David Sobotta's Homepage

You will find links from this page to many articles which I have published on the web. I have been writing about the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina for over nine years as you can see from this article, Footprints That Need To Wash Away.

We have lived here since 2006 and I enjoy providing information about the area to people looking to visit or relocate. It is perhaps a holdover from the few years that I worked in real estate. I have been providing information for so long that I decided the easiest way to continue doing it was to write a travel guide to the area. We released the first version of A Week at The Beach, The Emerald Isle Travel Guide in 2012 and updated it in 2013.

Late in the spring of 2014, we did a complete update of the book including optimizing over eighty pictures and a dozen hand-drawn local maps for the latest generation tablets. The paperback version with 180 pages and over eighty full color prints plus maps is available from Amazon usually for under $15 and is Prime eligible. The Kindle version which includes all the pictures and maps plus over one hundred fifty live links to additional information costs $3.99.

In addition to keeping our travel guide current and doing my day job, I am devoted to writing, photography, kayaking, boating, fishing, hiking, and savoring life on the NC Coast. My pictures of the area are very popular and in the winter of 2014, I succumbed to pressure to do a Kindle picture book of the area. I picked the top one hundred pictures out of the 40,000 that I took in 2013 and published 100 Pictures, 1,000 Words, A Crystal Coast Year. I spent a lot of time making sure the images would be impressive on any tablet or computer. It is an amazing tour of the area for only $2.99, not much more than you would pay for a Sunday paper.

I grew in the Piedmont area of the state and my early years are detailed in this article, A Piedmont Awakening. I have been visiting the coast for as long as I can remember which is well over sixty years. I finally came back to live on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast after a rather interesting life.

My first stop after college was moving to Canada to live along the shore of Nova Scotia and eventually build a cattle ranch in New Brunswick.

You can read some about our time in Nova Scotia in our book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada’s Maritimes.

To find out how I got from a cattle ranch to Apple Computer, read my book, The Pomme Company.

After my nearly twenty years at Apple, it took a while to find this particular spot on the the Carolina coast where my wife and I could be successful and happy at the same time.

We now live in one of the most beautiful places in the world as you can see from this picture looking out Raymond’s Gut towards the White Oak. Our dock leads out to the White Oak River.

Lots of writing, photography, fishing, boating, kayaking, gardening and beach walking have healed the bruises from corporate life and given me a new purpose in life. Life on the coast renewed me enough that I could follow my skills back to a new career in technology.

If you would like to see some pictures of one of my many beach hikes, watch this slide show of a July 2014 trip around the Point at Emerald Isle, NC.

If you would like to learn more where we live and our books, visit our Coastal Paradise website.

To read about my wanderings around the coast of North Carolina, visit my Life Along The Crystal Coast site or my Crystal Coast Life blog regularly. I also publish a monthly newsletter about the area. You can find a sample from July 2014 at this link. To keep up with my technology articles, stop by my author page at ReadWrite Web.

For a selection of additional articles that I have written visit my article archive. The White Oak River, which forms the page background, is a pristine coastal river which empties into Swansboro Harbor just a few miles from the beaches of Emerald Isle.

If you would like to contact me, just use this form.