Ships of Opportunity

Using NC Ferries to Monitor the Pamlico Sound

by Monte Basgall

It's one of those forehead slapping "Why didn't I think of that?" ideas. In fact, a local newspaper - the Carteret County News Times - gave it a "stroke of genius" award. Still, Joseph S. "Joe" Ramus and Hans Paerl spent a decade getting the needed support for their plan to use North Carolina's ferries as mobile environmental monitoring stations for the nation's second largest estuary.

Ramus, the former director of the Nicholas School's Marine Laboratory in coastal Beaufort, N.C., and Paerl, a senior scientist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Institute of Marine Sciences in nearby Morehead City, are both Californians who moved to the area in 1978 to begin studying coastal systems.

Good friends, they worked in slightly different areas. But about 10 years ago, both began focusing their attention on the Pamlico Sound, which at 1,700 square miles is only slightly smaller than the Chesapeake Bay.

"There were compelling reasons to think about it scientifically, and also from a management perspective," Ramus recalls in an interview. "It's a terribly important living resource, a critical nursery habitat for many, many commercial fish species."

Pamlico Sound is actually the nation's largest "lagoonal" estuary. Chesapeake Bay water flows freely out into the Atlantic Ocean like a river does. But the big North Carolina sound is like a huge mixing bowl where fresh water from feeder rivers - the Neuse, the Tar-Pamlico system, the Roanoke, and the Chowan - gets impounded by a leaky wall of barrier islands, the Outer Banks.

The sound's water can only escape through narrow inlets between the islands. As a result, scientists think that about half the water lingers long enough inside to actually evaporate. And the nutrients, soils and chemicals that wash into the sound from upstream also have long residence times there.

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