Channel markers and buoys on Bogue Sound, and how to read them

Bogue Sound runs shallow and wide, and the marks that carry a boat across it are read in one direction and one order. Here is how colour, shape and number fit together on the water between Morehead City and the island.

What a channel marker and a buoy are telling you

A channel marker is a fixed sign on a pile; a buoy floats. Both do the same job on Bogue Sound: they hold the edge of water deep enough to cross. The United States Coast Guard sets and charts them, and the part that matters to a boater is the pattern they make together, red and green in pairs, running from open water toward a harbour or a creek mouth. Nothing on a marker tells you the depth by itself. The mark tells you where the channel sits, and the tide tells you what floats over it, which is the point covered in the entry on depth over the marks.

Which side does the red mark go on?

On the way in, inbound from the sound, red marks keep to your right and green marks keep to your left. On the way out, at the helm and running toward the inlet, the order swaps and the same pair reads the other way. That is the whole logic, and it is why the direction a boat is travelling decides which side of a mark you want. A red nun and a green can standing close together mark a narrow stretch; spaced far apart, the same colours mark a broad one. The colour is the instruction, and the shape only confirms it at a distance.

Red marks are called nuns when they carry a cone shape, green marks are called cans when they carry a cylinder. A red daymark on a pile may show a triangle; a green one may show a square. That shape is the second reader: when colour washes out in low light or glare, the outline still says which side of the channel you are on.

Light, sound and the numbers that keep them in order

Numbers run in sequence along a channel, odd on green and even on red in the standard arrangement, and the sequence is the third reader. If you know the last number you passed, the next one tells you whether you are still on your line or have drifted across it. On the sound at night, two flashes and a green body, or a red mark with a different rhythm, separate one from the next, because the flash pattern is the mark's name after dark. Some marks carry sound, and a bell or a horn on a specific mark lets a boater hold a line between them in fog when the colour is gone entirely.

The Bogue Sound aid to navigation chart and the federal register behind it are where the exact flash character, the light list number and the current position of every mark are published by the Coast Guard Navigation Center, so the reader can match what is on the water to what is on the chart.

Which way do I read the order of the marks?

The order is set by the channel, not by the boater. Follow the numbers from the seaward end toward the harbour or the creek, and read each pair as a gate the boat passes through. Where two channels meet, or where a dredged cut branches off the main one, a junction mark carries both colours and both numbers, and it is read as two marks on one pile. That is why a junction marker confuses a first trip and makes sense on the second: it belongs to two orders at once, and you choose which one you are following by the direction you are running.

Reading the approach at the Bogue Sound crossing

Between Morehead City and Atlantic Beach, the marks lead a boat from the wide water of the sound to the inlet side and back into the port at Beaufort or the creeks along the marsh edge. The sequence is the same pattern you find anywhere, but the water it guards is shallow and the wind here pushes it around. A boater takes from the marks a line through the sound that holds clear of the flats, a way to leave and return in the dark, and a shared language with every other boat making the same crossing, so that two hulls meeting in a narrow cut already know which side each will take. The National Weather Service office at Newport and Morehead City publishes marine forecasts for exactly this water, and a mark's line is worth little on a day the wind has stood the sound on end.

Where the channel edge matters to an angler

For the angler, the marks draw the edge worth fishing. Current runs along a channel edge and drops what it carries, and bait and predator sit where that edge turns. That is the water described in working a channel edge, the strip just off a red or a green where a cast lands in two depths at once. The mark itself is not the fishing spot; the contour it marks is, and the number on the pile tells you which stretch of it you are standing over.

What changes with the tide and the wind?

A mark holds position; the water under it does not. The same green can sit in six feet at high water and stand nearly dry at the low, and the pair that was a clear gate at the turn of the tide can leave a shoal between them by the afternoon. Wind across the sound moves the water, a sustained blow from one quarter pushes it off the flats and piles it against the bank, and the marks stay put through all of it. The tide and current entry sets out the rhythm that decides which stretch a boat can take and when, and it is the reading that sits under every mark on the sound.

Marks that warn of thin water

Some marks are not channel marks at all. A single mark set away from a channel, or a pair standing off a shoal, warn a boater where the bottom comes up and where not to cut the corner. That is the water behind marks that warn of thin water, the sand that makes the sound side beach worth a wade and makes a shortcut expensive. Read together, the channel marks take a boat where it can go and the warning marks keep it off what it cannot. The Coast Guard Navigation Center page carries the full register of both, and it is the page to check before a run across the sound, because the marks are the only part of the crossing that does not move.

About the Coast Guard Navigation Center

Entity: navcen.uscg.gov is the Navigation Center of the United States Coast Guard, the federal page for aids to navigation. It publishes the register and the light lists behind the marks a boater reads, including the aids placed on Bogue Sound, and it is where the light character, the number and the position of each mark can be checked against what stands on the water.

This entry sits with the rest of the water entries of the log, which cover the tides, the fishing and the shallow beaches the marks hold a boat clear of.

The Bogue Sound Ledger editorial team, contact@thechannelmarker.com