Paddling Taylor's Creek Beaufort NC 2010

Paddling Taylor's Creek Beaufort NC
Paddling Taylor's Creek Beaufort, NC

We made our annual 4th of July trip to the beach which, of course, includes a paddle on Taylor's Creek in Beaufort. Work on the development that replaced the Menhaden plant is well underway. Probably most of it will be completed next year (2011) when we visit.

There have been some changes at the parking lot at the launch site. The parking under the trees has been replaced with a paved road around the parking lot. The amount of parking has been significantly reduced. We really missed the shade that was provided by the trees at the edge of the parking lot.

white heron
gull
Ibis
Flying gull
Nessie when we ran out of water
Wild Horse herd
Sailboat in Beaufort
Launch site and Menhaden development

We had a nice paddle--the day wasn't too hot and there was little wind. We paddled towards Carrot Island and then headed away from Beaufort. We hoped to see some birds. We didn't find any birds on this part of the paddle.

We didn't see anywhere the number of birds that we usually see. Just a few solitary birds on the shore or in the air. The bird populations seemed to be very low everywhere this year. In the whole week we were at Atlantic Beach, NC we saw on small flock of pelicans, a few flocks of various gulls, and that's about it. We usually see lots of pelicans, gulls, sand pipers, and other birds. But not this year.

We then paddled around Carrot Island to see if there were more birds on the back side of the island. We did find this white heron, and a gull and an Ibis. But not much else.

Wild Horses

We had about given up on seeing any of the wild horses on Carrot Island, when we saw most of the herd off in the distance. We started paddling towards them but ran out of water before we could get close. We tried dragging Nessie to find deeper water, but still couldn't find enough water to get close. I wish we could have paddled closer, but Nessie can't go anywhere without water (unless she's on the top of the minivan). This was clearly a case of you can never have too long a telephoto. My wife got this shot because I was using the video camera at the time. We enjoyed watching them before we had to head back to the launch site.

When we headed back we had to drag Nessie a bit to find enough water to paddle. We found a cut through the island and we were soon back in Taylor's creek. We headed back to the launch site past the sailboats. It turned out to be a very good day.