Port Starbird (Storm Ketchum Adventures) Read Free Page A

Avon, damaged by a hurricane in the Forties, had been demolished, and the remnants of the Little Kinnakeet station buildings on the north end were still in a state of restoration limbo and not open to the public.
    A nd he'd lost count of the ostentatious new beach houses and soundside developments that had sprung up here in the last twenty years or so, often at the expense of older dwellings and other legacy structures. They, along with a plethora of associated realty offices that reminded him of remoras on a whale shark, were now nearly as ubiquitous as the cordgrass in the salt marshes and the sea oats on the dunes. And of course it was vastly different than it had been in earlier times, when this part of the island had been wider before the erosion that resulted from the decimation of the expansive stands of live oak and cedar harvested for boat building and other commerce, and from the now-nonexistent cattle devouring just about everything else they could get at back then.
    But to the town's credit, there was less of the blatant commercialism and cultural homogenization here that he knew had infected other popular coastal areas like a plague. Yes, there were some small, touristy strip malls here and there along Route 12, and scads of vacation rentals - but there were no fancy resorts or even hotels, just the retro but trim Avon Motel; no chain restaurants nor fast-food abominations unless one counted the Subway and the Dairy Queen, neither of which bothered Ketch much since he happened to be fond of subs and ice cream; and no department stores, golf courses, apartment complexes, cheap boarding houses, or boardwalks stocked with carnival rides and arcades and other tacky amusements - yet. One would have to go off-island an hour's drive or so north past Oregon Inlet to the Nags Head / Kill Devil Hills / Kitty Hawk sprawl to start enjoying some of those fruits of so-called progress, or several hours farther south. Well, except for the mini-golf down in Frisco, and the go-karts and water slide and such up around Rodanthe, now that he thought about it - but there was nothing like that here in Avon so far.
    Though radically changed in many ways, the town still retained some tenuous bits of character and individuality, some sense of history, and some meager traces of its original old-time flavor - but for how much longer? Who needed a state-of-the-art marina with upscale condos and a luxury hotel, for crying out loud, in Avon? And then what else would start sprouting up after that - Outbacks, Targets, amusement parks? And why would any of the bigger boats want to be based here in the first place? If there wasn't room enough in Hatteras, expanding between there and Frisco would make more sense.  But Avon was Ingram's turf, and he guessed that might be reason enough.
    Fishing and other water sports were indeed the main attractions on this stretch of the Banks, but due to its mid-island location sport fishing in Avon mostly meant surf fishing, either directly from the beach or from the venerable Avon Pier. You couldn't berth nor launch yachts and head boats in the breakers on the ocean side of the island, so from Avon their closest access to the Atlantic and its Gulf Stream would be via Hatteras Inlet to the south, where the Minnow was headed right now; and many of those bigger boats might also be unable to navigate the shallow sound between here and there. Were there definite plans in place to do more dredging in the sound between Avon and Hatteras? Ketch didn't know, but there would have to be; again, more bad news for the sound's ecosystems.
    There was also Oregon Inlet on the north end of the island, but that was twice as far, and for Oregon Inlet it would make more sense to build around Rodanthe - though it wouldn't make much sense there either, since the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center, a full-service marina just across the bridge, was both close to the more populous and developed Nags Head area, and not appreciably closer to