Shackleton Bank Wild Horses

Wild Horses on the NC coast
Goose Creek State Park Hike »

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One of our favourite days so far. It was a privilege to see such beautiful wild horses. Check out the BLOG!


Beauforttown

Waterfront at Beaufort, NC. Looked like a realy pretty town, too bad we didn’t have time to walk around much before we boarded the ferry.

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$16/each for a 20 min ferry trip to and from Shackleford Banks. You could stay as long as you wanted, last trip back was at 4:30pm

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Leaving the Beaufort Marina

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That’s the island we’re heading for. It’s completely undeveloped. No humans live on it. Only the horses and the rest of the wildlife.

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The ferry we came in on at 1:30

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Majority of our boatload of tourists spread out at this end of the island. Apparently this is where you find the big shells.

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We went left and headed this way down the beach, we were looking for horses.

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We didn’t have to walk far, about 5 minutes when we saw this one.

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And then this one

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There were actually 4 in this group.

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One of my favourite pics!

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Then she just started to walk away and Dave just walked parallel to her. She didn’t seem to mind him there and this was about as close as we were supposed to get to them.

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Some of the interesting beach textures

Tracks

Beach tracks: Bird - Horse - Crab

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Checking out the water….

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It was pretty cold, that’s as far as I was going in!

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Bobby signals for you Suzie!

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What an awesome beach….the tide was out when we were there so it was bigger than normal.

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We saw this single horse coming out from the dunes and you can see in the pics how he got progressively closer and closer to us. Didn’t mind us being there at all.

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A close up of her.

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On the way back to where the ferry pick up we saw these 4 horses up on the dune.

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At first it just looked like they were just standing there, warming their butts in the sun.

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This was the stallion, the other 3 his harem of mares. We were impressed at how healthy they were especially since all they eat is this grass.

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Two of the mares

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Then the one mare headed over to boss guys spot.

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And together they gave me some great pics!

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She seemed to take over the spot and he moved away.

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And she became Queen of the sand dune.

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Back to the shelling end of the beach

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Walking down the othe side of the island we saw this little cluster of boats, everyone was fishing here, must be the spot!

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View from the top of the sand dune we walked up to.

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Somewhere out there is supposed to be a water source that the horses frequent but we couldn’t see it.

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We were warned not to go to the edge where Dave is standing on because the sand is continuely eroded by the currents here and because the bottom drops 25ft here. Very deceiving.

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Good thing we were leaving at 4:30, clouds from the cold front coming in were rolling in.

Carrot Islandhorses

We got to see some more horses as we passed Carrot Island on the way back to port.

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Interesting pirate inspired boat

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The crew on the ferry pointed out the name of this boat to us. They said they’ve been looking for those “5 Naked Ladies” all summer but they never saw them.

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We had a great day at the beach. Highly recommend coming here if you’re ever in the area.



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