major, she went to work for the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at UN headquarters in New York, where her Army experience was put to good use as a logistics desk clerk in the Africa unit. In many cases, the job required significant amounts of time away from a desk in New York, and Carter found herself on planes, heading to (among other places) Sierra Leone, Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where her expertise helped the organization assure that any given peacekeeping mission was properly planned and executed with all of the support services such a mission required, from medical facilities, paymasters, transportation, and of course, the actual personnel.

During her two-year stint with the UN, Carter’s mother died, which led to a major shift in her priorities. Her father was now a widower, after 46 years of marriage, and Carter’s worldwide travel to coordinate UN missions became problematic.

“My father was back in Brooklyn by himself for the first time, and when you’re in places like Bangladesh, it’s not like you can get back from there in a few hours,” she said. “I realized that I needed to be in a different profession; one where I could get back on a plane in a matter of hours, not days.”

Carter had an aunt, uncle and cousin who had moved to North Carolina in the 1990s, which had led to numerous family visits to the Whiteville area. During those visits, Carter “fell in love with the city of Wilmington.”

“This led me saying to my father, ‘We’ve been in North Carolina a lot, so how about we go down and see if it’s someplace we’d like to settle?’” she said. “He told me he wanted to be wherever I was, so that’s what we did.”

In December of 2003, after purchasing the land in Leland and building a house on it, she moved her father here. She joined him two months later.

“I stayed retired for about six months,” she said. “My father hadn’t moved in over 40 years. I knew beforehand that it was going to be an emotional experience for him, so I stayed with him for that six months, before starting to work at Fort Bragg as a civilian contractor doing logistics.”

Veronica Carter often found herself in the spotlight as the leader of the opposition to a huge landfill.

The Hugo Neu dump would have been built in a poor community on the edge of the Green Swamp.

Within the first six months of her residence here, her father handed her a leaflet, inviting area residents to an organizational grassroots meeting, designed to stop a proposal to build a 750-acre landfill in the area on the edge of the Green Swamp, five miles from where they lived.

“He showed me that leaflet and I thought, ‘This doesn’t sound good,’” she said.

Carter attended the meeting of the Brunswick Citizens for a Safe Environment meeting and didn’t like what she heard.

“That same week, a representative from the company (proposing the landfill) was on the radio, answering questions and I liked it even less,” she remembered.

It was at this point, that all of her background began to coalesce — her educational background in political science, her Army and UN experience with logistics and perhaps, most importantly, her personal experience as an African-American. It was more than just the idea that Hugo Neu,  later to become Simms-Hugo Neu, was proposing an environmentally dangerous idea. It was also the fact that this landfill, and others being proposed throughout North Carolina at the time, happened to be next to African-American, Latino or predominantly poor neighborhoods.

Veronica Carter’s private, environmental justice train had, after many years, finally left the station. She went on to become president of the Brunswick Citizens for a Safe Environment, later re-namedThe Cape Fear Citizens for a Safe Environment, and was at the forefront of the logistical, political, scientific and personal campaign that led to the passage in 2007 of Senate Bill 1492, North Carolina Solid Waste Management Act, which was the first overhaul of the state’s solid waste laws in two decades.

The bill’s siting requirements for new landfills made it impossible to build the Hugo Neu landfill.

Among the people instrumental in championing this particular cause were Giles, Tracy Skrabel and the late Jim Stephenson of the N.C. Coastal Federation. Shortly after the passage of the bill, they asked Carter to become a member of their board of directors.

“I’d been so impressed with the way that (the Federation) had worked at getting this law passed,” she said, “that I accepted.”

She’s been on the board ever since, continuing to disseminate the environmental message. Gov. Mike Easley appointed Carter to the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, which sets development policies in the 20 coastal counties. Gov. Beverly Perdue re-appointed her. Thinking back to her early days at Fordham University, Carter noted that it had taken her all of those intervening years to finally make use of her political science degree

She brings to the commission her activist agenda and a great deal of passion about environmental justice, particularly as it relates to poor, often minority communities.

“There are companies out there that continue to target poor, usually minority communities that more often than not, rely on their environment,” she said. “They hunt, they fish, they dig their own wells. These companies count on these people not to fight.

“I want them to learn that they can fight,” she said, adding that she might not have been able to “connect the dots” of this issue without the federation.

While so much of what led to her work with the federation was based on educational and vocational experiences, the history of what brought her to this space and time goes back even further. In discussions with her father, during the early days of her environmental activism here in North Carolina, they talked of the troublesome “minority” angle of the environmental threats; of the ways that companies targeted and potentially exposed minority and poor communities. These discussions harkened back to an earlier time, when Carter was growing up, and her parents laid the foundation for all that was to come.

“Both my mother and father,” she said, “always taught me to do the right thing.”

WILMINGTON — There was, according to Ron McCord, no “Aha!” moment, no defining event that crystallized his long-time commitment to the N.C. Coastal Federation. It was, rather, a steady growth in his awareness of the environmental threats posed to the coastal region he had adopted.

Born and raised in St. Louis, far from any seacoast concerns, McCord was working for GlaxoSmithKline at Research Triangle Park in the 1980s and began spending summers with his family at Wrightsville Beach. There, for the first time, McCord was exposed to coastal environmental issues.

Ron McCord, standing, and Lewis Piner help move the federation into its new office in Wrightsville Beach.

“That’s when I started getting more interested in the coast,” he said, “and became aware of the development problems. I would read about some of the things that were going on,particularly unscrupulous development, creek pollution, the shellfishing that was closing down, the reduction of the oyster population, and I thought, ‘Something needs to be done about this.’”

Over-development became a pressing concern when McCord and his family moved to Wrightsville Beach. The area’s population swelled in the mid- to late 19880s, and it got so crowded, McCord said, that he’d come home at night and find cars parked in his carport. He sold the home in Wrightsville in 1994 and built a house on the sound side of Topsail Island, where he and his wife, Diane, lived until recently moving back to the Wilmington area.

Continuing to broaden his awareness about his adopted environment, he read an article about the N.C. Coastal Federation, and decided that it would be a good group to get involved with.

“At first, I just became a member and then I started volunteering,” he said. “I did pretty much everything you can think of, from the hands-on dirty work of filling bags with oyster shells for reefs, to using my boat to ferry the oyster shells out and distributing them in the river.

“I’ve lobbied in Raleigh, met with legislators, you name it,” he added, “and I’ve also represented the federation at pretty much every festival in the area.”

Modest to a fault, McCord’s contributions to the federation’s on-going initiatives far exceed his efforts on the front lines of volunteer work. McCord’s association with GlaxoSmithKline, for example, was instrumental in the acquisition of a company grant in 2008 that helped the federation expand its regional offices along the coast.

“Ron is a particularly strong volunteer and spokesperson for the federation,” said Mike Giles, the organization’s Coastal Advocate in the Southeast Region. “He is by far one of our greatest ambassadors.”

McCord, who insists that he’s “not a bleeding heart liberal, but a conservative Republican,” doesn’t do as much of the hands-on dirty work these days, but remains a fierce and vocal advocate for environmental vigilance. He is encouraged these days by a younger generation, which appears to enthusiastically advocate for the environment.

“There’s a fairly large group with the university here (the University of North Carolina-Wilmington), that’s very involved and turn out for work days for planting along the banks and helping fill oyster creeks,” he said. “They turn out in large numbers and are very gung ho.

“In this area,” he added, “I think the transfer of knowledge and interest is quite high.”

Ron is not the only McCord with an active interest in the coastal environment. Diane is an artist whose paintings focus on marshes, beaches. Son, John, who more or less grew up on Wrightsville Beach with a surfboard under his feet, inherited that sport’s somewhat pragmatic interest in clean, coastal waters. He graduated from UNCW’s with a degree in natural resource management and works for the university’s Coastal Studies Institute.

McCord remains committed to the work and the education of others to get that work done. He’s not exactly sure how one goes about convincing people to volunteer –“I wish I knew,” he said — but he does know that for all the progress that’s been made, particularly through the efforts of the federation, the struggle goes on.

“There is still” he said, “a heck of a lot of work to be done.”

Second of two parts

“Where you from?”

Marc Basnight, a retired N.C. senator and once the state’s most powerful politician, pulled up next to an SUV parked at Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head, where a man was dumping sand out of his shoes.

The man looked surprised. “Maryland,” he said.

“How do you like our pier?”

The new cement structure stood high above the curling blue surf. For Basnight, who had craftily maneuvered for N.C. Aquarium funds to buy and later rebuild the old pier, the visitor’s endorsement was almost a personal matter. But the man hadn’t yet been on the pier.

“Well, enjoy it when you do,” Basnight said.

With a frown, he turned his attention to the ocean. “Look,” he said, indicating five imposing ships within a mile of shore.

They were factory fishing ships from the Chesapeake Bay seeking menhaden. “That shouldn’t be allowed so close to shore,” Basnight said. “I thought I had taken care of that. I thought they were supposed to stay offshore.”

But he hadn’t quite taken care of it. A call later confirmed that menhaden boats were allowed within a half mile of the beach in the winter. If those regulations were to be changed, someone else would now have to do it.

Basnight’s retirement from the N.C. Senate in 2010 followed the Republican takeover of the N.C. General Assembly and the loss of his hold on power as the Senate’s president pro tempore. While the Manteo resident remains a force in politics—Basnight is highly influential with Democratic office holders like his protégés Gov. Bev Perdue and U.S. Senator Kay Hagan—the shift has left the coast with a much diminished presence in Raleigh.

U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, D-N.C., (right) and N.C. Sen. Marc Basnight hold an impromptu discussion before the beginning of a 1989 public hearing at Manteo High School on offshore drilling. Photo courtesy of the Outer Banks History Center.

A Rising Star

But in the early 1990s, Basnight’s star was still on the ascent.

As chairman of the Appropriations Committee he was a favorite of then-President Pro Tempore Henson Barnes. The president’s post had recently acquired new significance. When Republican Jim Gardner was elected lieutenant governor in 1988, the Democratic majority in the Senate swiftly transferred much of the powers held by that office to the leader of their own chamber. Suddenly, Barnes rather than Gardner had final say over the budget, assignments to legislative committees and appointments to state boards and commissions.

In 1993 when Barnes announced his retirement, Basnight quickly made a bid for the president’s post. He called in favors and consolidated his support with impressive speed.

“He understood the way power works and the way personalities work,” said Tony Rand, a former Democratic state senator and close Basnight colleague. “Marc is a natural leader. You don’t ascend to a role like that unless people are willing to go down the road with you.”

Basnight swiftly started moving his pet projects through the chamber. Frequently these included his own ideas, gleaned from his voracious reading. On more than one occasion he forgot to tell his staff before announcing his latest grand plan.

In 1996 Basnight was invited to give an Earth Day address at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Invoking images from a huge fish kill that had plagued the Neuse River the previous summer, he announced the creation of a new source of money, the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund, to be used to stem pollution in waterways across the state.

“He had even figured out a way to pay for it,” remembers Bill Holman, an environmental lobbyist at the time who is now director of state policy for the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

People started calling Norma Mills, Basnight’s chief of staff, wanting to know more about the proposal. “But she knew nothing about it,” Holman remembered.

The trust fund became one of Basnight’s most cherished legacies to conservation. Since its inception in 1996, the fund has distributed about $970 million in more than 1,500 grants.  The money has been used to buy sensitive lands threatened by development, clean up hog lagoons, improve sewer plants and reduce stormwater runoff. It also bankrolled major planning initiatives, including a blueprint for restoring the state’s once-great oyster population.

The fund was so closely associated with Basnight that Republicans in the House “would take it hostage in the budget to get Marc to do something they wanted,” said David Rice, a former reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal who covered the N.C. General Assembly for 13 years.

Basnight’s contributions to stemming pollution also included his shepherding of the 1997 Clean Water Responsibility Act, which tightened regulations on hog farms and municipal sewage treatment plants.

Wielding Power

Sen. Marc Basnight (right) and Dean Louis Martin-Vega of N.C. State University’s College of Engineering look out at new engineering building. Basnight was strong support of North Carolina’s university system. NCSU photo.

He deftly wielded political capital, dispensing favors to those who earned them while sometimes punishing others. Rice recalled an incident when Basnight was trying to obtain state funds for a satellite campus in Dare County for the N.C. School of the Arts. Sen. Billy Creech, a Republican from Johnston County, facetiously called the project “UNC-B.” Rice quoted Creech in an article.

When Creech saw the published quote, “he pushed back in his chair and got real quiet,” Rice said. “Then he said, ‘Well, I didn’t want to get anything (in the budget) this year anyway.’”

Rice recalled that Basnight loved to joke with his colleagues and reporters, and that his jokes were often too racy to be repeated. Tony Rand, the Senate’s majority leader from 2001 to 2009, also spoke fondly of Basnight’s playful side. “We had fun, oh we had fun,” he said. But when asked to give an example, he demurred.

The fun could turn off in an instant when Basnight grew displeased. Legislative insiders tell of state employees being bullied into changing their positions on sensitive issues. And, they note, Basnight’s temper was legendary. Some used names to refer to Basnight that were not always meant to be flattering — The Boss, The King and The Squire of Manteo.

Basnight also amassed a huge campaign war chest, much of it from business interests.

It was inevitable that inland legislators began to resent the state funds flowing to the coast for special projects — The David Stick Library at the Outer Banks History Center, Roanoke Island Festival Park, Jennette’s Pier. And environmentalists bristled at the ease with which developers in Basnight’s district could grease the skids for pending permits simply by calling Basnight’s office.

In a 1995 editorial headlined “Basnight’s Lofty View,” the Raleigh News & Observer wrote that the senate president had “flirted with crossing the line” with too much arm twisting. The column cited Basnight’s interference with fisheries management issues and his diversion of $700,000 from an account in the state Department of Cultural Resources so it could be used to develop the Elizabeth II historic site at Festival Park in Manteo. “To be fair,” the editorial added, “Basnight has also been a champion of open government.”

As his terms as senate president stacked up year after year —an unprecedented run in state history—the criticisms and jealousies mounted. U.S. 64, the road between Raleigh and Manteo, was dubbed “Basnight’s Driveway” by some of his critics. It was raised and widened, while busier coastal roads like U.S. 17 remained narrow and congested.

“I never minded getting beat up in print,” Basnight insisted.  “I say bring it on. Free speech is one of the greatest things in this country. Let freedom ring.”

America’s founders—Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams and others— savaged each other “in pen and print,” he said. “It’s all part of the process. The truth will come out.”

Personal Trials

In 2002 Basnight suffered the first of a string of personal trials when his wife, Sandy, was diagnosed with cancer. He responded by seeking the best treatment for her—and in the process funneled $180 million to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a cancer hospital and imaging center. That initial funding was followed by a recurring $50 million annual appropriation from the legislature despite tight state budgets and is making North Carolina a leader in cancer treatment.

Marc Basnight and his late wife, Sandy. AP Photo.

“The origin of it was his wife’s disease,” said Rice, “but its implications reach out to the one in three of us who will have that disease.”

Perhaps the most lasting of Basnight’s legacies will be his support of the state university system. In 2000 he was the driving force behind a $3.1 billion bond initiative for higher education, including community colleges. The bond was approved by 70 percent of the voters. He also funneled budget allocations into university research program.

Reflecting on his legislative legacy, Basnight mused, “We did a lot of good things with the universities, but with the environment too—in ways you wouldn’t even hear about.” He mentioned pushing the N.C. Department of Environmental and Natural Resources staff to clean up Swift Creek, one of the most polluted waterways in the state.

With a mischievous smile, he also told of replacing all the lights in both state Senate and House chambers with energy-efficient bulbs.

“They said the new light bulbs would cause headaches. I put them in and they never knew the difference.

“Everything we did, if it wasn’t going to make the world a better place, we knew it wasn’t worth doing.”

Through the years Basnight became an ally of N.C. Coastal Federation, which he said he admired because of its reasoned approach to conservation, emphasis on stormwater control and strong stance against beach hardening.

In 2003 the Coastal Resources Commission granted a variance to the state’s long-standing regulatory ban against seawalls and other types of erosion-control structures on the beach to allow the installation of sheet pilings along N.C. 12 in Kitty Hawk. The road was in danger of collapsing into the ocean. Basnight responded by shepherding through a bill that gave the ban against beach hardening the full weight of the law. However, the federation and other conservation groups were disappointed a few years later when a Basnight-led Senate passed a bill to weaken the so-called seawall ban to allow small jetties on the beach.

Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head undergoes construction. Marc Basnight maneuvered for N.C. Aquarium funds to buy and rebuild the old pier.
Basnight also began pushing for the use of stormwater controls like cisterns and rain gardens on state property. He installed stormwater controls at his restaurant.

Fire the destroyed the Lone Cedar Café in May 2007.  To everyone’s shock, the State Bureau of Investigation ruled the cause as arson, but no arrest was ever made.

Although he no longer visits with diners at the rebuilt Lone Cedar, Basnight spends time there overseeing changes to the waterfront, which includes an ever-expanding array of conservation features.

A month after the fire, Sandy Basnight lost her five-year battle with cancer.

Disease Strikes

Two weeks later, Rand said, Basnight fell for the first time. “(He) just toppled over face first. It’s his equilibrium,” Rand said.

Within a short period he fell twice more.

Doctors at first diagnosed a Parkinson-like nerve disease. His speech began to slow and slur, but initially he was able to adapt it to his folksy style of speaking.

After Republicans took over the Senate in the 2010 elections, Basnight lost his leadership position and would have had to go back to debating legislation on the floor. He said he had neither the necessary quickness of speech nor the strength for long stints on his feet.

In his resignation letter in January 2011, Basnight cited an additional reason for coming home: He was newly in love with Manteo resident Sue Waters, a teacher and musician.

Basnight is philosophical about having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a degenerative disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the neurons eventually leads to their death. When the motor neurons die, the brain loses its ability to initiate and control muscle movement. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed and unable to breath on their own. While there is no known cure or a treatment that halts or reverses ALS, some drugs can slow the progression and several others show promise in clinical trials.

In this county, the disease gets its more popular name from Lou Gehrig, a Hall of Fame baseball player for the N.Y. Yankees. He brought national and international attention to the disease when he abruptly retired from baseball after being diagnosed with ALS in 1939. He died two years later. Other notable people who have had ALS include Jim “Catfish” Hunter, a Hall of Fame pitcher from Hertford; Sen. Jacob Javits; actors Michael Zaslow and David Niven; boxing champion Ezzard Charles; jazz musician Charles Mingus; and Henry Wallace, a former vice president.

“There’s nothing so special about me that I shouldn’t have this disease,” Basnight said.

He is pursuing all treatments, as he urged Sandy to do with her cancer. Recently he had seen a new doctor in Charlotte, who he said offered him hope. “We’ve been once and we’re going back.”

His public role may be gone, but his charm remains—as does his colleagues’ and constituents’ regard for him.

“Politics make some people grow and some people swell,” Tony Rand said. “Marc never swelled.”

Sign a Petition to Help ALS Patients

Ed Johnson, a longtime federation member who owns a bike shop in Cedar Point in Carteret County, also has been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

He notes that more than 40 treatments are now undergoing FDA trials and that there is great hope for every ALS patient.

Patients and their caregivers have started a Facebook page and are circulating a petition asking the FDA to make promising drugs more quickly available.

Coming Feb. 20: A profile of Sen. Harry Brown of Onslow County, the Republican majority leader in the state Senate and highest-ranking coastal legislator.

First of two parts

NAGS HEAD — On a mild December morning, Marc Basnight stood on the shore of his family restaurant, the Lone Cedar Café in Nags Head, showing off the post-hurricane improvements. “Look,” he said, pointing to the newly placed riprap, “recycled concrete, crushed into small pieces. It cost me a fortune.”

He pointed to the edge, where the rock met the lapping waves of Roanoke Sound.

“But late at night I have counted thousands of mullet down there,” he said “And we will have zero stormwater coming off this property.”

Basnight, 64, has avoided the press since his retirement from the N.C. Senate a year ago. He has been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. In this country, it’s better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Still straight-backed, dapper and very sharp, he stays out of the public spotlight, in part because of a slowness of speech and weakness that makes it difficult for him to stand for long periods.

“I must have turned down 15 interviews, maybe more,” he said, shaking his head to yet another request.

Still, he couldn’t help giving a tour of the hardy roses that had survived a foot of water from Hurricane Irene. He proudly pointed out the restaurant’s water recycling system. He paused next to the back fences, fashioned from recycled cooking oil jugs and plastic drink bottles. A fence on the west side of the property consisted of carefully stacked wine and beer bottles.

“You should see that when the sun gets low,” he said, pointing to the glass assortment.

As pretty as the northern lights? A big grin spread across the senator’s thin face. “Yes. Beautiful.”

And a few minutes later, “Do you have time to ride to Jennette’s Pier?”

Marc Basnight (seated, right) joins the other members of the Dare County Bicentennial Committee in 1976. Seated next to Basnight is Natalie Case Austin. Standing are Bobby Owens, a county commissionor (left) and Carlisle Davis, the Manteo mayor. Photo courtesy of the Outer Banks History Center.

The Survivor

During his 26 years in the state senate—the last 17 as president pro tempore—Basnight grew to be the most politically powerful man in the state. He outlasted governors, opponents and many of his closest colleagues. He developed a reputation for ferociousness when it came to defending favorite causes—a number of which included protections for coastal waters.

He also grew beloved by his constituents, who knew him not only as the go-to man for solving problems, but as folksy and approachable, with disarming candor and charm. Basnight loved to chat with residents of District 1 whenever he stopped in a store or strolled the winter beach.

“I never wanted to be a leader,” he mused.

Really?

“Never. I didn’t want to be put on a pedestal. I wanted to challenge people and get them thinking big, beyond the problems in their own districts, about problems in the world.”

It’s been an interesting ride for a small-town native and graduate of Manteo High School—his highest educational honor until the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill awarded him an honorary doctorate of law in 1999.

As a legislator, Basnight was known for his curiosity and thirst to learn about issues. Discussing problems with constituents, he would turn to a staff member and say, “We need to know more about this. Get me a report about it.”

That wasn’t always the case. As a boy Basnight was a middling student who loved to have fun and play jokes on others. One classmate remembered Basnight piloting a skiff through flooded Manteo streets during Hurricane Donna, scooping up baby dolls that had floated out of the Ben Franklin store. There are also tales about an 11-year-old Marc organizing a town football team, with Saturday practices and occasional games against the rival Wanchese team.

In high school he played on the football team and hung out with pals, including Charlie Fearing and the late Buddy Davis. After graduating in l966, Basnight worked for the family construction business. Bobby Owens, Basnight’s brother-in-law and the long-time chairman of the Dare County Board of Commissioners, remembers a shirtless Basnight riding a bulldozer with his father. “He came from a large family and always worked hard,” Owens said. In 1968, Basnight married a local girl, Sandy Tillett.

‘Backwards Dumb’

His interest in civic affairs led him to a post as the first chairman of the county tourism board. He soon attracted the attention of the late Walter Royal Davis, an oil tycoon and a major influence in state Democratic politics.

“Mr. Davis took a liking to him and in a sense Marc became the son Mr. Davis never had,” Owens said. “At the beginning Mr. Davis told him how backwards dumb he was.”

Davis started sending Basnight the magazine The Economist and suggested other reading material.

Walter Davis

When he announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election in 1984, state Sen. Melvin Daniels asked everyone to support his cousin, Marc Basnight, who was then on the state Board of Transportation. “It was a total surprise to Marc,” Owens said.

In such a strongly Democratic county, it was tantamount to Daniels anointing his heir. Basnight won the seat handily.

Why did he enter politics?

“Isolation,” Basnight answered immediately. “I wanted to change that for the Outer Banks.”

When the legislative term opened in 1985, he attended a Democratic Caucus meeting in Pinehurst, where freshmen senators were invited to introduce themselves and say a few words. “I told them I’m from the Outer Banks, which you may not know about,” Basnight remembered. “Our roads were terrible, and our bridges. The highway to Hatteras was atrocious. I told them I felt like we should be part of the Commonwealth of Virginia. And I did feel that way.”

A wry smile creased his face.

“But I paid the price. I didn’t get very much accomplished that whole first year.”

It was a lesson he took to heart. Basnight was elected by business supporters, and everyone assumed it was to them he would pay his highest allegiance. But within a few years he developed an unusual interest in environmental issues. Bill Holman, then the only environmental lobbyist working the N.C. Assembly, remembers trying to get Basnight to support a ban against phosphate laundry detergents in 1985. Basnight didn’t go for it. “He was still very much in the mold of a DOT-construction guy,” said Holman, now director of state policy for the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

Interest in Environment

But a shift occurred after a group called the Friends of Hatteras Island began fighting development of a golf course in Buxton Woods on Hatteras Island, Holman said. The group feared that chemical fertilizers and herbicides from the course would pollute public drinking wells. Other residents complained of seeing pollution for the first time in local waterways.

“He talked to his constituents and found out how important clean water is to the economy,” Holman said.

Sen. Marc Basnight, left, has a laugh with Ken Mann, the past president of the Outer Banks Chamber of Commerce, during a legislative breakfast in Nags Head in 1989. Photo courtesy of the Outer Banks History Center.

Basnight’s first years in the Senate coincided with a legislative sea change. The old guard was retiring, and the new senators had environmental issues on their radar screen.

“They were more moderate,” remembered Tony Rand, a long-time Democratic state senator and the majority leader from 2001 to 2009. “They came of age when the environment was something to pay attention to.”

“Some people come to the legislature and have a world view and they never change,” Holman said. “Marc started reading stuff and was intellectually curious enough to pay attention.”

Basnight specialized in helping those he came to call “the little man,” people without wealth or political connections whose needs, he believed, had long been ignored in Raleigh. To make it easier for working folks, he had his staff open his office early, by 7:30 or 8 a.m. and keep it open at least until 6 p.m. There was no voice mail or email in those days; every caller spoke with an aide. His style of constituent services was reminiscent of Jesse Helms, the Republican U.S. senator known for helping N.C. residents cut through government red tape. If you called Basnight’s office, you knew you would get a response—although Basnight would tell you frankly when he disagreed with you.

But Basnight took constituent services to a new level, Holman said. “Helms would solve problems, but he wouldn’t do anything about the policy that had caused the problems. Senator Basnight would want to fix the policy that had caused it. He wanted to change things. He worked his ass off. He was incredibly driven.”

Basnight never lost his Outer Banks hoi-toide accent, and the Raleigh press made much of his frequent malapropisms. Nonetheless, he quickly learned to maneuver through the Capitol. “He was comfortable in his skin,” Rand said.

He became known as a forceful orator and political player.

Then in 1988 a Republican, James Garner, defeated Tony Rand in his bid for lieutenant governor. The election of a Republican to that office set the stage for a procedural change that a few years later would greatly affect the senator from District 1—consolidating his power and thrusting him into the crosshairs of controversy.

Tuesday: Marc Basnight’s rise to power