The Tar Heel Outdoorsman

It's a funky place, Wilmington.  A weird mix of beach luxury, old in-town money, yet grittiness of a port city with a blue collar and service economy backbone, and poverty and drugs and violence in the "wrong" part of town, and people who grew up there with roots reaching down through generations of sandy dirt, and now more than ever a mix of "new" people from all over and North and West.   It's a funky river, the Cape Fear, and her sister, the Northeast Cape Fear.  It's sometimes a dirty river---industry, logging, chemicals and heavy metals, fuel, both nearby and upriver, and the sprawling semi-urban and suburban landscape of New Hanover and the quickly developing Brunswick and Pender Counties.  It's an old river, full of history.  From the Native Americans who first called the area home, to the English colonists and the raiding Spanish at Brunswick Town, to the economy of naval stores and tar and pitch and turpentine, to the last port and   "...

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.  

Rails.  Marsh hens.  Rail birds.  Marsh chickens. Whatever you wanna call 'em. I'm by no means an experienced marsh hen hunter . . . I've only tried for the salt marsh fowl a handful of times. There can be some work required for this briny mix of dove and quail hunting.  Especially trying to push the skiff through the spartina grass when the tide hasn't risen quite enough . . .  especially with a not-quite-long-enough push pole.  You, like me, may be huffing and puffing. But when you spy a rail-bird through the grass, when you see that long distinctive bill, when you see that dark brown, slinking through the flooded grass, low, low like a nutria or a rat, those hunting instincts that lay dormant in many of us start to stir. This really is hunting , though the shooting isn't all that difficult.  Your eyes straining, looking for the small bird, the bird just trying to evade your detection.  He, the bird, won't jump up and flush easily....

I’m not asking ya’ll to fully understand what it was like growing up hunting and fishing in Eastern North Carolina.  But it was great.  It’s something I really am thankful for.                         It was cold and dark.   There was that nip in the salty morning air that tells you its hunting season.   The flame from the propane burner and the hot oil just starting to pop and bubble in the charred aluminum fish fryer would only momentarily warm my hands.   My little brother and I stood around the burner.   When the thermometer read 350, I dropped in two lightly breaded bluefish filets, trying not splash the oil.   The cold filets sank in the hot oil.   A few minutes later they floated to the surface, the breader crusted into that gold brown characteristic of most fried food.   We ate them and they were darn goo...