|
Ocracoke and SealevelNov 16, 2007
|
|
The Ocracoke Light
Ocracoke is much more like a quaint seaside village
The Ocracoke ferry
| 11/15 - 16 Ocracoke Island, Cedar Island, and the Intercoastal Waterway. When we left Hatteras Island, we decided to take the ferries down along the island chain. It is a 40 minute free ride across Hatteras Inlet to Ocracoke Island. The ferries on this route are fairly small, room enough for 20 or 30 cars, but tight for a big pickup and a 25 foot trailer - especially if there are a couple of semis that also want to go! Ocracoke Island is all national seashore except for the small village at the south end. This island also has "wild ponies" which are supposed to be the progeny of ponies that survived shipwrecks in colonial times. We saw a few of them, sturdy-looking, compact pintos for the most part. The ponies are actually confined to a few hundred acres of fenced pasture because feral horses are hard on vegetation and the dunes are really unstable. Ocracoke Village is much more like what I expected the outer banks to be - quaint, narrow streets, and not too many tourist traps. Marshes with little tidal creeks, duck blinds on pilings out on the sand flats, and some authentic looking fishing boats add to the step-back-in-time atmosphere. From Ocracoke, the ferry is a 2 hour and 15 minute ride to Cedar Island. This is a bigger ferry, and crosses some wide open water, but it is shallow and most of the channel markers are on pilings. We did see some boats that looked like they might be purse-seining for menhaden and trawling for shrimp (Fresh-caught jumbo shrimp are $5 per pound fresh off the boat!). Half way across this passage, we got hit with 35 knot winds and a rain and hail storm. Darlene had gone to the trailer to get some snacks and make a cup of tea, and was trying to get back to the truck when the storm hit. The combination of boat speed and wind speed made the apparent wind about 50 mph with sheets of rain and salt spray on the ferry deck and she was soaked and cold before she could get in the truck. It continued to pour rain as we got off the ferry, so we pulled into a little campground in the tiny town of Sealevel, NC to hunker down and wait it out. Sealevel is really what I expected this coastline to be like. Small towns, big marshes, lots of boats and fishing shacks, lots of wildlife and country that is big enough and harsh enough to have resisted being subdued by the hand (and greed) of well-meaning mankind. This little campground is beautiful. When I walked the dogs this morning, mallards were landing in the boat basin, herons and gulls were fishing on all sides and I could see scallops, oysters, and clams along the shore and shrimp were kicking along in the shallows. We headed into Beaufort, another very attractive town that dates to the early 1700s as a seaport and pirate hideaway. There is a small, but first-class, maritime museum that includes a surprisingly large and well-equipped wooden boat shop where a group of old dudes (much like my coffee group) were working on a couple of classy construction and reconstruction projects. This harbor was full of nice boats, some cruising sailors as well as commercial and sport fishermen and an estuary research station. The houses along the water front in Beaufort had plaques with dates mostly in the early 1800s, but a few in the 1700s. These houses are excellent examples of plantation-style architecture, but are most likely sea-captain and merchants houses. There is a characteristic "Carolina Skiff" boat here, which is a big, flat-bottomed, Garvey or John-boat type, made of fiberglass mostly and mostly 20 to 24 feet long with 6 to 8 foot beam, and powered by up to 250 HP outboards. I suspect that this is an adaptation of the commercial clam and oyster boats developed for shallow-water sport fishing. There are also many of the big Hatteras and Bertram sport-fishers that are very classy off-shore fishing machines, and some open semi-V, flared bow fishing boats that are set up like the Super-Pangas in Mexico. I saw one open boat, which was about 26 feet with probably close to 10 feet beam, that had twin 300 HP Suzuki outboards - it had to have been scary-fast, and also scary expensive! We drove along toward Wilmington, NC, stopping for lunch at an all-you-can eat seafood buffet with fresh local shrimp and flounder filets, clam chowder and hushpuppies for $6.99. I expect to sprout gills before this trip is over! |
Advertisement 
|
