Saturday January 21, 2012 was a damp, gloomy day with fortunately not a lot of winter attached to it.

However, it was just rainy and windy enough to keep me from my afternoon exercise of walking around the marshes here in Bluewater Cove.

My walk isn't a very long one.  Unless I do a lot of doubling back and a few laps on the road which isn't visible in the old Google aerial photo, it is hard to even get in two miles of walking.

Still a few minutes out in the fresh air under what is usually a brilliant blue sky is a great antidote for the winter blues.

Keeping winter out of my head gets more difficult when I miss a few days of walking.  This Thursday I was busy catching up on some correspondence, and Friday we went to Morehead City and Beaufort.  The highlight of the trip was a barbecue lunch at Smithfield's and seeing some Mergansers in the Beaufort Harbor.
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One of the amazing things about the Crystal Coast of North Carolina is that we have enough space and water to have some really big feathered friends living nearby.

Our home which borders Raymond's Gut is just off the White Oak River.  It is a very sheltered spot, and I often measure the nastiness of storms by the number of egrets or herons seeking shelter.  We had a great egret stake out some ground not far from our kitchen window during Hurricane Irene.

When it is really cold, the competition for the fishing grounds behind our home can become fierce with blue herons and great egrets vying for positions in the nooks and crannies of the marshes.

Most mornings I will go for a walk along the boardwalk which surrounds our neighborhood's clubhouse.  It is a great vantage point for watching our big birds.  Tuesday morning, January 10, a great blue surprised me by flying from one of the pine trees along the dock.
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Usually once we get past the end of November, you can count on the the air over at the beach being a little cooler during the middle of the day than it is here on the mainland.

With that thought in mind, on Friday, December 16, I headed out for a hike at the Point on Emerald Isle wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved tee shirt.  It was certainly a miscalculation.  I should have stuck to my earlier-in-the-week thoughts that this was shorts weather.

I was fairly certainly that I had detected some signs that the season was changing, but apparently the warm weather is proving harder to dislodge than I guessed.

It is normal when I park and get out of my truck at the Station Street Parking lot near the Point for it to be warmer than it is when I actually walk onto to the beach.  read more »

It is sometimes funny how we use weather to meet our own needs. All fall it seems like I have been writing about the wonderful weather.

We have had so much wonderful weather that you almost feel guilty if you don't get outside and enjoy it.  Of course for much of the fall, I did exactly that.  I was out in the boat, in my kayak, on my bike or walking the beaches of Emerald Isle.

I had a great time fishing and spent some wonderful afternoons on or near the water.  The trouble is that if you do all that neat stuff everyday, you eventually get worn out.  The fresh air, physical exertion, and warm sunshine all conspire to sap  your energy.

I would come home from my adventures with the best intentions.  I always planned to work on my writing after dinner.  Of course a warm home cooked meal just added to the problem.  I would go up to my office and start work only to find my face falling into the keyboard.  read more »

I still have memories of the 2009 and 2011 fall seasons which were not exactly up to my standards of fall at the beach.  Admittedly I have some high expectations of beach weather, but the weather on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina usually delivers.

Having some lingering warmth in the fall is to be expected along the Carolina coast near Bogue Sound, but it usually isn't this consistent.

The fall of 2011 has been very similar to the first three fall seasons that we enjoyed after we moved here in 2006.  However, this year might have given us one of the nicest Novembers that I have seen anywhere.  On Sunday November 20 it was over seventy degrees Fahrenheit before 10 AM in Bluewater Cove.
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It took less than a month, but the sand that I reported lost in the post, "A Bite Out of Third St. Beach," seems to have been replaced by waves that are likely cousins to ones who took it away.

My wife and I went for a walk up at Third Street on Wednesday November 9 and discovered that plenty of sand has returned to the beach.  I am pretty sure that there is now more sand on the beach than I saw at any time during the summer of 2011.

Never knowing what you will find is one of the neat things about walking on a beach.  It is rarely the same place twice.  The beach can even change as you are walking on it.

Lots of times, as the sun starts going down, the light on the beach will change.  What looked like a perfectly normal beach just a few minutes earlier will turn into a very different spot.
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As October disappears into memory, our weather forecast has been trying to drag us out of some really pleasant late season warmth.  We are even seeing about as much color in the leaves as ever reaches the NC coast.

My most recent trip to the beach on Emerald Isle was just like a late summer trip.  The temperature was almost 80F as I walked around the Point and observed the most recent changes to the beach.

Most of our threats of rain in late October have gone largely unrealized.  We received no rain the last weekend of October while much of the east coast was being soaked or covered in up to thirty inches of snow.  However, we did get cold enough for a small patch of very light frost to show up on the high spot in our front yard.
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