The Crystal Coast, Salt water on my feet

Is $300K realistic for a home close to the beaches?

I recently got a question online about finding an affordable home in the area.

The person looking had checked out Beaufort and Pine Knoll Shores and had found nothing that they liked. 

They wanted to know whether or not they were being realistic looking for a home in this area in the $200-$300K range.

The following was my answer.  I have added some links and corrections.

As to $200-300K being realistic, it depends.

Nice single family stick built homes are available in our area from $170K up. You can be in a water access neighborhood like ours for around $300K. Having water behind your house costs more. Our neighborhood has a pool, boat ramp, clubhouse, boardwalk-day dock, and boat storage. You can get in water access neighborhoods without quite as many amenities for under $300K. It just depends on what you want. Houses over on the beach are more expensive and usually smaller and often older.

The selection on the beach would be very limited in the under $300K range. Right now there are around ten or eleven homes in the Emerald Isle area listed in the under $300K range. The least expensive would be around $265K.

However on the mainland within a few miles of the beach you would find over fifty homes in the under $300K range.

It is easy to live in the Cape Carteret area and still have great access to the beaches and get a lot more home for your dollar. Also insurance and taxes are less.

If you live in the town of Cape Carteret proper, good water access is part of being a town resident. There are number of parks along the water, most have parking. The parking is reserved just for residents. Paying a $50 per year fee as a Cape Carteret resident gives you access to the Cape Carteret boat ramp.

In the North Starhill area of Cape Carteret, you could buy a new home for between $275K-$280K with single floor living, granite, stainless steel appliances, 2,200-2,300 square ft and backing up on Wildlife Trust lands.

The same $275K in Emerald Isle would get you 1,200 square ft and a home that is probably 25 years old. You pay for being over on the beach.

Most homes in the area are under 10 miles from the beach. The area with the homes backing up on the National Forest in North Starhill would a little over five miles from the beaches.

Beach access is so easy that we get a little picky. I will often skip the larger beach access areas for a quieter more private beach.

This evening for example my wife and I left home after five PM and drove up the beach to Third Street Beach. It is only 15 miles from our home. At that point up the beach, you are only ten miles from the Atlantic Beach bridge.

Third St. has a small parking lot and when we pulled in this evening, there were no other cars. From these pictures that I took you can see how "crowded the beach was. You could barely make out people in the distance. We were still home in time to grill some chicken for dinner before it got dark. When we got back, I even toyed with the idea of dropping the boat in the water to catch the sunset, but there were no clouds, and I knew a good sunset would be hard to capture without some clouds to tone down the sun.

Basically it boils down to making some choices of what works for you. You can find a very nice home in your price range that is close to the beach. If you want to be over on the beach, hitting that price range would be much more challenging and you would end up with a lot less home.

A nice seven or eight year old home about the same size as one of those 20+ years old $275K beach cottages would cost you around $175K seven or eight miles from the beach.

You might say the beach premium in that size range is about $100K. You also might have a hard time finding a home over in the beach area in your price range in a neighborhood with year around residents. It can get very quiet over there in the winter time.

We don't mind a little driving to get to the beach, and we also really enjoy being on the river where kayaking and boating is a lot of fun. Almost all the tourist traffic is already over except for a little spurt on Labor Day weekend. Basically from now until the second or third week of June, the beaches mostly belong to the year round residents. We share them with the fishermen in the fall but that's it. While there are times I would love to have a home a few blocks from the beach, the economics of it just did not make sense for us. We ran into something similar in Beaufort. I love the place, but finding a place where I could even see the water much less be on it did not make financial sense for us.

If you are back in the area, I would be glad to give you one of my area tours.

Looking for something more than just a vacation spot

If you are looking for something besides a city with some tourists, then perhaps you might enjoy some quaint New England charm on the North Carolina coast.

My personal favorite would be Beaufort to the east or perhaps Southport to the south. I am no expert on Southport, but I know it has changed a lot since we visited in 2004..

Your trip to Beaufort from the south or west would take you through Swansboro. It takes about 1.5 hours to get from Wilmington to Swansboro. There you will cross the White Oak River on two bridges which are within sight of the Intracoastal Waterway.

We live about three miles up the White Oak River on the Carteret County side. The White Oak where we live is nearly two miles wide. Between those bridges in Swansboro you will see Clyde Phillip's Seafood where you can get shrimp and fish that have just come off one of the boats tied up to the dock behind the fish house.

You can also stop in Cedar Point and rent a kayak to explore the White Oak or Bogue Sound. The kayak rental is near the Waterway Inn.

In the next half mile after the Waterway, you will pass Captain Sam's. Their house is on the Intracoastal, and their shrimp boat is tied up behind the house much of the year when it isn't over on Pamlico Sound shrimping.

As you continue you will be driving through Cedar Point, where small businesses are the rule. We also have two farmers' markets in that same stretch (Winberry's is my favorite) along with most of the services you could ever need. Highway 24 where you will be riding is full of small shops and service. The real main street of the area is the ICW, and the beautiful homes back farther from the road which you see when boating along the Intracoastal Waterway.

After three or four miles on Hwy 24 you will come to a large intersection with Highway 58. If you take a right on that, you will head across the bridge to Emerald Isle and the strand of beaches which stretch up to Atlantic Beach and make up the heart of the Crystal Coast.

A left turn will take you north up Hwy 58 through the edge of the 158,000 acres of the Croatan National Forest. There are some great trails just off the road not far up 58.

Going straight on 24 through the intersection is the quickest way to Morehead City and then Beaufort. It would be about 35 minutes from Swansboro to Beaufort by Hwy 24, or it would take approximately 50 minutes by Hwy 58, the beach Hwy. The beach route which goes over the bridge to Emerald Isle and up the island is much more scenic. Following it lets you stop and dip your toes in the area's beautiful saltwater. The saltwater is pretty hard to describe with just words so I prefer to use pictures when I can.

This is my map of the area near the intersection of Highways 24 & 58 with a few of my current favorite restaurants in the Cape Carteret-Emerald Isle area. McDonald's is there strictly as an easy to find landmark.

One way or the other you will pass through Morehead City (MHC) which is where we find everything that isn't in the Cape Carteret-Cedar Point-Emerald Isle-Swansboro area. If you go by route 24 to MHC, you will pass our shopping center area at the intersection of Hwys 24 & 70. There is where you find Belks, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Staples, Best Buy, TJ Maxx, Panera Bread, Outback Steakhouse and everything you need but a Target which is located in Jacksonville.

If you follow Hwy 58 up the beaches it will eventually take you to the Atlantic Beach Bridge to MHC which dumps you in the heart of MHC. Morehead City is a small town with lots of fishermen surround by water. It is the gateway to the far eastern part of North Carolina. The railroad runs down the middle of the main street in MHC. It has a substantial port and our closest hospital which is less than 30 minutes from Cape Carteret. MHC was home base for my visits to the Crystal Coast as a teenager in the sixties.

Beaufort is only a few miles from MHC. While there are some nice restaurants in MHC, there are a few to avoid so ask a local before you eat or better yet, travel on to Beaufort and have a meal at one of the many fine restaurants there. I have enjoyed fine meals at the Nethouse, Spouters, Front Street, Clawson's, Blue Moon Bistro, and Beaufort Grocery.

You can read my travel guides for Beaufort, Swansboro, and Emerald Isle. You can also check out my restaurant guide which has some more area dining information from our visits and the first year or so we lived here. You can find more current restaurant information at this page.

After enjoying Beaufort, you can take a drive through Down East. Going "Down East" in NC might seem strange if you are from Maine, but it is one or our unique places, and the name fits. Harkers Island is the first stop on a Down East tour. It is easy to take a trip over to Cape Lookout from there.

If you follow Highway 70 east from Beaufort, you will eventually run into NC's famous Route 12 which takes you to the Cedar Island Ferry Terminal where you can take a ferry lasting something over two hours to Ocracoke Island which has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world and what I would call a very unique island atmosphere.

From the village of Ocracoke, you can drive the 13 miles or so to the other end of the island and take another much shorter ferry to Hatteras Island. From Hatteras Island is around sixty miles up to the Nags Head area where you will find a couple of my favorite restaurants the Lone Cedar which is located on the causeway to Manteo and Sam & Omie's which is near the causeway.

If you a looking for a vacation out of the ordinary, this is one where you can have fun and see some of the most unique scenery on the east coast. This is a great area to visit. You have to watch because a visit can be the first step to changing your residency. I brought my wife to Beaufort to celebrate our 30th anniversary. We just celebrated our 37th and have been living here in the Cape Carteret area in Bluewater Cove for the last four years.

I find Carteret County a great place to live. I have lived in a lot of places, including north of Fredericton, New Brunswick for 11 years so I know what kind of winter weather people from the northern areas are trying to escape. Our youngest daughter was born in January 1982 when we were living on our cattle farm in Tay Creek, NB. The temperature was minus 40 degrees for a couple of days after a massive blizzard that dumped nearly three feet of snow on us.

You can check out my blog for people thinking about living here and my site with lots of information and pictures of the area.

Make sure you take a boat ride somewhere. If you don't get in a boat, you will have missed the essence of Carteret County which by the way is over 50% water. You can only truly appreciate the area from the water.

If for some reason you miss a boat ride, try my Mackerel Morning trip or my trip behind Hammocks Beach-Bear Island which is another great place you can grab an inexpensive ferry ride over to one of our outer beaches.

You can also take a virtual trip down the beaches and back down Hwy 24.

I like to say this area is a special place which stretches your mind. It is a wonderful spot for an active life style on the water whether you love kayaking or riding around in a skiff.

Hope you have a great visit and decide to come live in our little piece of paradise.

Nothing better than local shrimp fixed at home

My favorite way to memorialize a trip to the beach has always been taking home a cooler of fresh seafood.  For one magic summer, while I was in college, I alternated camping on the beaches of Ocracoke Island with camping in the National Forests of western North Carolina.  

Nowadays, fresh shrimp is just down the road from us at one of the local seafood vendors who catch the shrimp right here in our local waters.

In my youth, I would take the long way home from Ocracoke which as any well-versed traveler of Route 12 knows is the Cedar Island Ferry.  I would stop in Morehead City for a meal at Captain Bill's (which has been replaced by Southern Salt ) and then fill a cooler full of fresh off of the shrimp boats and head home.

Five to six hours after loading the cooler in the car,  I would be cleaning and boiling shrimp for a straight from the sea treat. I'm pretty convinced that most folks think shrimp come from the grocery store.  It has gotten more and more popular to buy your shrimp at the grocery store and have them steamed right there. 

I'm no purist but I would rather have my shrimp cooked after they've been cleaned, and grocery stores don't do that.  You may not know the difference because you've never tasted shrimp that have been done right.  It's not that hard, but it does take some time.

You do need one tool, a Shrimp Deveiner. The one I have looks exactly like that picture. (Update 2018- They usually cost a couple of dollars locally but they seem much more expensive on Amazon eight years after I wrote the original article)  The next thing you need is fresh shrimp.  Ideally, you try to get your shrimp as close to the boat as possible.  In most cases that means asking around locally to find out the best way to buy your shrimp.  Sometimes you can buy them right off the dock or from people who buy them right off the dock.  The shrimp should be firm and not mushy.

Often the shrimp you buy will have the heads still on the body.  Do yourself a favor and have the folks where you buy the shrimp take the heads off if at all possible. 

It seems almost effortless for them, but for normal mortals, it's a little more of a challenge.  Take a cooler and ice your shrimp down if possible.  Often the seafood shop will give you enough ice for a small cooler. 

The biggest challenge with cleaning shrimp is that it is pretty boring.  We usually get three to four lbs of shrimp, weighed with the heads still on the shrimp.  That's about my limit.  After that, I lose interest even if someone is feeding me freshly boiled shrimp.  By the time you take the heads and shells off, four pounds with the heads on are equal to approximately two pounds shelled and raw.

In the Swansboro, NC area we buy our shrimp from one of the local legends, Clyde Phillips Seafood, located between the bridges on Route 24.  Don't expect a lot of conversation but Jimmy who owns the place knows more about seafood than anyone I have ever met. You can count on fresh seafood and a magic touch for removing shrimp heads.  There is also Captain Sam's in Cedar Point and Captain Willis Seafood in Emerald Isle, but you won't find me there as long as Jimmy has shrimp.

Learning to use the shrimp deveiner just takes a few shrimp and they don't seem to mind.  Just focus on the big top vein.  You can ignore the bottom one. The twist at the end is the secret touch. Once you have deveining mastered, you can start thinking about cooking them.  We cook them in batches so that we can cool them easily. 

My suggestion is to clean about one half your shrimp and then bring to boil about two to two and one-half inches of water in an uncovered twelve inch deep (three quart) skillet.  If you have cleaned your shrimp the way I suggested, they cook without any smell.

My wife, Glenda, says she adds some salt, an amount or pile about the size of a quarter in her palm.  She dumps the shrimp in the boiling water and has a timer running from the minute the shrimp are dumped in the water.  The shrimp cook very quickly and are done in three minutes when they've turned a beautiful pink color.  As soon as they are done, my wife dumps them in a bowl of water filled with ice.

We then fish the shrimp out and let them drain in a colander.  All you have to do then is to put them in a bowl or on a platter if they are going to be eaten immediately.  Once you have had real fresh shrimp done right, going back to anything less is tough to do.

I can highly recommend Kelchner's Cocktail sauce.  It does vary a little between batches so I try to be a little forgiving since it is the best I've ever had.

If you want to know more, this link on shrimp is very helpful as is this link on cooking shrimp.

You aren't able to read the sticker in the lower left corner of the leftmost window at Clyde Phillips, but it says "Friends don't let friends eat imported shrimp."  Just click on the link to the left for a view of the bumper sticker.

Land and waters that stretch your imagination

After many years of travel, your mind has wonderful images of beautiful places that you have visited. I have been lucky to have traveled to many scenic spots around the globe.

From Alaska to New Zealand to Switzerland and Germany's Bavaria, I have enjoyed many postcard perfect scenes. Beyond that I lived on the shore in Nova Scotia and more recently on the side of a mountain in Virginia.

From our Nova Scotia home I used to watch the sun set over the Bay of Fundy. From our Virginia home, I could roll out of bed and capture the sun as it climbed above the mountains surrounding downtown Roanoke.

All of those places have left me with wonderful memories, vivid images, and thousands of pictures. As wonderful as all those places are, my mind ends up being a blank slate when I get out on the water here along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks. It is nearly impossible to describe the beauty of this area in words. Only photography offers the chance to share some of the beauty with people who are unable to actually make a boat trip.

I often talk about the wonders of living along the water. Here along the Crystal Coast a water view is highly prized. Yet as wonderful as it to live by the water, the appreciation of the water and the beauty of the surrounding land deepens greatly when you are actually out on the water.

Something truly special happens when you make a turn, and you see nothing but sky, water, and amazing marshes filling the horizon. It is almost like the scenery just washes over my mind's eye and clears out any old images.

Understanding that you can be swallowed up by the beautiful scenery around you explains one of the great mysteries of being out on the water. Often we go out and find a spot to fish and enjoy the beauty around us only to discover that time has little relevance for us. What we thought was an hour, possibly was actually three or four hours.

If we are lucky enough to have escaped any cell phone calls, then it is very easy to suffer time dis-orientation. We have no idea what time is, and sometimes we end up forgetting even when we left. Fortunately hunger usually shakes us back to reality, but it is truly amazing how our area's scenic beauty can lull you almost into another dimension.

What is even more fun is that the images from the water stick with you. I can easily remember many wonderful water trips while I have a hard time recalling any of my road trips even though I have driven around the United States three times. It is almost like the best images from my water adventures are burned into my brain. I can flip through almost at will. Time hardly seems to dim them. I remember the water on a trip that I called Mackerel Morning almost as clearly as it was two weeks ago instead of over two years ago.

As good as the pictures might be, there are times when you can only appreciate the true beauty of the moment by being there. The wind on your face, the smells of ocean water, and the warmth of the sun all contribute to special moments. While our minds can record those feelings, it is the rare photograph that can do justice to one of those special moments.

Even this evening, I spent a long time deciding what picture could best capture a sampling of the beauty of this area. I came close to picking a special ocean wave or perhaps a view of Bogue Sound from the Emerald Isle Bridge, but in the end I went with this recent shot taken as we turned towards Bear Island from the Intracoastal Waterway.

It highlights the expansiveness that often captures our eyes and imagination. The clouds, the water, and the marshes are all part of the equation that ends up equaling scenic beauty that pulls many of us to choose the Crystal Coast as our permanent homes.

We are the really lucky ones. We wake up to the beauty of this area every day. It is literally on our doorsteps. I know that I am not the only resident who can lose himself by enjoying just a few hours on the water.

The good news is that many of those wonderful views that have so enchanted me are very accessible by boat. Some can even be seen while riding the pontoon ferry over to Hammocks Beach State Park. We live in area where kayaking and boating are a big part of life so it is not very hard to find a boat ride in Carteret County.