“The day was all gentle promise and the sea lay smooth and clear.”  Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway

One hundred years ago, Kinnakeet village (Avon) was inhabited by fishermen, boat builders and tradesmen. The days were filled with hard work and lifespans were shorter than today. The village was crisscrossed with sand roads traveled by horse and cart; homes were sturdy and built on the ground where they were vulnerable to storm tides. Daily life was  tied closely to the forces of nature. The day’s promise for them was a bountiful catch of fish or oysters and a garden full of vegetables.

Hatteras Island could be reached only by boat. Sailboats connected the villages to the mainland. Many of the boats were built locally from juniper and cypress cut in the Buxton woods. Farrow L. Scarborough had his own boatyard on his property in Kinnakeet and a road going through his land to the sound that was used to cart supplies in from the boats. Scarborough built small and large boats and rebuilt them as well, cutting the wood with hand tools and nailing it together with spikes. The wood was soaked, perhaps in linseed oil, to soften it in order to shape the wood. He owned a 45 foot schooner, the Topaz, which he traded to a man in Colington for a skipjack called the Silver Spray, which he then rebuilt. Another boat builder was Malachi Gray. The last boat he built was the Thelma G.

Some of the types of sailboats used were schooners, skipjacks and sharpies. Schooners ranged in size from 35 to 50 feet and had a square mainsail, a foresail and a jib. The skipjack and sharpie had a triangle mainsail and a jib; the sharpie had a slight raking in its mast so its sails tilted slightly backward. They also ranged in size from 35 to 50 feet. The boats anchored in the sound off of the village and were reached by skiff. Locals say that in those days “the boats were so thick it looked like a pine tree forest.”

Smaller sailboats, about 25 feet, with a mainsail and jib were used for fishing. Fish was the chief source of food and barter from the time of the first settlers of Hatteras Island. There was no crab market at that time. The summer months were spent fishing and salting the catch. In the fall they took their catch by larger sailboat to the mainland and exchanged it for corn, potatoes and sweet potatoes. The schooner boat H.P. Brown went to Elizabeth city, and the Carrie Bell went to Washington, N.C.

The oyster market began in the 1880’s. Two-masted schooners were used for the winter oyster trade and would go out for a week at a time. They tonged and dredged oysters from Roanoke Island to Carteret County. A boat would come in from Norfolk and buy their catch daily. Oysters were also taken by local men to the mainland for sale. The oyster market brought cash into the community as well as goods to barter. One winter, the sound froze over while the men were out oystering south of Hatteras Island. Their only way home was to walk over the ice across the inlet to shore and continue to walk across the frozen ground to Kinnakeet, taking shortcuts across the icy sound whenever possible.

The fishermen of Kinnakeet were always arguing who had the fastest skiff and would arrange races on Saturday to prove their boasts. The skiffs used in these races were 18 to 30 feet and had a portable mast with mainsail and jib attached to spread the mainsail. They used a wooden sprit and in the center of the skiff they attached a center board to diminish leeway while in operation. A portable rudder was used for steering. For ballast, there were canvas bags filled with sand which they shifted from gunwale to gunwale while in operation. They also used a ballast board with one end tucked under the gunwale and extending across the midsection of the skiff, protruding over the other gunwale of the reverse side about four feet. A man would crawl out to the end of the board to be used as ballast. The men would pick a Saturday when the wind was blowing a strong gale from the southwest. The race ran eight miles from the shoreline to the Inner Buoy at Cape Channel and back to land. Ten to twenty skiffs would participate. Some of the skiffs would be dead-rise, chime or chimp-bottomed, some flat-bottomed. Everyone in the village turned out and crowded the shoreline, straining their eyes to see the first skiff reach the buoy and turn shoreward.

The sails now seen off Kinnakeet belong to kite boarders, not fishermen, as they traded their sails for motors years ago. Tourism has surpassed fishing as a local industry. This community is no longer isolated from the world; the world comes to us. Most of the generation that can remember the day of the schooner has passed on, but there are a few left, hardy people with sharp minds and a love of life that has extended their days. For them, each day can still be full of gentle promise, if the sun shines warm and good friends stop by.