Terns Turning
Last week I had a chance to get a boat ride out on Pamlico Sound to a spoil island near Hatteras Inlet.
Spoil islands are man made from sand dredged to maintain the ferry channel between Hatteras and Ocracoke.
These “engineered” islands make good habitat for nesting terns and other colonial waterbirds, like Black Skimmers.
With the Summer season drawing to a close, nesting is done.
Lots of activity still prevails, and the mature birds continue to catch fish for growing juveniles.
The adults are loosing their handsome breeding appearance in favor of less dramatic winter plumage.
An adult sandwich tern, in non-breeding plumage, brings its catch in for a family member.
This island has a mix of Royal Terns and Sandwich Terns.
Adult Royal Terns have orange bills, and their juveniles have yellow bills.
Mature Sandwich Terns have black bills with yellow tips.
Their corresponding juvenile’s bills are dark and less distinctive.
Next Spring the tern population will renew the species once again,
looking their best in bright breeding plumage.
Latest Casualty
Yesterday morning I heard that the yellow house at the end of Buela O’Neal Road had just fallen on to the beach. Of the latest casualties, this is one of the older ones, a modest beach box. It may have been built in the 70’s or early 80’s. There was a light rain coming down, but I went to look anyway.
The owner had been working with local government and Park Service officials on trying to save the house. His insurance company would not help. In order to collect through the federal flood insurance program, the structure has to have been already damaged or destroyed by flood (encroaching sea) before collecting. I hope this owner was covered.
Now the remnants will be all over the beach, creating an unsightly and potentially dangerous condition. This is nothing new. It happens time and again. There is little incentive to save these imperiled structures.
There is something wrong with the system that repeatedly allows this to happen.
This is the view looking to the south toward the Rodanthe Pier. So much for our pristine beach.
Soft Shell Guru
Some of my most gratifying work as a photographer has been freelance jobs for the North Carolina Sea Grant publication, Coastwatch. My work first appeared there in 1981, when it was a fledgling newsletter of just a few pages.
Living on Cape Hatteras, I shared many common interests with Sea Grant, and they began to give me some assignments. Each job was intriguing and put me in touch with some fascinating people.
One of these was Murray Bridges, a commercial crabber. Based in Colington, Bridges not only caught crabs, but he was and still is, best known for his business of producing soft shell crabs. He started Endurance Seafood in the 70’s as a family operated venture, and today at 79 years of age continues to do so. His pioneering contributions to the local soft shell crab industry are legendary.
I met Murray in May, 2001 for a Coastwatch story. He was very friendly, engaging and loved his work. These are a few of my shots using a Nikon F100 with Fujichrome slide film.
There were well over 100 tanks connected with plumbing, all for the purpose of molting crabs.
The crabs have to be attended 24 hours a day.
Peelers await to shed their shells.
Murray picked up a nice buster for me.
A pile of empty shells was evidence of past shedding.
Once packed in wet eel grass, they’re cooled and ready for shipment.
In season, they move them out by the thousands every day.
I enjoyed my visit, and went home with 4 dozen soft crabs.
The Grommet House
An accountant from Northern Virginia by the name of Myers, owned a cottage on the oceanfront in Rodanthe. It was a ramshackle place, built at a time when, if there were any building codes, they weren’t enforced much. The Myers family used to spend Summers there. Two of their kids were Worth and Gladys. They partied with the locals. In the winter, two of my friends Carlen and Dave, rented the place.
Robin and I surfed in front of it for years. It had a consistently good breaking wave and the mainstream surfers from Virginia Beach hadn’t discovered it.
A bit of a landmark, I photographed it for a period when I thought it was going to wash away. I saw the Rodanthe oceanfront nearly every day, checking the waves and exploring. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that I was also witnessing a complex process of barrier island dynamics. It fascinated me, how the beach environment reshaped with each storm.
Then the surfers from the north began coming. And as surfers will do, they name a spot after something they can relate to. From then on it was dubbed the grommet house. Grommet is surfing slang for a young or beginning surfer. In the longboard days, they were referred to as a gremmie. The Grommet House became a popular, packed out surf spot, but by then Robin and I moved on to other secret breaks to elude the crowds. We were always one or two steps ahead of the masses.
The Myers cottage gets some weather in March of 1980.
The house was still holding fast in 1982, and the beach made some accretion. The dune line in the background would later shelter a subdivision called Mirlo Beach.
The driveway got pummeled into the sand.
The ocean eventually took over, and the house fell into the sea.