Daybreak on Ocracoke Island, many winter mornings, finds Ronnie O’Neal heading out to one of his stake blinds in the Pamlico Sound, pursuing a tradition that his grandfather practiced years before. Earl Gaskins, Beaver Tillett, and several other Ocracokers are doing the same thing, carrying visitors from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia — some […]
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Ocracoke’s historic landmark, the Island Inn, went up for public auction on the steps of the Hyde County Courthouse on Oct. 21. The owner of the inn, Branch Banking and Trust, received no acceptable bids, so the company placed a bid itself and bought it back. The bank is expected to put the property on […]
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Jelly balls, jelly bombs, cannon balls, cabbage heads or whatever you call them, the month of November found them all over the soundside of Ocracoke Island and southern Hatteras Island, rolling in on the beaches, clogging up fishing nets, even making their way up onto docks. Ocracoke fisherman Wayne Teeter, owner of the Ocracoke Crab […]
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Some years ago, a 5-year-old boy was found wandering alone along the beach at Ocracoke Island’s South Point. The story he told was heart-rending. His brother, two years older, had ventured too far out into the channel and had been caught in a rip current. The father, seeing his son pulled under, had tried to save him. Neither had returned. No one […]
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By PAT GARBER “Meet at Jack’s Store at 7:30 a.m.,” were the directives for a cloudless morning in late September on Ocracoke Island. At the dock behind what was once Jack’s Store, now the Waterman’s Exhibit and office for the Ocracoke Foundation, a group of five Ocracokers converged, some still yawning with coffee cups in […]
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“Foreclosure Auction, Ocracoke Island Inn” reads the newspaper ad in Ocracoke’s local newspaper. “Sold at public auction to the highest bidder on the courthouse steps, October 21, 2010.” For over a century, the lovely Island Inn has stood in quiet elegance in Ocracoke village, not far from the Lighthouse, an island institution of historic proportions. Listed […]
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By Pat Garber “If such a place there be, an island in the sun, where horses free as spindrift run.” –Jeanetta Hennings, from her 1985 book “Conquistadore’s Legacy: The Horses of Ocracoke.” Thirty-three years ago, on the island of Ocracoke, a Banker pony mare retreated into the marsh grasses along the Pamlico Sound to deliver […]
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“Yuck. There is slimy stuff all over the beach!” During the last weeks of May, beachgoers and sport fishermen at Ocracoke’s ocean beaches came across an oddity that few recognized. “A strange kind of slimy grass” was how one fisherman described it. “Gooey strings resembling frog eggs” was someone else’s comment. The organisms floated in […]
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Comatitlan is a small rural village far south of the United States border. Close to Mexico City, in the state of Hidalgo, it is surrounded by mountains, and near it flows a river where groves of orange trees, mangos, bananas, avocados, lemons, and pecans grow. It is an idyllic place where little, privately owned farms […]
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“No wetlands, no seafood” is the logo on a bumper sticker from the North Carolina Coastal Federation (NCCF.) It is quite appropriate, therefore, that one of the group’s latest projects is restoring wetlands on Ocracoke Island. The federation teamed up with the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT) to replant an acre […]
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