THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 3, 1994 TAG: 9406300229
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 58 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Drew Wilson
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
I had seen it all.
I thought.
My decade of work as a newspaper photographer on the Outer Banks has sent me to virtually every section of these marshy parts. I had been east and west. Traveled from sounds to the sea. On brown water and on blue.
It seemed there was no bird, fish or crab that flitted about this place which I hadn't seen, stepped on, or gotten bitten by.
I spent hours and days on boats big and small. Motored, sailed and paddled. I had surfed the waves in - and jumped them back out.
I had seen, and done, it all.
I thought.
Then, last week, I took a few days off to take a sailing trip with my parents, Frank and Katherine Wilson, on their 28-foot sloop Katrina.
Sailing has become a tradition in our family. My brother and I were introduced to the sport 25 years ago on flat days on the Neuse River in a plywood Sailfish assembled on my grandfather's farm in New Bern.
I remember an old photograph of my dad sitting on the stern of that little thing, his weight submerging half the boat as the bow angled upward proudly. I was amidships, sheet in hand, ready to take in the main on this particularly windless day.
Windy days we saw, though, in successively larger boats that took the family from the northern reaches of the Chesapeake Bay to the southern sections of the Pamlico Sound. We had docked in most of the harbors along the Intracoastal Waterway in Virginia and North Carolina.
But those were all inland trips along the sounds. This time, we were going ``on the outside.''
The trip was a milestone, of sorts, for my folks.
Sailing 56 miles in the Atlantic from the bight at Cape Lookout to Ocracoke Inlet was their first real ocean leg.
It has been a dream for my dad, the fanatic behind the tiller for all these years. I remember him talking about it. He even went the exhaustive route of obtaining his Captain's license, mainly to educate himself about the sextant. He learned to read the stars, crunch the numbers, and pick a course over open water.
And last week, as Katrina skirted the Gulf Stream west of Core Banks, land disappeared. Open ocean abounded.
Through the clear, blue water, shafts of light penetrated into the dark, 75-foot depths. Minnows schooled under the shade of floating clumps of sargassum.
Pods of porpoises played in the bow wave and jumped alongside for minutes at a time. Flying fish broke the surface, gliding in pairs and triplets over the ground swells. Portuguese Man-of-War blew lazily along at the whim of the breeze and current.
My father, his feet dangling over the rail, seemed mesmerized by the simple beauty of it all. He had made it at last.
We all had made it.
Around these Outer Banks, hardy skippers don't think twice about going 60 miles offshore for the sport of catching a big fish. Our quick dash up the coast was no huge feat by any means.
For my family, though, it could have been a transatlantic crossing.
It was a first. I finally learned.
I hadn't seen it all after all. by CNB