8.24- Sunday Night Shrimping in Oriental Harbor

Trails of light left by small boats shrimping in Oriental Harbor.

Sunday through Friday is shrimping time in NC, and Oriental Harbor is no exception.

There is a shrimping curfew from Friday midnight to Sunday noon, which is why there are dozens of large commercial trawlers docked in the harbor on the weekend (as seen in the banner photo at the top of this blog), and almost none during the week... Local lore has it that the Sunday noon ending time is so commercial shrimping crews can go to church, which is a bit of a laugh...

While most of the large commercial trawlers that operate out of Oriental (featured in the header photo at the top of this blog) are out shrimping in Pamlico Sound, Oriental Harbor hosts many local shrimpers in much smaller boats (see my post of July 22 for a daytime picture of "Play'n Hookey," a vessel similar to the ones leaving the light trails in today's pictures).

The small boat shrimpers circle around in a complex dance around Oriental Harbor and the channel into the Neuse River, towing their nets and periodically stopping to haul their nets and separate their catch... shrimp are kept, while untold hordes of mullet, menhaden and other minnows so prolific in local estuaries are unceremoniously dumped overboard (usually dead or dying).

Sunday night sees the heaviest small shrimper traffic of the week, with a dozen to twenty or so boats working the waters.

After sunset the boats putter around in almost complete darkness, most of the time with only their navigational lights on... Spotlights are used intermittently to illuminate obstacles (shoreline, other shrimping boats, anchored sailboats, channel markers, bridge piers, and the buoys that float above the ends of each boat's net), and deck lights turn on when it is time to haul in the full nets and separate the catch. All these lights contributed to today's photo.

The soft glow in the sky on the right side of today's photo comes from the lights of Beaufort and Morehead City, about 20 miles to the South. You can barely see the glow at night with the naked eye, but it becomes more pronounce in this time exposure photo.

Some of the boats have music playing on board; tonight I heard some AC/DC and Led Zeppelin as the boats passed near the bridge from which I was shooting pictures.

Technical info: this picture was taken with a Canon Rebel XTI, with the following settings: ISO 400, f.5.6, with exposure time of just under 8 minutes.

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