1. As Lu-Ann Perryman began explaining influences to opening up the new nautical consignment shop, Hurricane Jack's Marine (17N just outside of New Bern at the entrance to Bridgeton Marina), I hit the record button on my iPhone. There was something charismatic in Perryman’s delivery which I though I could capture for transposing her word to print.  Unfortunately, when husband and partner Van Perryman said, “You should tell him about buying Uncle Ray’s sailboat,” Lu-Ann launched into such an animated pose that I hit my record button again, pausing and losing any opportunity I might have had to dictate directly the fine words of a good storyteller.  So, forgive me as I try to recreate something of the tale told so well by co-owner and operator of Hurricane Jack’s.
   

The setting was the original inspiration for Hurricane Jack's, Creech's Hardware, on the waterfront of Oriental, NC. It was like any authentic hardware of the 1950's, a place that had a little bit of everything.  In the lineage of the General Store that was a resource for American ingenuity in the first two centuries of this nation prior to the big box discount stores of recent decades, Creech's was as much a place to congregate as it was to stock or resupply.  It was understood in that local jab of humor that if you read about it in a local paper or found it discussed at a church social, it had already been served up and dealt with at Creech's Hardware.

If community was the atmosphere at Creech's Hardware, it became even more like a family gathering as the hardware store converted into a nautical consignment shop. It started with one boater then another asking Old Ray Creech if he knew anyone who might need this or that nautical item or boat hardware. Creech being hospitable to his customers made a corner available for these boaters’ goods. But as the used nautical goods become more and more the items at Creech’s, the corner became larger and larger until the hardware store itself was cornered as Creech’s became known as Oriental’s nautical consignment shop, complete with a center salon of chairs and a couch where congregating just became a matter of making oneself at home.

It was in such a setting, a place to hang out that Lu-Ann Coe became familiar with boaters, boating, storytelling, and the charisma needed to gain recognition in a constant scene of unique characters.  It is also where she got the bug which now has her newly opened Hurricane Jack’s at Bridgeton a new center for congregating boater looking to let go of excess in nautical inventory.  At the time, though, it was just a place to grow up.

Of course, growing up in the company of a watchful uncle or two is always a matter of testing waters.  It’s always difficult pulling away from the shore of being somebody’s little girl.  Literally, in this case.

“Well, my cousin, Amy Griswald, and I got together and bought Uncle Ray’s 30 foot Coronado sailboat: Windemere.  And one day we walk in the shop, and I tell Ray that we are planning to sail her down to Beaufort in about forty five minutes.”

“Beaufort,” Uncle Ray replied, “Isn’t that a little far?”

“You go there all the time,” responded Lu-Ann.

“But you never have before.  Wouldn’t you like to wait until I close the shop here and then I could go down with you?”

“No, we’ll be fine, just Amy and me.”

At this point I interrupted Lu-Ann’s tale.  It seemed a worrying Uncle deserved a little defense here. “What? Were you just children, teenagers?”

“Actually,” chimed in Van, “she may have been in her twenties.”

“I believe I was at least 30, but my uncles were always worrying over me.  A moment later Ray’s telling me that my Uncle Billy was on the phone and wanted to talk with me.”

“Is he the more persuasive uncle?” I asked, again interrupting.

“No, he’s the more bullying uncle.  So I get on the phone and he says, ‘I hear you are planning to sail to Beaufort in forty five minutes’.”

“‘No, it’s more like thirty now,” I told him, and he went on to warn me how unsafe it was, how I didn’t know the waters or the markers.”

“How hard can it be?  It’s just connect the dots, and you and Uncle Ray do it.”

“Yes, but what if you run aground?”

“Well, he was pushing my buttons here, and I am one to push back, so I just say, ‘Uncle Billy, I would just consider that to be a right of passage’.”

“At any rate we sailed to Beaufort that day, just me and Amy, alone.  And we didn’t run aground, and we didn’t kill anyway.  And when we pulled up to Beaufort with group of guys standing around watching us come in, one of them says, ‘That boat looks familiar.  Isn’t that Old Ray Creech’s boat?”

“It was. It’s ours now.  Amy and I bought it off him. But still he was all concerned about us bringing it all this way down here by ourselves.”

“The men considered this for a moment, then another one says, ‘Well, you certainly brought it in better than they ever did’.”

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