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June 19, 2008
With gasoline prices at an all time high, people in Oriental are adapting. You see more bikes than ever on the streets, for instance.Robbie Beal has made a dramatic change too. For the past week, his business, Olde South Hardwoods, has been installing a floor at a home on the Carteret county side of the Neuse River.
That’s not just a power boat out for a spin up Greens Creek. That’s a crew of four hardwood floor installers, commuting home.If he had driven his work van to the job every day, it would have been about 35-40 miles each way, in a van that gets about 10 miles to the gallon. Toss in the wait for the Minnesott-Cherry Branch ferry, and it would’ve been a 60 to 90 minute trip in each direction.
His solution? A 20-foot Mako powerboat.
The commuter vehicle, a 20-foot Mako.For the past week Robbie and his crew — his father, Robert, his stepson Reuben Maxwell and Bill Gwaltney — have crossed the Neuse from Oriental to Carteret County, worked on the flooring job and then zoomed back home.
It’s about 5 or 6 miles from shore to shore. Robbie says he fills the 5 gallon gas tank every two days. While that compares favorably to filling the van’s tank, the real savings comes in terms of time. The trip across can be as short as 10 minutes. (The afternoon commute home can be longer if they slow down to fish.)
Robert Beal, Bill Gwaltney, Reuben Maxwell and Robbie Beal.“It’s great to go to work by water,” Robbie said Wednesday after docking the boat behind a friend’s home on Greens Creek.
Robbie Beal.Robbie says he has just about one more day of doing this particular commute, because the hardwood flooring job is almost finished.
But Robbie’s wife, Sandie, who on Wednesday drove the mile or two to the dock on Greens Creek to pick up the work crew and bring them back to Oriental, figures this isn’t the last time Robbie will commute by boat. Their company often puts in new floors in recently built homes, and as Sandie notes, “a lot of the new construction is on the waterfront.”
The boat-pooling starts and ends at this dock on Greens’ Creek.She hopes that maybe others will take to the water, too. Closer to home, she says, there’s an example of that kind of commute in Oriental’s past. “It’s what people did before there was a bridge,” when they had to get from one side of the river to creek to the other.
If the Beals still lived in the mountains of NC near Hendersonville (which they moved from a year and a half ago) commuting to work via boat may not have been an option. Unless, Robbie laughs, “it was a canoe.”
Which of course, might really cut down on the fuel costs….
Posted Thursday June 19, 2008 by Melinda Penkava
