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RALEIGH In North Carolina, Down East mean that big stretch of land and marsh to the west of Core Banks and east of the Lower Neuse River. There, in little towns all along this watery world, descendants of explorers became fishermen and, of necessity, boatbuilders.
They built them then the way a few still do: without plans, using a few tools and native woods such as juniper and cedar. They built them according to their needs, proceeding from plank to plank with the help of a virtual blueprint in their brains. Local craftsmen had an expression for it: “rack of the eye.”
In coastal tradition, they made them different in Atlantic from the way they did in Stacy or Davis or Marshallberg, but they made them sturdy, able to take the beating a choppy sound and a relentless weather system could wreak on people and craft alike. A lot of these boats still float; a lot more have gone to pieces in the harsh marine environment.
And a lot of them have been preserved in loving photographic images by Lawrence S. Earley, a multi-talented artisan of the written word and the captured image. For years Earley edited “Wildlife in North Carolina,” magazine of the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, known for its outstanding photography and lively writing about the outdoors. Possessor of a Ph.D. in English from UNC Chapel Hill, Earley is also author of the book “Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest” (UNC Press) and is a noted garden photographer in Raleigh. Check out www.larryearleyphotography.com.
Be sure to check out his online gallery section “Workboats of Core Sound.” There you'll find some of the fine black and white images he has recorded of boats built for working fishermen Down East. An exhibit by the same name opened in May at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh, and runs to May of 2010. If you have time to see the exhibit in the capital city you'll see the reverence and respect Earley has for the coastal boatbuilders Down East.
“A Core Sound workboat is exquisitely adapted to the shallow waters of the region,” Earley notes on his Web site. “It is the signature of the man who made it and a distinctive expression of the village in which it was made.”
You'll also learn of a number of innovations that mark the work of such builders as Brady Lewis of Harkers Island. I've seen this attributed to other boatbuilders up and down our coast, but I believe Lewis is credited with what's known as the Carolina Flare – a dramatic curve in the bow of a boat that turns a roughly vertical side of boat into a nearly horizontal outward flare at the deck. This flare – rendered in wood, mind you, with all the compound curves that would have been required in boatbuilding half a century or more ago – helped a boat cut through rough water, threw the chop and the spray to the side, provided more lift to the bow in heavy seas and enabled working fishermen to move their wheelhouses far forward. This not only left crewmen drier in wet conditions, it also gave them more stern upon which to work at the often-backbreaking work of hauling nets and icing down fish.
Today you see this innovation in the bows and sheer lines of multi-million-dollar fiberglass sport fishing vessels. It's a simpler matter to achieve this flare by constructing hulls over a fiberglass mold, or even building them up in the cold-molding process using narrow strips. How Brady Lewis managed to fashion planks into the sweeping Carolina Flare for which he is known is beyond me. There was art in that craft.
It's enough, for now, to look at Lawrence Earley's photos of the Workboats of Core Sound, and to marvel at the creativity, craftsmanship and sheer genius of those unforgettable Down Easters.
Jack Betts is an Observer associate editor in Raleigh: jbetts@charlotteobserver.com.
