Belhaven city hall on the left and library on the right.
Belhaven is one of the smallest and also one of the nicest marinas we stop in. It has as many stellar reviews on Active Captain as a number of great marinas holding 50 times as many boats. As is usual for these type of places it is right by the old downtown with great restaurants, breakfast places and other shops.
Across the street looking away from City hall, Belhaven marina is down past the trees. Water was 2 – 3′ above floor level here.
Spoon River restaurant is our (and a lot of other area people’s) favorite – we missed it last time because we were here only for the night it is closed. We’re missing it this time because it had a few feet of water during the recent flooding. In fact, every single restaurant in the nearby area remains closed. Some will open in another week, Spoon river around November 1, and a few maybe never. While we’re at a beautiful little marina, there is no place to go and nothing to do.
Star Gazer at Belhaven Waterway marina
This is our closest approach to Greg, our favorite boat technician (30 minute drive for him) so a few recently noticed items are getting repaired. That’s why we stayed here 5 nights. All the parts are in and Greg will finish up today and then we’ll move on to Beaufort NC tomorrow (Friday) morning.
This nice older home is up off the ground. Not too high but maybe enough.
They built this home next door years later, and raised it much higher.
The famous Outer Banks protects nearly all of North Carolina from the ocean tides flowing in and out, so tides here are wind driven. Here it was 4 to 5 feet up, enough to put an easy 2 feet or more above the main floor levels in the old downtown. Just around the corner in Washington NC, at the end of another 30 miles of the very wide Pamlico river they had a record 9 feet. Last March a different wind drained the west end of the Pamlico at Washington down more than 5 feet, putting a number of anchored boats on the ground for awhile. Very large shallow bodies of water make it harder for wind driven water to return underneath.
A block away from the waterfront, this home was raised long after it was built.
We saw how flooding in this area was more taken into account in home construction as time went on. We’ll be gathering more flood stories as we go southward through North Carolina.
Jack & Sue 