The Canada I miss

Canada, Time to get with the program

We moved from Canada in 1987.  It would be fair to say that we have spent more than our fair share of time since then convincing Americans that Canada is not snow covered the whole year.

Do not get me wrong, doing a little work to help the Canadian tourism industry is fair exchange for the wonderful years that we had in Canada.  However, this May 2009 outbreak of snow in Edmonton is really hard to explain to Americans who are getting ready to begin their annual pilgrimages to the beach.

I can show nice pictures of trees, water, and sunsets and pretend they are Canada, but it does not do a lot of good if Edmonton is buried under a blanket of white.

Americans have a hard time figuring on why anyone would want to live as far north as Edmonton anyway.  When you add late May snows, Canada as country ends up being dragged into the snowdrift.

We have heard that Alberta has enough tar sands to heat the world, so why is it snowing in Edmonton in May? Have not Canadians had enough snow this year?  Is there some plan to store this snow and use it to capture the winter Olympics?

Why is there a place in the world over 30 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than we are this morning? I am sure our weather is suffering because of Canadian sins.  It may well be time to send in the Saint Bernards with their casks.

Is the snow in Edmonton an effort to share the spotlight with the hockey teams in Stanley cup semi-finals?  After all the Canadian teams are missing in action this year.

Maybe Canadian tire dealers are stuck with extra snow tires that need to be sold.  Whatever the reason, it is time to halt this mid-May snow madness.  We have had enough snow chilled air dropping below the border to cover us for the rest of the year.  Save it for August when we could use some cool air.

Think of the tomatoes that might be in danger of frost, spawned by all this cold weather.

Canadians are amazing people.  You can put 100 Canadians in a restaurant, and the noise level will not rise above a whisper.  It you put 100 Americans in the same restaurant, it becomes a mad house, and we will probably invade a country.

Surely the quiet resolve of our Canadian friends can stop this fiendish May snow.

If the snow does not stop, we can almost guarantee that Dominion Day, otherwise know as your one true day of summer, will be a non-event this year.

Since the opportunity is strong that this might actually happen,  I suggest all Canadian immediately make plants to evacuate to the south.  We are willing to take our fair share.  We have room for close to 100,000 temporary residents so perhaps you can send the expatriates from the Maritimes who are working in Alberta.

They will have cash and can help us settle the long running debate as to whether New England style clam chowder is better than our Downeast style chowder.

They will also fit in well with our fishermen and farmers.  It we get a cold nor'easter in the summer, all it will do is make them homesick for Halifax in July.

Any fog will make the folks from Cape Breton think they have been transported home.  I see it as a win-win situation.  With the continuing snow, you will probably have to shut down some operations anyway, and we would love to have some Canadians with their pockets full of money drop by for a visit.

Things are ready for visitors on the beach.  We can even find some nice homes if our imported Maritimers grow fond of the area after their toes and noses have turned from blue to pink.

I suspect Coastal NC will surprise most Canadians. Our Coastal Paradise is just that, a great place to enjoy with no threat of snow.  They will find it very close to Paradise.

If you have any questions about the suitability of the area for Canadians, just check this blog and its index.  If you want more information there are lots of pictures and links at this site.

Atlantic Canada, specks of land in ice water

Friday of this week I took our skiff out for the first real fishing trip of the season.  As the story behind the link details, we had a great time.

Perhaps the biggest difference from the last time we were out on the White Oak River in February was the water temperature.  In February the water temperature was in the high forties.  Friday we got consistent reading in the sixties on the water.

Today those sixty degree water temperatures made a huge difference.  While my friend in New Jersey and our grown kids in Northern Virginia were all suffering from ninety plus temperatures (33 C), we were struggling to reach the eighties.

It was still a beautiful day, and in fact it was much nicer here on the NC coast that it was inland. The water that almost surrounds us moderates our climate for much of the year.

You can actually say the same thing for Nova Scotia, PEI, and Newfoundland.  The trouble is that their water is like a glass of ice water.  We lived on the Bay of Fundy for a few years.  When the fog came in, it reminded me of opening a refrigerator door.  I am pretty sure that the only creatures who love the temperature of the Bay of Fundy are Labrador Retrievers and fish.

We ran our farm just north of Fredericton, New Brunswick for over ten years and never took a vacation.  When we sold the cattle and finally decided to go on a vacation to PEI, I was looking forward to the beach.  I can still remember that my legs felt sandblasted on our first beach walks.  While the kids could take the water along PEI's northern coast where the beaches are so beautiful, I could not do it.  We get similar winds once in a while here on the coast, but swimming in the summer on the north coast of PEi would be like swimming here in April.

While I absolutely love PEI and its rolling green fields which go down to the shore, it is just not a good place to go swimming.  The next year we managed to take the kids back to North Carolina and visit a warm Carolina beach.  I can still remember the trip down to that beach, my wife, who was born in North Carolina just like me, told me as we were walking across an almost ready to melt parking lot in Tarboro, NC that she was officially warm for the first time since we had gotten married fifteen years earlier.

 That beach trip redkindled a love of the Carolina coast.  We eventually moved back to the states as I worked for Apple Computer for nearly twenty years.  Two years after leaving Apple, we moved to Carteret County just six miles from the beaches of Emerald Isle.  I am officially in heaven.

While we had the coldest winter and first snow in six years here on the coast, we still never put on a heavy coast.  Our snow was right at one half inch and did not even stick to the driveways.

There is a lot I miss about Canada, but I really do not miss the cold waters.  There was once when we were living in Halifax that I did feel like were were trapped in a glass of ice water.  The pack ice got driven down from Newfoundland and filled Halifax harbor.  We thought spring would never come.

I am to the point that I enjoy a good eight degree day.  I love it cooling off to sixty at night, but I am ready for heat during the day.

If you are Canadian and are down our way, stop by our office in Cape Carteret, and I will tell you the best places to eat and personally welcome you to the Crystal Coast.

And if you have had enough of cold weather, I think we can find you a spot in the sun.

No reason to miss Canada in April

As I think back over my years in Canada, I cannot remember an April that was very nice.  I can dredge up April snow storms without any challenge.  I can remember the mud season which always threatened to swallow us.

In eastern Canada it was often the last week or so of April before things started to even think about being green.  If we were lucky, we got our cattle in the pasture by the middle of May. 

We would plant our gardens in June and hope that there would be no June frost.  Tomatoes were a mid-August treat at best in New Brunswick.  On the shore of Nova Scotia, it was sometimes close to September before we got a ripe tomato.

There are a lot of things to love about Canada, but April weather is not one of them.  Admittedly if you have chosen to live in Canada, you have made the decision to put up with a fair amount of cold.  Still April seems to be cruel and unusual punishment.

Here on the Carolina coast our early spring flowers are gone.  Tulips, dogwoods, and azaleas are in bloom.  I put my tomato plants in the ground on April 1, and if things go as well as they did last year, I will enjoy a tomato sandwich around June 1.

As much as I loved the cool Canadian air in the summertime, I certainly do not miss that those late spring snow storms.  In year like this where most of the continent as seen cooler than normal weather, it is nice to have some heat.

While we are about to get a dose of Canadian cold it will be short lived.  Even tonight as the cold starts to roll in, the temperature is still at 60F at 11 PM.  That would be a nice mid-summer day in Halifax. 

I have been wearing shorts for a couple of weeks now.  I might have to put bluejeans on for a day or two, but that should end it for the year.

When we are cooking in the summer heat in late August, I will write a post about how much I miss those cool Canadian breezes.

A pretty good summary of Canada

A former neighbor of mine from Canada sent me a link to the Globe and Mail article, "DEAR MR. PRESIDENT: WE'RE CONFUSED AND WE NEED YOUR HELP." 

The article really rekindled a lot of memories of why I loved living in Canada.  The thought that "mutual grievance" binds Canadian provinces together as much as anything brought a smile to my face.

We lived in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. I worked out of both Quebec and Ontario when I was employed by Apple Computer.  Between the two provinces I got a great feel for Canada.  I especially loved the all French sales meetings that I attended.  In typical  French Canadian fashion, the least bi-lingual person in the room was the only one ever to attempt to keep me in the loop.

Once I got transferred to reporting to Ontario so I could understand my management, I saw clearly why the rest of Canada usually had a problem with Ontario. As nice a city as Toronto might have been, I was always relieved to get back to Halifax and the common sense of my fellow Maritimers.  Somehow the idea that Ontario was God's gift to Canada got old fast.  It used to drive me crazy how some people looked down on the Maritimes.  I have actually lived in a lot of places, but Halifax was one of my all time favorites.

Maybe all those years running a farm north of Fredericton helped me to appreciate people who were not affraid to get their hands dirty.  One of the more popular commercials on television in our area happens to be one which starts with the premise of what would happen if delivery men ran schools.  From their demonstrated ability to make sure things are usually in the right place, you get the idea that school attendance would no longer be a problem.

I used to wonder what would happen if someone from the Maritimes ran Canada in the eighties? Certainly some humility might have creeped into government.  Now my thoughts are more towards what is going to happen now that someone other than George Bush is running the United States.

Somehow I think President Obama is going to need all the help he can get.  He is surrounded by a bunch of politicians who like all politicians have but one goal and that is staying in power.  They certainly have almost no humility so I was pleased to see President Obama actually apologize for an early mistake.

One of the best lines out of the whole article by Margaret Wente was the following.

We have absolutely nothing in common with the United States. Our nation is harmless and ignored. Yours is powerful and despised, not least by us.

With all my years in Canada, I can certainly relate to the statement.  However, there were many times that I thought Canadians did not appreciate themselves and what they had.  Canada, certainly when I was there through 1987, was one of the most civil places on earth. 

Perhaps this letter is a good sign that Canada has a strong identity now.  One of the stories I love to tell about Canada is the bank robbery that took place in Stanley, NB when we lived near there. Apparently the tellers convinced the robber that he had to wait fifteen minutes while a timer went off.  They offered the robber a cup of tea while he waited, and he accepted while they called the Mounties.  In a few minutes they gave him the money, and he was on his way.  Of course in that lenght of time the Mounties had been able to cover the three ways out of Stanley.  The robber was arrested without incident.  What a great Canadian solution to a problem.

It certainly makes a lot more sense than stun guns, but that is another story.  As we go forward in this challenging year, one of the things that gives me a little sense of security in my world of real estate is that the holding company behind Royal Le Page has purchased the GMAC franchise in the United States.

Somehow heading forward, I would much rather have some perhaps level headed Canadians working to help us market real estate instead of the people whose name only brings a reminder of the disaster that our Detroit auto makers face.

Having a successful Canadian company behind us is almost as comforting as the Canadian-like marsh pictured in this post.  The marsh and sound are actually part of North Carolina's Crystal Coast and located behind the NC Aquarium on Bogue Sound in Pine Knoll Shores, NC, but they still make me think of Canada each time I visit.

Now I just need to convince some Canadians to move down here.

Faulty snow fails Canadian standards

It is hard to be serious about snow that you cannot shovel, but yesterday we had the first snow storm on the Crystal Coast in six years.

I was not very excited to see the snow as you can tell from the post that I wrote at Crystal Coast Living.  The picture in that post was taken at 4:30 PM on January 20.  This picture was taken January 21 at about 11 AM. 

The one half inch or so of snow that we received was pretty well gone from the beach by the time I took the picture this morning.

Most area businesses closed yesterday at 3:30 PM.  Our real estate office did not open until 10:30 AM this morning.

I told the ladies in our office this afternoon that when we lived north of Fredericton, New Brunswick that it was standard policy for them not to plow the roads unless we got over six inches of snow.  Six inches of snow just made for a smoother road.

Of course southern snow and Canadian snow are two very different creations.  I doubt that even late spring Canadian snow behaves like North Carolina snow.  We lived on a mountain in Virginia for several years.  I can only remember getting decent driving snow a couple of times in those twenty years.

Most of the time the snow we got turned to ice after one or two cars drove over it.  I can never remember it not being attached to the pavement like someone used super glue.  In Canada, at least in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick where I lived, snow did not seem to be permanently bonded to the pavement.  You could hit it a few times with a shovel and generally fracture it.

Our coastal snow failed miserably as Canadian snow.  First it refused to stick on most of the driveway.  By eight o'clock this morning what little ice had collected on the driveway was melting even though the temperature was still stuck in the mid-twenties Fahrenheit.  What self-respecting Canadian snow would start melting just because some sun was shining on it.

Even the snowy windshield of my truck which was parked outside melted clean before I went to work at just before one.

All of these are good things since we do not have snow shovel or anything to clean the windshield on my truck.

I am not unhappy at any of these events.  I actually moved to the Crystal Coast to get away from snow and ice.  If this is all Mother Nature can throw at me, you can count me as one happy ex-Canadian.

Part of the reason the Crystal Coast is such a great place is that we do not have snow.  It you want more details on our snow event, visit my area blog.

Hard to think of Canada in January

Sometimes I try to remember what it was like to be in Canada in the winter months.

I even stepped out on our deck today and took a picture of our partially cloudy weather.  Then it occurred to me that I was outside with no coat and no shoes.

How can you think about Canadian winter without a coat and no shoes?

When we lived in New Brunswick, our old farm house was one of those with a number of buildings attached including a woodshed, carriage house, outhouse, and chicken coop.

We used the carriage house for storage, treated the outhouse as a historical monument, and the chicken coop as my shop.  We really did use the woodshed.  Each year we would put in about four cords of hardwood mill ends.

We had a very efficient wood heater which kept us very warm but required a short trip outside across a few feet of porch to reach the wood shed.  I can remember days cold enough that you put on boots to make that short journey to the unheated woodshed.  You rarely crossed those few feet without a coat.

The experience of living along the southern coast just does not lend itself to Canadian comparisons.  We hardly ever wear coats.  Even in January the sun is strong enough to warm things significantly.  I actually will go in bare feet to retrieve something from our unheated garage.

I remember well when in 1984 we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia from central New Brunswick where we saw temperatures as low as minus forty degrees.  We got to Halifax and found that people mostly wore tennis shoes during the winter.

Not wearing boots was so foreign to us that it took a while to adjust.  People did not plug in their cars in January, and you could run outside without a coat.

Of course Halifax has not enjoyed one of those mild maritime winters this year.  I watched with interest their latest blizzard.  When we recently visited our mountain home in Roanoke, Virginia, we got a taste of weather that could bring back Canadian memories.

It was a cold morning in Roanoke with the temperature down to ten degrees Fahrenheit, and winds gusting to forty miles per hours.

It is nice to have escaped back to the coast.  Even in the few minutes that it has taken me to write this post, the temperature has risen a degree to sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit.  We just might make it to seventy again today like we did yesterday.  That would be two days over seventy in the first six days of the new year.

That is a winter that can make me forget Canada's cold and remember the best parts of our years there.

Ah, one of those days

If you live in what Canadians call a snow belt in the Maritime Provinces, you know that you will experience the freeze, thaw, freeze cycle repeatedly.

We just had a storm go up the coast.  It brought that very familiar cycle to the Canadian Maritimes today.

I grew up in North Carolina. Snow was a cause for great excitement.  An inch or two of snow would close school for a day.  Five or six inches could shut the system down for days.

There was one March when we were growing up that it snowed on every Tuesday for a month.  We were out of school more during the month than we were in class.

I went off to college in Cambridge, Massachusetts with the great hope that I would see lots more snow.  I soon found that city snow was nothing to relish except on rare occasions when there was enough snow and cold to shut down the city.

I can remember one wonderful winter when I cross country skied on the Radcliffe Quad.  It was great fun.  After graduation, I took six thousand dollars and bought an old farm in Nova Scotia on the Bay of Fundy.  It was the early seventies, and I was sure that snow would be a constant companion in the winter.

It only took one winter to figure out that being on the shore had a huge impact on the climate even in Canada.  We would often get some beautiful snows, only to watch them disappear the next day under a few inches of rain.  Just to rub salt into the wound, everything would freeze solid the next day.

The worst insult was when our frozen dirt road would turn to muddy ruts only to frozen in muddy ruts for weeks.  The memories of bumping over those frozen ruts are still fresh. Sometimes the rain would just turn the snow to a couple of inches of ice which was good if you enjoyed skating with your car.

A Canadian Maritime climate was not exactly the best for farming so we eventually headed away from the coast to the interior of New Brunswick.  There in the little village of Tay Creek about twenty miles north of Fredericton, we found our snow belt.  The first winter we were there, the snows totaled twenty-three feet.  We were on snowshoes and skis all winter which ended started the first of November and ended in May.  It was not quite the ten months of snow and two months of poor sledding that our neighbors had promised, but it was close.

There was so much snow that I ended up getting a tractor mounted snow blower.  As we developed our farm and eventually ended up with around 200 head of cattle which we wintered each year, snow blowing became a major chore.

Eventually I was blowing snow off at least a mile of road on the farm.  My eight foot wide snowblower was hooked to a huge diesel tractor with a cab.  The tractor had ring chains on it.  It was a formidable beast blowing new snow over one hundred feet.  I went through drifts as deep as three feet deep like a hot knife goes through butter.

Still the ring chains were there for a reason.  That reason was the freeze, thaw, freeze cycle that I hate so much.  We had not escaped it completely. 

Blowing snow on gravel roads demands that you keep some packed snow between you and your snowblower unless you want to hurl gravel that same 100 feet or more.

However, during a freeze, thaw, freeze cycle that packed snow could become saturated with water and turn into two or three inches of ice.  Ice could turn any tractor into something as useful as a turtle on its back.  Ring chains, which are more often used in the woods, work pretty well on ice unless it gets very hard which it sometimes does in Canada.

You know you are in Canada when your kids put their skates on and skate around the driveway while waiting for the school bus.  I can remember our driveway being so slick that a car in park with the parking brake on once slid down the gradual slope and ended up in a snow bank.

Even in our New Brunswick snow belt there were some winters when almost all our snow storms went through the freeze, thaw, freeze cycle.  And then there were a few winters like our first when the only snow was unadulterated snow was a delight to have.

After Canada we ended up in the mountains of southwest Virginia.  There the most likely snow is about two to three inches of snow which mixes eventually with sleet only to be soaked with rain.  The difference is that if you work hard and get it off while it is wet, you do not have to deal with the ice since the freeze part in Virginia is not nearly as cold or quick as it is in Canada.

Canada taught me the virtue of a clean driveway.  Fortunately the Crystal Coast where we now live counts snow events as times when we see a flurry which is only every other year or so.

The link to the post about my passion for a clean driveway has a picture of big tractor with the ring chains.

Finally something interesting in Canada

Years ago when we were living in New Brunswick, our English friends, who were also living in the NB wilderness, gave me a book, "Canada, cancelled because of lack of interest."  I cannot remember much of the book other than the title.

I remember being surprised that a country which fascinated me so much could have a book with such a title.

As student of English and colonial American history during my college years, Canada's government was of great interest to me.

This latest crisis of Parliament being prorogued is a perfect Canadian crisis.  If we are lucky by the time Parliament comes back, the financial crisis might at least be a little more understandable.

Just think how much money Canada is saving compared to the US where "something has to be done immediately" has been translated into billions of dollars of taxpayer money going to companies and institutions which have failed on their own.

Of course this latest crisis is the far from the only moment when something exciting has happened in Canada.

I can remember some very interesting times, especially when Canada finally got control of its own constitution in 1982.  I love some the phrases in the Constitution Act.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

    (a)     freedom of conscience and religion;
    (b)     freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
    (c)     freedom of peaceful assembly; and
    (d)     freedom of association.

I find those statements about as positive as anything that will ever come from a government.  It was a great time to be in Canada when these discussions were taking place.

If there is one thing that I learned about Canadians, it is their ability to discuss and debate things is unrivaled. Sometimes I was convinced the interminable discussions were viewed as an acceptable way of solving problems.

Americans seemed to be focused on doing something immediately even if it turns out to be wrong.  I think the Canadian method of lots of debate may well be a superior way to keep governments from doing any harm.

How could anyone think a country about to split up could be uninteresting.  When I came to Canada in 1971, the Parti Québécois had just become a force.  By 1976 they had risen to control the provincial government of Quebec.

Of course Quebec did not support the patriation of Canada's constitution.  I can remember endless effort to bring Quebec on board.

My guess is that they never have agreed.  I am pretty sure Quebec is a "distinct society."

For at least a year of my career at Apple Canada I reported to the Montreal office of Apple where all sales meetings were conducted in French.  Since I was the only non bi-lingual person in the room, I read magazines during the meetings.  One of the least bi-lingual of my compatriots would try to tell if anything came up that was important.

Sales meeting being what they are, I never missed anything vital, but I did get a good taste of that "distinct society" and was relieved when I finally ended up reporting to Toronto.

I will look forward to more details as this latest Canadian crisis unfolds.  It is great to have something besides cold air coming from Canada.

If Parliament being prorogued has got you in a knot, I might suggest that viewing my December Day at the Beach YouTube video could provide some relief.  Watch in high quality if you can.

Not a nice gift from Canada

This has not been our typical fall here on the Carolina coast. 

First the heat stayed longer than normal into the fall.

Then the winds and the rain seem to make regular appearances, timed to thwart most fishing attempts.

I can remember crossing the first bridge in Swansboro around midnight.  There in the dark and rain was a fisherman with his boat anchored just to the north and west of Clyde's Seafood.

That was a dedicated fisherman forced into desperate measure by uncooperative weather.

However, even that was not as bad as what we found this morning.  The gut behind our house was frozen over.  That raised some concerns in my mind especially when I noticed that there were some holes which had refrozen.

My assumption was that some of our native Jumping Mullet might be breaking through the ice. I immediately wondered what would happen if hey were to land in a spot where the ice might be thick enough to prevent them from re-entering the water?

Fortunately I did not see any flash frozen mullet.  Had I seen any dead mullet if would have been dead mullet on Canadian hands.

I know Canadians are a reasonable people, but I also an aware that you are trapped in a land of cold temperatures.  This cold obviously makes you do strange things.

Why else would there be Canadian cars at Old Orchard Beach, Me. in January.

While the US government has been concentrating on building walls along our southern border with Mexico, I think we have missed an opportunity to save energy.

We should have been building wind breaks along the Canadian border.  We could have diverted those cold Canadian winter winds into windmills powering electric generators.

While our low temperature this morning was a shocking twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, we did manage to get above freezing around 9 am this morning.  We are approaching five degrees Celsius or almost forty-one degrees Fahrenheit as we near noon.

Our government missed the opportunity for the Canadian windbreak.  Now we have seen ice in the water along the Carolina coast in November.  There are lots of events planned for November here along the Crystal Coast. None of them require any ice on the water.

The good news is that we should see temperatures over sixty degrees by Monday.

It would be a good time for Canadians to come for a visit and mend relations.

Canada is closer than I think

Once in a while I forget that we are in such a connected world that almost no one is much more than a few micro-seconds away anyone.

A few days ago I wrote a post on my Applepeels blog about a change in management at Apple which I had heard about through the grapevine.  I did not think it was a huge deal.

Then I read another post which indicated things had changed a lot in the enterprise space at Apple where I worked.

I ended up writing another post, "Winfidels and Apple's punt on the enterprise."'

It was not long before I got a phone call from someone who writes for the Macintosh press.  It was someone who used to work for me at Apple.  We had a nice chat, and he asked me to dig up some additional information for him.

It was not long before his group published a "scoop" to use their words on what I had been talking about in my blog for about a week.  My Applepeels blog is pretty well read, but I only write when I have something worthwhile to say. That means the numbers of posts I do has dropped a lot in the last year.  Still I have not dropped off the earth.

Perhaps the feeling of contentment that rolls over me when I have a good day fishing had something to do with it, but for whatever reason, I did not really mind someone taking my information and creating a scoop in their own mind.

However, I was really pleased when a Canadian reader of my Applepeels blog sent me note saying that I had obviously written about the scoop well before the other folks.

It is nice to know this web of electronic communications can shrink the world so much that I have almost instantaneous communications with someone in Calgary, Alberta.

For some reason, I am very visually oriented so after the email I spent a few minutes rolling through the film of my mind and enjoying old images of Calgary and the rest of western Canada.

Running that through my mind is a major shift since life here on the coast of North Carolina is so oriented to the water like at the top of the post. That happens to be a picture of the docks at Beaufort, NC where we enjoy taking our visitors.

I like to keep my connections with Canada alive and healthy, but the warm water along North Carolina's coast probably has a very strong hold on me especially as the weather starts to turn cold.

The days when I enjoyed tackling a blizzard of three feet on our New Brunswick farm are long gone.

For a trip to a different world, have a look at these photos of the old seaport of Beaufort and check out this YouTube video of a sailboat docking there this past Tuesday.

Maybe some warm can be electronically transferred by reading about what is happening here along the sea.  You can check in out in our new Electronic Village for Carteret County.