The Crystal Coast, Salt water on my feet

Like A Nova Scotia Summer Day Except In November

Sometimes the weather plays tricks on you.  You get a sense that you are in a place where you know you cannot be.

That happened to me a few days ago, I had just returned from a walk in the fog and we got in the car and headed across the bridge to Emerald Isle.  With the cold weather that visited us recently, it was no surprise to see fog on Bogue Sound.

However the light, temperature, clouds, and colors conspired to make me think that I was back in Nova Scotia.  Nova Scotia seems to get more than its fair share of foggy days.  Here near the Carolina coast we get a few visits from the fog fairy each year, but blue skies are a lot more common.

 A day in when the temperature is between sixty-five and seventy degrees Fahreheit even in November is not that uncommon here along the Crystal Coast.  That is especially true since our average high temperature in November is sixty-five. In the first twenty-five days of November 2014, we managed twelve days within that range.  We even had some sixty-five degree low temperatures.

However, you would have to be in the middle of the summer in Nova Scotia to experience temperatures in that same range.  This past summer, which was a warm one in Halifax, saw every day but three get up in the sixty-five to seventy degrees Fahrenheit range.  However so far in Novermber of 2014, Halifax, Nova Scotia has only managed three days over sixty five.

Another thing which made me feel like I was in Nova Scotia was the water temperature.  After our cold snap, the water in the river and sounds dropped into the upper forties.  That is not far off summer water temperatures in Nova Scotia.

Beach days in Canada's Atlantic provinces do not come easily.  It is however a great place to go to escape the worst of the the heat of summer.

Most of our fog in the marshes disappeared today because the shallow marsh water rapidly equalizes with the air temperature.  While it stayed in the mid-sixties all day, it has started to rain this evening as another nor'easter is about to spin up off our coast.

We will see some rain, maybe even a lot of rain, but our air temperature will not be so cold that we have to worry about snow. Nova Scota will likely go from rain to freezing rain then to snow and then back to rain with some more snow thrown in for good measure.

While there are not any spruce trees in Nova Scotia that are the height of our pines, at a distance our forests look similar.  In fact even when the fog is gone, the blues and greens of Bogue Sound remind me a lot of Nova Scotia from the air.

Sometimes when a quick front passes here on our coast I am also reminded of the power of the weather both here and in Canada.

While the climate along the Crystal Coast is about as different as it can get from Nova Scotia, there are elements of the weather that help me drift back to those very happy years in Canada that are the basis of our book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes.

With that in mind, I will enjoy our North Carolina foggy days which let me relive the seventies and eighties when I was living in the different but similar world of Martime Canada.

Spinning Up Another Nor'easter

We are used to weather changing frequently here along North Carolina's coast. 

Our own weather is enough of a challenge at times, but we also get to be the birthplace of many storms. That would include the Nor'easter which started spinning up on November 1, 2014.

As you can see from the picture, things look pretty stormy Saturday morning, November 1.  That morning we were watching a storm start to develop.  In spite of that in less than an hour, clouds were gone and we were looking at blue sky.  A band of rain and clouds from the new storm had snagged us early, but it soon moved off the coast and while developing produced some strong winds along the Northern Outer Banks.

It was over four hours before we saw any more precipitation and then it was very light.  In spite of being the birth place of storms, we sometimes escape with almost no bad weather from these storms.  We only got one tenth of an inch of rain and a few hours of strong winds out of this most recent storm.  We were far luckier than areas to the west of us.

Of course these storms often grow in strength after they head north. The reason we get to watch storms be birthed is that the Labrador Current runs into the Gulf Stream just off the North Carolina coast.

With warm and cold waters colliding nearby, our area is a great place for storms to spring to life.  As is often the case, we are having more problems with the aftermath of the storm than the storm itself.  This time the rotation of the storm sucked down some very cold air.

That means that Sunday night, we might see our first frost of the year.  Our yards are already done for the year, but many of us who live close to the water get a very nice fall crop of vegetables if we can sneak through a few cold days.  I have my fingers crossed that I might get a December tomato and some November green beans.  We are already enjoying some broccoli from a neighbor's garden and our own broccoli will be ready in the next few days.

As this most recent storm headed north, we heard reports of snow in the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia.  Our friends in Maritime Canada and Maine are bearing the brunt of this Sunday night storm that started here early Saturday morning.

Weather is a big part of life at the coast.  Because fall is definitely the best season of all, it is nice when one of the storms that get birthed here gets out of our way and takes its bad weather and sometimes nasty snowstorms far to the north.

We usually sneak in plenty of great weather later in the fall season.  Likely the weather will not be as consistent as it has been in October, but the Crystal Coast usually has a wonderful, long fall and nice days in November or even December are not that rare.

If you have some free time, fall is a great time to visit the Carolina Coast.  If you are interested in more articles about the area, check out the index on this page, my Crystal Coast Life page, or visit my special page with an archive of older articles about the area.