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 many years as you can see from this article, Footprints That Need To Wash Away.

You can take a quick tour of all the books that we have written and some of my articles by visiting my Amazon author page or your can read the rest of this page for detailed information.

We lived on the North Carolina Coast from September 2006 until February 2021. I continue to provide information about the area to people looking to visit or relocate. 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. The last version was released in 2017.

You can read about our move from the coast back to the Piedmont on my View from the Mountain blog. One of the places to start is Our Pandemic Move - Life Lessons- Part 1 and get a taste for where we live now by reading A Cathedral of Leaves.

Late in the spring of 2014, we did our second 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 around $25 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. Things don't change very quickly on the Southern Outer Banks except for the odd restaurant changing hands and I try to keep people updated through my newsletter though they are infrequent now that we have moved back close to where I grew up in North Carolina's Piedmont..

I have my day job to keep me busy. When I am not doing that I am devoted to writing, photography, gardening, fishing, hiking, and enjoying the outdoors. I did sell my boat and give away my kayak but those memories are strong. My pictures of the coast continue to be popular. BAck in the winter of 2014, I did 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 up in North Carolina's Piedmont where we now live and my early years are detailed in this article, A Piedmont Awakening with some additional information in the Sobotta family history. 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 somewhat unique life that took me from North Carolina to Canada and back to the United States. You can find a number articles about my history and everything important to me on my Ocracokewave.me blog

My first stop after Harvard 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 unwind and find this particular spot on the the Carolina coast where my wife and I could be successful and happy at the same time. However, after fifteen years, we started looking for a place closer to our grandchildren. We moved back to North Carolina's Piedmont in February 2021.

We will always remember the years we lived in one the most beautiful places in the world. Just have at look at this picture looking out Raymond’s Gut towards the White Oak River. Our dock leads out to the White Oak River.

Lots of writing, photography, fishing, boating, kayaking, gardening and beach walking healed the bruises from corporate life and gave 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 and even move back closer to population centers.

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

If you are interested in purchasing any of the books mentioned, visit my Amazon author page.

To find a detailed list of what I write, how often I publish and where you can find it, visit our Crystal Coast Life home page.

For a selection of additional articles that I have written visit my article archive or you can find almost daily posts at my feed on post.news or scan through the nearly five hundred articles in the index for my View from the Mountain blog where I first started posting on the web back in 2004.

We learned a lot about coastal life through our fifteen years on a pristine coastal river just a few miles from the beaches of Emerald Isle.