I am back in the Outer Banks after a weeklong trip to Alabama and Illinois. It was a rather exhausting trip with daily shoots and teaching at a 5-day workshop. The most enjoyable part of these trips is the after hours, spent catching up with friends.
There is so much beauty in OBX that when I am here, I am continually faced with the dilemma of what to showcase from my photographic explorations. For those that have visited or vacationed here, it is a magical, as well as, historical piece of paradise. The island is known for it’s sunsets but since May 5, smoke from the Pains Bay fire in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge has filled the skies with a haze and masked the horizon. The sun sets into the smoke layer never truly disappearing in the horizon.
While out on one of my photo journeys, I traveled north to the sleepy fishing village of Wanchese and then back to Oregon Inlet. I found myself once again photographing two majestic icons of the island, the Bodie Lighthouse and the Pea Island Lifesaving Station. As luck would have it I found myself hiking around the dunes at Pea Island as the sun was setting. As magical as the setting is with the Lifesaving Station in the foreground, I could only imagine what it could have been without the haze.
From a historical perspective, Pea Island Lifesaving Station was originally commissioned on June 18, 1878 and decommissioned on March 18, 1947. Pea Island Lifesaving Station was the first life-saving station in the country to have an all-black crew, and it was the first in the nation to have a black man, Richard Etheridge, appointed as commanding officer on January 24, 1880.
Additional info can be found at:
http://www.uscg.mil/history/stations/PEAISLAND.asp
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Best regards ……….
~dK~
