Four if by Sea: Shells > Sharks

By Amanda McDanel

As the weather warms, most local families tend to congregate at the same beach spots each week – and those locations are 100 percent determined by the activities available at said beach. First Street, for example, might have a great sandbar for the kids to boogie board. Lillian Street may be primed for some post-storm seaglass hunting, or the fish might be biting just north of Avalon Pier. More often than not, though, it’s a combination of these factors along with the answer to the biggest grown-up adventure question – a.k.a., where’s the surf breaking?

But a few years ago, a family adventure of another sort presented itself on our shores. Around the same time the new H2OBX Waterpark was set to open in mainland Currituck, an equally fun natural waterpark began to form across another bridge much farther south.

It started as a small island off the coast of Cape Point in Buxton and quickly vaulted into national news with the likes of Good Morning America broadcasting live from its shores. Known as Shelly Island because of the vast amount of shells it contained, it was a beach-goers dream destination.

Although it was only approximately one mile long and 500 feet wide at its grandest, locals and visitors alike couldn’t get enough of the phenomenon. And being the avid shell collector I am, I was determined to head south as soon as possible.

My family’s first venture down to Shelly Island was actually the maiden voyage of my husband Johnny’s new car. As soon as he arrived home from the dealership one spring morning, we loaded the Honda Pilot up with kids, beach chairs, fishing poles, coolers, buckets and a kayak, and headed over the Oregon Inlet bridge for a blissfully full beach day.

A few hours’ worth of traffic later, however, we were hangry and irritable. And to make matters worse, we soon realized that our extended journey had caused us to misjudge the tides. Lacking the option to drive out on the beach toward Cape Point, we opted to chance cutting through on the west side of the dunes – where we promptly hit a soft spot of sand and got stuck.

Now Johnny would like you to know that he is a very experienced beach driver, and the fact that we had a brand-new-to-him car was the only reason we got stuck. I will not argue this because I know better. After about 20 frantic minutes that involved a shovel, a Google search, the owner’s manual and a phone call to a friend, we eventually figured out how to engage the four-wheel-drive function and make our way to the point.

Pulling in between the 715 other trucks parked there, we rock-paper-scissored it to see who got to wade across the small channel first to explore Shelly Island and who got to sit and wait with the kids on the other side. I lost, so Johnny mapped out the lowest tide point before we all – finally! – headed over as a family. As the tide continued to rise, I had to focus all my attention on not getting swept away by the currents along with two small girls and our prized buckets of shells.

And it was blissful, after all. The girls delighted in scampering along the sand, discovering one perfect shell after another. Small coves provided great kiddie pools and we dashed and dove into the shallow waves. After a few hours of exploring, we headed back across the channel before the tide rose again, our arms heavy with shells. A few months later, I offered to join some out-of-town friends who were visiting specifically to experience Shelly Island. Thinking myself a veteran at this point, I brazenly hopped into the car and drove down with my girls to the summertime hot spot.

What I failed to take into account was that I didn’t exactly have the same sort of skills as Johnny when it came to monitoring the tides. So while we made it across the channel without incident along with a good number of fellow adventurers, we somehow lost track of time as we filled our buckets with shells.

Suddenly, only a few people were still on the island, and the channel was filled with nearly chest high water. Only slightly panicked, my friend and I decided to divide and conquer by splitting up to make it back across with our respective children in tow.

As the tide continued to rise, I had to focus all my attention on not getting swept away by the currents along with two small girls and our prized buckets of shells. My friend and her son, on the other hand, sized the situation up more quickly – and promptly caught a ride back to shore with a friendly surfer who happened to be paddling by.

Luckily, I didn’t learn the full reason why the surfer was so helpful until we were safely on the other side – as my friend wasted no time telling me about the six-foot bull shark they’d seen swim right in front of them. Insert eight-year-old Amanda who’s been so traumatized by the movie Jaws that she refuses to swim in water when she can’t see the bottom, and you can probably imagine my reaction to news reports later that evening that detailed pods of sharks congregating in the shallow waters around Shelly Island.

The island disappeared about a year after it so quietly appeared, and I never made that trek out past the point again. While it’s possible that Shelly Island could re-form sometime in the future, I will forevermore prefer to wade through the mechanical waves at H2OBX and find my shells along the tideline of my nearest beach access – because adventure is one thing, and finding new meaning in the words “shark bait” is quite another.