8.31- "Chicken Dance" and Ice Cream on the Tiki Deck

As sunset approaches, an accordionist entertains some ice-cream-eating fans with the "Chicken Dance" on the Tiki Bar deck at Oriental Marina & Inn on Raccoon Creek.

These young ladies requested the "Chicken Dance," then danced about 5 seconds before returning to their ice cream (from "The Bean," across the street)... they kept moving to the beat, and seemed pleased with the song, but doing the Chicken Dance does require clapping one's hands too often to be compatible with eating ice-cream.

The Tiki Bar deck is a great place to watch the sun setting over Raccoon Creek and the commercial trawlers tied up at Garland Fulcher Seafood. I'll feature a sunset shot from the Tiki deck sometime soon.

Aliens staying in the hotel or on boats at the marina mix with a good crowd of local regulars, and on summer weekends there are usually a bunch of kids and dogs playing on the grass by the visiting sail and power pleasure boats tied up at the Oriental Marina & Inn slips.

Sometimes the older kids play bocce on the lawn, and on most summer weekend nights there is a live band on the deck.

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8.30- Stuck in the Mud

A 40' Lord Nelson, the "Aurora," home port Parker, Texas, sits stuck in the mud of Oriental Harbor.

This itinerant sailboat ran aground in the soft mud of Oriental Harbor while seeking anchorage near dusk this evening.

After running aground, the sailboat captain used his dinghy to set an anchor, and unsuccessfully tried to "kedge" the boat off her ground.

Soon after the failed kedging attempt, a passing Boston Whaler with an 80 HP outboard offered to help tow the boat off... she gave it a good try for about ten minutes, but this sailboat was good and stuck as the sun was setting.

Guessing the sailboat draws 6 feet or more, probably with a full keel (she looks to be a blue-water sailer), stuck in 5.5 feet of water with the wind blowing towards even shallower water.

We'll see if and how she makes it out of the mud tomorrow.

[8.31 Addendum - She did make it out the next morning by motoring back the way she came in (the wind-tide had also risen a half foot or so overnight.)

After a day out sailing, she came back and anchored in a deeper part of the harbor. I sailed out in the Bauer dinghy, and met the boat's captain.

She is the "Aurora," and has been the home to Captain Ted and his wife since they sailed from Port Aransas, TX last November. The couple expect to winter over in the Chesapeake Bay and then... maybe bahamas, maybe who knows?

The "Aurora" is a 39 foot (deck length... bow sprit adds another 9 feet) "Lord Nelson" blue water sailboat built in Tawain. Capt. Ted explained a bit of the history of the "Lord Nelsons," but about all I retained was that it was essentially an adaptation of an earlier design, the "Hans Christian."]

Hopefully, we will also find out why there is a faux goose standing on the bowsprit!

[8.31 Addendum - Capt. Ted explained that the goose is the boat's "guard-goose," whose so-far-successful mission is to keep elephants off of the boat.]

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8.29- Masses of Menhaden

Menhaden (a type of fish) schooling next to the Hodges Street causeway over Raccoon Creek (next to Town Dock).

The menhaden invasion continues... Untold millions of menhaden minnows have thronged area creeks this summer, thriving in their estuaries.

The enormous schools of menhaden minnows create "boiling" effects along creek shores and docks. Especially on calm days, when the wind is not creating waves, the water everywhere seems to shimmer as the never-ending schools of tightly packed menhaden create surface turbulence.

I did take a video of the menhaden, since the still picture does not quite capture their frenetic nature:


All I Know About Menhaden (at least I think it's interesting):

Local crabbers (recreational and commercial) and recreational fishers use menhaden for bait. It is extremely easy to catch many hundreds of the 1 to 2 inch minnows simply by tossing a cast net from the shore.

People don't eat menhaden in their natural fish form, but commercial menhaden fisheries produce commercially successful proteins and oils extracted from the fish, as I learned last summer when I visited Reedville, Virginia.

Reedville, VA is home to the only menhaden fishing fleet on the Atlantic Ocean, and to a large processing plant that turns hundreds of millions of pounds of menhaden into fishmeal and oil for use in a wide variety of products.

Like Oriental, Reedville is a small town dominated by a large commercial fishing fleet. Unlike the Oriental fleet, which concentrates on shrimping and some scalloping, the Reedville fleet is 100% dedicated to menhaden, which it harvests in enormous quantities.

While there, I spent a couple of hours at the Reedville Fisherman's Museum, which is essentially a propaganda outlet for the commercial menhaden industry (though they do also have an impressive floating collection of wooden boats, including one of about 30 surviving Chesapeake Bay "Skipjack" sailing oyster boats, which the museum continues to operate for charters and tours... all in all, well worth visiting.)

When you enter the museum, the docent immediately shunts you into a small room to watch a ten minute video about commercial menhaden fishing (the museum has now posted the video on YouTube, so I have embedded it below in this post)

Once properly indoctrinated, you are allowed wander the halls of the museum, which feature a pretty amazing photographic history of the industry in action, as well as scale models depicting key technological developments that have led to today's frighteningly large catches of the fish.

The modern menhaden fleet consists of about 10 "steamer" ships, each of which carries two smaller "purse-seine boats"...

When one of the fleet's associated airplanes spots one of the gigantic menhaden schools from the air, the steamer heads that way and launches the purse seine boats.

The purse seine boats each take one end of a 1500-foot purse seine net and encircle a portion of the school then close the bottom of the net, trapping the fish... The area within the net may only be a tiny piece of the overall school, but will result in a catch of up to 300,000 menhaden.

The fish are then pumped out of the nets by the steamers (using giant vacuum tubes that are lowered into the trapped mass.) When their holds are filled, the purse seine boats are brought back aboard and the steamers head back to the processing plant at Reedville.

At the plant, the fish is "cooked" and pressed, separating it into "liquor" (water and oil) and "cake" (solid fish meal). If you are ever in Reedville, you will immediately know if the plant is cooking, as an odor-you-would-not-believe pervades the air downwind of the plant... make sure to anchor or tie up on the windward side of the stacks! (Crazy Crab Restaurant and Marina is recommended, so long as the wind is not out of the south)

The dry meal is used, among other things, as a protein for livestock and pet foods. (take a deep whiff of a can of fish food flakes, or while in the cat food aisle at Pet Smart and you will have a small clue as to the odor that emanates from the processing plant)

The oil is mostly exported to Europe for use as cooking oil/margarine/shortening for human foods (as the Reedville Fisherman's Museum film points out, if you've ever been to France and enjoyed their croissants, likely cooked with menhaden oil), but because the American market has so far not embraced menhaden as a food oil it is instead used here for industrial products like paint and cosmetics.

If you only watch the Reedville Museum's film (embedded below) you might think, as the narrator asserts, that it is indeed:

"the perfect commercial fish... fishermen don't value them except as bait [not good eating, plus they are toothless phytoplankton eaters not catchable with hook and line so sports fishers don't care about them]... they are plentiful, self-renewing, usable in a variety of ways and catchable in large quantities without accidentally killing other valuable fish that people want to eat or catch for sport."

(Video from the Reedville Fisherman's Museum, Reedville, VA)


Some conservationists and sports fishers, however, complain that because menhaden are a significant link between plankton and larger predatory marine and avian life, the large-scale removal of their protein from the ecosystem can only have damaging effects on predator populations such as striped bass, bluefish, mackerel, flounder, tuna, drum , sharks, egrets, ospreys, seagulls, northern gannets, pelicans, herons, etc... Some allege that commercial menhaden fishing has even led or contributed to an alarming increase in appearances of lesion-causing mycobacteriosis and Pfiesteria among menhaden predators such as bass and rockfish.

The U.S. Dept. of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that this year the 10 steamers of the Reedville-based Atlantic menhaden fleet will bring in close to 200 Million Tons of menhaden! (see NOAA report)

According to NOAA, the combined Gulf and Atlantic menhaden fleets landed 454,000 metric tons (1.39 BILLION pounds) of the fish last year.

I won't bother linking to the multitude of sources discussing the debate over whether menhaden are being over-fished to the detriment of other species (and whether that is even possible)... if you are interested, you can google and find tons of discussion on the subject, most of which appears in the form of defensive discussions from the commercial fishing interests.

If you want to see more video of menhaden fishing in action, however, I do recommend this YouTube video, apparently made by a commercial menhaden fisher (and oddly accompanied by Dire Straits' "Sultans of Swing")

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8.29- Skywatch Friday - July 8 storm retrospective

(For best results, click on "->" to start slide show, then click Pause and use arrows to advance slide by slide)
(For best results, click on "->" to start slide show, then click Pause and use arrows to advance slide by slide)

SkywatchFriday special retrospective report. I never did post these pics from July 8, but the rainstorms on Wednesday reminded me I had these pictures.

The captions tell the story.

But I do have a question for my fellow Skywatch Friday visitors, and would love to hear your inputs, perspectives:

I am used to posting photos the day I take them... in fact I have just started participating in City Daily Photo on my other blog, Oriental Daily Photo. The sky today, however, was quite boring, and I didn't really have any good sky pics from this week, even. So, my question is:

Is it more appropriate for me to post Skywatch Friday pictures taken on the each current Friday? Or at least from the week preceding each current Friday?

Or does it make more sense to do as I have done today, that is post pictures I have taken at some point of interesting skies, regardless of when they were taken?

I am very interested in hearing the views on this issue from my more experienced (more experienced than I, that is... this is my second SWF entry) Skywatch Friday participants on this one! Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

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See more views of the heavens from around the globe at Skywatch Friday.

8.28- Princess Sharpie 22 on Smith's Creek

A 22' Princess Sharpie cat-ketch sails up Smith's Creek as dusk approaches.

This boat was designed by naval architect Graham Byrnes, whose B&B Yacht Designs is located in nearby Vandemere, NC, on the Bay River.

Check out B&B's Princess Sharpie 22 page, for more info about this sweet vessel, including photos of the construction process & interior. You can order the plans for this boat at the B&B site for about $200.

B&B dinghies and small sailboats are understandably popular here in eastern NC, and most are designed specifically for eastern NC's inland and coastal waters.

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8.27- Respite from the rain

Captain Roy (nearest to the street) holds court on the porch of The Captain's Quarters Bed and Breakfast on a rainy day here in Oriental.

Capt. Roy, owner of The Captain's Quarters B&B hosts some friends for wine, cigars, antipasti and conversation on the porch on Broad St. (Hwy. 55) as afternoon rains pass over Oriental. Today's new edition of the weekly "Pamlico News" newspaper rests on the table.

Broad St. is the main thoroughfare through "downtown" Oriental, so while sitting on this porch (at the intersection of Church St.) one can see everyone in town driving, biking or walking by, and many folks wave to Capt. Roy and anyone who happens to be on the porch.

Even a day of rain and thunder doesn't stop the regular appearance of Capt. Roy and guests on the porch... a great place to get out of the rain and enjoy some excellent company... or on sunny days, to get out of the sun and do the same.

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8.26- Mink on the breakwater

This is one of the two young minks who regularly hunt for crabs and other meals in the breakwater along the South Avenue waterfront (next to Lou-Mac Park) here in Oriental.

The minks patrol this breakwater several times a day... they usually crawl under the rocks as much as possible, but occasionally must break out into the open to get where they need to go. When they know someone is watching, they won't sit still in the open, but will zip from one hidey-hole to the next with surprising speed.

I know I have featured the "Lou-Mac Minks" before (see post of 7.16.08), but they are just too darn cute. I can't swear I won't feature them again in the future.


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8.25- Seafood Straight from the Boat

Boxes of "Fresh Seafood," each containing a bushel or thereabouts of Shrimp from Pamlico Sound, await pickup on the loading dock of a local fish-house (Garland Fulcher Seafood).

One of the commercial shrimp trawlers (I think it is the "Captain Jeff") peeks through the passageway while tied up at the fish-house dock.

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