The Tar Heel Outdoorsman

                                              It was mid-June, and the lawyer-quiz was not far off.  Sometimes, you need a break, to clear your head, to get some clean(er) oxygen to the brain, to keep that thing inside your skull from turning to mush, jumbled with actus reus  and fee simple subject to a condition subsequent  and the  rule against perpetuities  and the elements of common law burglary or larceny and d uty-breach-causation damages and ... on and on and on.  So, trusty Old Town canoe on the truck, I drove a mere five minutes from my cookie-cutter apartments to a little bit of public land, near where I had often duck-hunted in my undergrad years.  I'd fished there before, and never had much luck, but in a different area, and by foot, not by boat.  As much as I'd like to describe it mor...

The beauty of the unexpected---it's what drives many of us to the natural world.  You might not catch a thing or see a single bird.  Or, perhaps, you might get lucky.  You might catch a permit on a bass fly.  Or even a near 30" brown trout while carp fishing, with cicada dry flies, on a broken rod.  Or even a black duck out of a white Whaler boat.  You just never know...

It was the first weekend of the first "split" of duck season.  Mid-November.  Unfortunately . . . our first hunt on the sound this year didn't go quite as planned.   Several buddies and I had two Currituck National Wildlife Refuge Blinds, off Knotts Island.  We've had good hunts there before , and I love going up to that part of the world.  Northeastern North Carolina is a special place, a place full of water and waterways.  A place full of history, thanks to all that water.  One of the first colonized areas of Carolina.  Knotts Island is an especially unique place . . . and getting there from the rest of our state requires boarding the Currituck ferry or driving into Virginia, and coming back south, down NC 615, through Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge, and onto Knotts Island, the island-peninsula jutting out into the Currituck Sound. This year, we rented a cabin at a campground right on the state line.  Wate...

A look back . . .  Speckled trout.  What a great fish.  To fish for, to catch, and, every once in a while, to invite a few to dinner . . . When the trout get thick and start chewing, it's that time of year.  The temperature cools and the water clears.  It's the best time time of year---fall on the coast of Carolina. Catch 'em from the skiff, catch 'em from the jetty.   It just doesn't get much better . . . especially when these "trout-tivities" coincide with spoil island skeet shooting and some Turkey day oysters and a bit of Atlantic Beach pie.