{"id":18103,"date":"2023-06-02T20:09:42","date_gmt":"2023-06-03T00:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/?page_id=18103"},"modified":"2024-08-12T13:17:01","modified_gmt":"2024-08-12T17:17:01","slug":"out-at-hatteras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/out-at-hatteras\/","title":{"rendered":"Out at Hatteras: With Cap’n Ernie Foster and Albatross I"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n
Back in July of 2008, my great old friend and Carolina colleague Jake Mills and I had met up in Beaufort, taken the long ferry crossing from Cedar Island to Ocracoke, and spent the night there with another old friend, Scott Bradley, at his place in the Mary Anne\u2019s Pond neighborhood. The next morning we took the then-short, forty-minute ferry ride on up to Hatteras village, had a late breakfast and some Dramamine, and then went out with wonderfully friendly, sandy-haired Cap\u2019n Ernie Foster on Albatross I<\/em> for the afternoon, braving the vigorous roll of the very first vessel of the Outer Banks sport-fishing fleet, a round-sterned craft designed by Ernie\u2019s father Ernal and built down Core Sound in 1937, at Willis\u2019s boat works in Marshallberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I asked Ernie if we might, before we got to fishing, go over Diamond Shoals, out to the spot where the ghost ship Carroll A. Deering<\/em> had wrecked long ago, hard aground on the Outer Diamond sometime in the night of January 30th-31st, 1921, no captain or crew aboard when the Coast Guard got to her, and none ever found, their fate unknown to this day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ernie was happy to oblige, took the coordinates I gave him and got us right to that haunted spot, miles out from Hatteras Light beneath the bright sun of this July day. Nothing left of the Deering out here now, for she had broken up into two huge pieces, one drifting into the shipping lanes and blown up by the Coast Guard, the other, smaller one floating down and lodging on Ocracoke mid-island. September 1955 Hurricane Ione pitched what little was left up from Ocracoke north onto the seabeach of lower Hatteras Island, and only her capstan, a running light, a flask, the captain\u2019s desk, and the ship\u2019s bell live on at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Shipwreck Museum in Hatteras village.<\/p>\n\n\n\n