I
“I’d always said I’d never work for a state agency again
unless they put me in charge of North Carolina,” he says.
“They offered me the job, and here I am.”
The UAB headquarters is located in a tiny house on
the grounds of the Fort Fisher historic site. The sign on
the front door asks visitors to make sure the door is closed
securely so snakes don’t get in.
What it lacks in space and amenities is more than made
up in location. The Atlantic is just a few steps away across
Fort Fisher Boulevard. Billy Ray has been known to grab his
surfboard on breaks, or go for a dip in the ocean.
But it’s not the site that prompted Morris to take the job.
His enthusiasm for history and archaeology and what’s below
the waves is contagious. Spend a couple of hours with Morris
and Stratton, and you’re ready to quit your job and join them.
Which is actually what Stratton did. He went back to
school at East Carolina when he was 45, and now at 50 is
an underwater archaeologist.
“I love diving, and I’ve loved history all my life,” he
says. “I absolutely love my job. I’ve loved every second I’ve
worked down here.”
Almost as soon as he started, Morris began working to
make the Condor a heritage dive site. He had worked with
Roger Smith, state underwater archaeologist, to establish
Florida’s first one, and thought it was a great idea for
North Carolina. After spending hours on the bottom map-ping
Condor, he knew she would be perfect.
“You can get to it from the beach and it’s utterly intact.
Relatively speaking, this thing is a museum,” he says. “As
soon as I started mapping it, having just gone through
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WBM june 2017