. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. the explosive growth of saltwater fly- fishing has, in the space of a few years, turned the waters off the hook's rock jetty and Cape Point into a parking lot for boats, a place where sportfishers pay guides $350 per day to cast $5 flies to schools of migrating false albacore. The next morning, I hitch a ride with Michael Rikard, the park's natural resources manager, whose job is to see that recreational uses don't negatively affect the park's preservation mandate. In a few weeks, Rikard tells me, the Cape
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. the explosive growth of saltwater fly- fishing has, in the space of a few years, turned the waters off the hook's rock jetty and Cape Point into a parking lot for boats, a place where sportfishers pay guides $350 per day to cast $5 flies to schools of migrating false albacore. The next morning, I hitch a ride with Michael Rikard, the park's natural resources manager, whose job is to see that recreational uses don't negatively affect the park's preservation mandate. In a few weeks, Rikard tells me, the Cape Point will be packed with trucks. But even with the fishers and the growing numbers of daytrippers, 50 miles of sand makes for a pretty effective buffer. "If you compare us to Cape Hatteras," he says wryly, "then we're a sleepy little park with no ; We drive along the single two-track sand road that threads the island's spine, watching peregrine falcons pirouette in the morning updrafts. Many visitors might describe Cape Lookout as a stark landscape, but on this morning it is anything but. Fire-wheel flowers speckle the lower slopes of the dunes with their brilliant orange and yellow bull's-eyes. The truck groans through soft sand as it climbs the dune line and coasts onto the beach, and the empty stretch of sand seems to invite Rikard to play the Park Service's ultimate trump card in any discussion of its manage- ment of Core Banks and the cape: the undeniability of what the future had in store for Lookout were it not for public ownership. The choice was clear: Look at Bald Head, Figure Eight, Atlantic Beach, Wrightsville. "We could have had that here," Rikard says, his words freighted with the feel of a closing argument. Among Rikard's chief directives is the complicated allocation of the banks' precious sand beaches to all who vie for. Yeomans and his wife, Clara, have made their home at Cape Lookout in a converted llfesaving service b
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookcollectionunclibra, booksubjectoceanography
