When Hurricane Ophelia passed close by eastern North Carolina in mid September, the storm kicked up big waves and produced a storm surge that reformed different areas of the coastline. It also made a mess of a section of Atlantic Beach that already suffered from poor quality material placed on it during a nourishment project in the winter of 2004/2005 (see here for more details). The hurricane, pushed up more mudballs (the dark blobs in the background of the above photo) onto the main section of the beach. These are in addition to the larger mudballs leftover from the end of the nourishment project; these big mudballs had been been colonized by grasses and weeds during the summer (see above photo), although the vegetation appears to have been killed by the excessive wind and salt spray from the hurricane. Also as a result of the heavy waves, much of the muddy layers of the beach front were exposed and kicked back up ontop of itself:

How long will it take for this section of beach to recover to "normal" conditions? I will try to keep this story updated as time goes by.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Imagine my surprise when I saw the above scene today, 12 September 2005. This is the east side of Bogue Inlet, which recently underwent a Channel Relocation Project designed to shift the way the water runs through the inlet and ultimately deposit sand in front of this and nearby houses. The details of the plans and project can be found here. I wrote about this back in February, and I promised to give updates. Well, the latest is that there is still water running through the old channel, the dike constructed to block the old channel has eroded, and these houses are still under threat of erosion. To make matters more interesting, a hurricane appears to be heading our way. The total cost of the project to relocate Bogue Inlet channel was more than 9 million dollars, and the construction ended in April 2005. It will be interesting to see what happens to the inlet if (when?) a hurricane passes nearby. Stay tuned for more....

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With our summer months drawing to a close and temperatures gently cooling off, the pound net fishing season is ramping up. Larisa has some great stories from her many trips to the pound nets, and even when nothing outrageously exciting happens, it is still great to be out in the water. Last week, I was lucky enough to be able to go out on the regular turtle sampling trip on Friday. We found several healthy turtles swimming in the pounds of the nets, eating their fill of fish and shellfish, but I was surprised to see nearly a ton of menhaiden in one net. It took us four tries to get all the fish from the pound net into the boat, and it didn't all fit in the boxes (hence the fish up to Joanne's shins in the photo above). We also saw two dead turtles, cause of death unknown. They had both floated into the lead of the lead of one of the poundnets - when I pushed down the lead, they both just floated away (photo below). It was a reminder that autumn also signals an increase in dead stranded turtles in North Carolina.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)