home

O

n a morning in early September, Bud Daniels was taking his dog for their daily walk along the oceanfront beach at Pine Knoll Shores. In the high tide line, he spied a tennis racket bag. Unzipping it, he saw two tennis rackets, six dollars and a business card.

That business card, Bud Daniels says, “was wet and deteriorated,” but with no other identification on the bag, the waterlogged words and partial words on the card were his only clue to finding the bag’s owner. Daniels says he could make out the name “Nelda” and then the start of a last name “C-O-..” before the paper faded to pulp. There was also, he says, “some reference to insurance.”

How does a tennis bag get from Oriental to Pine Knoll Shores? If you ask Google for driving directions you get the blue route above. The green route shows the shortest water route – if the bag had gone down Adams Creek – then out Beaufort Inlet and over to the ocean front beach Pine Knoll Shores. Two longer, but possible routes: the bag could have blown out Ocracoke Inlet and then headed south. Or gone out to Cedar Island and then down Core Sound.

So, Bud Daniels went on line and searched the words, “Insurance” “Nelda” and the start of that last name. Pretty quickly, he saw a reference to Nelda Coats and an insurance agency in Oriental. There was also a phone number. He dialed it.

Nelda Coats in front of her insurance agency office on Broad Street in Oriental. Nelda was instrumental in helping a Pine Knoll Shores man find the tennis player in Oriental whose tennis racket bag washed ashore near his home.

As Nelda Coats tells the story, she picked up the phone one day and there was Bud Daniels asking if she was missing some tennis rackets.

Nelda said, no, she wasn’t. But when he explained how he came to find her name on a soggy business card, she told him she would send an email out to the women she plays tennis with in Oriental.

Nelda Coats fielded the call from Bud Daniels, who found a waterlogged and disintegrating business card in the tennis racket bag. The rackets were not Nelda’s but she helped Bud find the owner.

That email volley was quickly returned by Melody Henry.

Melody and her husband, Paul, live in the Dolphin Point neighborhood of Oriental. Their home faces the Neuse River and got hammered by Hurricane Irene’s wave action despite preparations the couple made.

Melody Henry and her rackets. During Hurricane Irene, the bag they were in was swept out in to the Neuse River and eventually washed ashore at Pine Knoll Shores about a week later. A tennis partner’s business card, inside the racket bag, provided the clue to get the rackets back to Melody.

They’d laid out sandbags at the ground floor of the house and garage. “We boarded up,” Melody Henry says, and still, “the waves crashed through.” A foot or two of water filled not only the garage but an adjacent living space. Computers and other electronics went under water. Lots of things floated away.

The first floor of Melody and Paul Henry’s home flooded, including the garage where she’d had her tennis rackets stored. The bag they were in wound up more than 25 miles away at Pine Knoll Shores.

In the upheaval in the days after Irene, Melody Henry says she didn’t really think about her tennis rackets. There was so much else to attend to. But then she got the email from Nelda. She called Bud Daniels. Her question to him was, “‘Is one of the rackets white with pink string?’”

It was, he said. Melody says she told Bud, “I think you have my rackets.”

Paul Henry returns his wife’s tennis racket bag to a hook on the wall of their garage, where it had been before Irene’s high waters floated it away. Paul’s golf clubs and golf bags did not prove to be as buoyant and stayed in the garage.

Bud had questions for Melody, too, such as, why was there six dollars in the bag? Melody says she explained that when someone brought a new can of balls to a game, the others would chip in. As for the business card which helped Bud get the tennis rackets back to her, Melody says that a while back, she’d asked Nelda Coats for a quote on insurance. Nelda gave her a card. Melody kept it in the bag, she says, because on the back of card she’d written the combination to the lock at the Dolphin Point tennis courts, a number she couldn’t otherwise remember.

Nelda Coats and Melody Henry at the Dolphin Point tennis court where Nelda had originally given Melody her business card. It was the card that helped reunite Melody with the racket bag that floated away in Hurricane Irene.

Melody and Paul Henry drove to Bud Daniels home at Pine Knoll Shores recently and came home with the rackets. Considering their watery journey, Melody says, the rackets – a Head and a Wilson – seem to be in good shape. (She’s thinking of contacting Head, to tell them how “durable” the racket proved to be.) She’ll have them restrung and the handles — now moldy — re-banded.

Also in the tennis bag that they picked up from Bud Daniels were two bills, a five and a one, that were, Melody says, “nice and crisp.”) The business card that proved to be the missing link, was not there, having fallen apart.

Racket bags don’t talk so it’d be impossible to know exactly what route it took from the Henrys’ garage at Oriental’s Dolphin Point to Pine Knoll Shores. Bud — and Nelda and Melody — all speak of the rackets going by way of Adams Creek. That is of course, the common route for boats to take. Much of it is a straight line, but there’s at least one 90 degree turn and lots of places off to the side where a racket bag could get snagged. Still, that seems the most direct and shortest route.

Melody Henry on the deck of her home at Dolphin Point. In the distance would be the entrance to Adams Creek.

Another possibility is that the racket bag floated out during the nor’easter part of Irene and then after the eye of the hurricane, when the west winds were blowing hard, was pushed up and out the Neuse and Pamlico Sound toward Ocracoke Inlet or Core Sound. And from there, down the coast to where Bud Daniels and his Labradoodle, Mollie came upon it one early September day.

Looking east from Dolphin Point toward where the Neuse River meets the bottom of the Pamlico Sound, which is another of the possible routes for the tennis racket bag to have taken. .

Bud Daniels says he thinks that not one but two hurricanes may have had a role in putting Melody Henry’s tennis racket bag on the shores of Pine Knoll Shores. Irene made debris such as the racket bag go afloat, he says, but he thinks it landed on the beach thanks to a “good swell from Katia,” the hurricane which followed Irene.

However the bag got there, finding it came naturally to Bud Daniels, a self-described “beach scrounger.” He says he’s out there just about every morning “at first light” to see what the ocean pushed up to the high tide line overnight. Around the time of finding Melody Henry’s tennis rackets, the Sprint retiree also found “a full bag of bird seed and the dagger board off a sailboat.”

“I keep looking,” he says of a habit that goes “all the way back to my youth.” The Morehead City native says that as he was growing up, “there was a spate of hurricanes in the 1950’s,” after which he and others would scrounge the marshes for wayward boats.

These days, Bud Daniels works weekends on a dive boat in Carteret County. Does he find a lot under the water? “I haven’t found gold bouillon.” he laughs. The story of the tennis rackets, though, and his resourcefulness in finding the owner, may have its own value for a while.

Posted Wednesday September 21, 2011 by Melinda Penkava