The northern migration of cruising sailboats continues to keep Oriental's anchorage a busy place.
If you know the right people you can get one of these front row seats for all the anchoring action plus a great sunset view.
I love the "Mad Men" chairs.
Commercial trawler undergoing extensive repairs at Chris Fulcher's Point Pride Seafood docks (located on Chadwick Point)Local shrimp-baron Chris Fulcher has been renovating some trawlers at his docks during the past couple of years... Looks like he buys pretty decrepit vessels, guts em and puts in all new everything.
When it comes time for sandblasting, painting, or installing super-secret shrimp boat technology, the boats are enshrouded in these canvas/dacron sail-looking cloths ...
When the wind blows and the wrappings shiver, it always make me think of "The Crimson Permanent Assurance" building after its aging clerks mutiny and go pirating through the financial district in the short Terry Gilliam film at the beginning of Monty Python's "Meaning of Life":
An old artificial reef about half a mile off of Oriental's Whitehurst Point (mouth of Pierce's Creek) is undergoing a major expansion thanks to the Town's raising donations and grant funding for the project.
The old artificial reef at the site was built during that unfortunate era when it was common to use old automobile tires as the reef material - 22,000 tires were dumped in the river at this location.
The idea was we could get rid of all those old tires that would go to a landfill or tire mountain, and at the same time create a fish-friendly reef... Turns out tires reefs don't provide good platforms for immobile organisms and therefore don't end up attracting many fish - also the tires don't stay in place very well, and get spread out all over the place by storms.
The new expansion project will be using marl and concrete "reef balls" - kind of like giant concrete wiffle balls - to create the new hard-surfaces immobile creatures and oysters enjoy, and plenty of hidey holes that fish will hopefully adopt as their new homes. It also looks like there are some large concrete structures like highway dividers or hog slats on the barge.
The yellow buoy demarcates a corner of the reef area. The green buoy in the foreground is one of the new buoys recently added to the channel into Whittaker's Creek.
Sailing students on board "Kava," one of vessels in the Oriental School of Sailing fleet, were performing quick-tack and jibe maneuvers in the narrow confines of Raccoon Creek today.
Here she is running out of the creek past Chadwick Point.-30-
The Oriental School of Sailing has a small fleet of sailboats, all the same color (matching the trademark red of shrimp-baron Chris Fulcher's fleet of trawlers, background), and one or two or more of them are out almost every day during the spring and summer as part of their Basic Keelboat Certification training.
Another sure sign of springToday my neighbors went off on their annual visit to Swan Island, and left me in charge of hundreds of seedlings and small plants, as well as three cats.
Within two hours after they left, I found that the three cats were now seven.
Luckily momma cats pretty much take care of it all, so I think I can bear with the unexpected extra duties.
Posts
All Comments
Posts
All Comments
