The Belhaven Boat Ramp That Opened, Closed, and Reopened Right Before Trout Tournament Weekend

Back in April, Belhaven cut the ribbon on a boat ramp seven months in the making. Six weeks later, contractors were tearing up the same concrete they had just poured. If you trailer a boat anywhere near Pantego Creek this fall, that whiplash matters more than any festival flyer, because the ramp you plan to use on October 23 may not be the one that was making headlines in the spring.

Here is what actually happened, and what it means for the weekend Belhaven's boating calendar builds toward every October.

A Ribbon Cutting That Lasted Five Weeks

The Town of Belhaven and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission broke ground on a new boating access area on NC Highway 99 at Pantego Creek in the fall of 2025. Seven months later, on April 30, 2026, they held a ribbon cutting for it. The facility at 409 NC 99 Hwy S added parking for roughly 75 trucks and trailers, a real jump for a town whose only public launch had long been the older ramp tucked behind the fire department on Water Street. The project ran about $900,000, funded through a mix of federal excise taxes on fishing and boating equipment and revenue from vessel registration fees, with the town supplying the land and NCWRC overseeing construction.

Belhaven Mayor Ricky Credle called it a facility that would matter to the whole community, and Tim Askew, who directs the Belhaven Trout Tournament and Festival, talked about how much easier it would be for families to pull boats up, unload coolers, and get kids on the water without walking through mud.

Then, on June 8, the ramp closed.

NCWRC's own crews had found the problem. Ramps built to national standard carry a 14 percent slope designed to leave about five feet of water at the ramp's end, enough for most trailered boats to float off without scraping bottom. Belhaven's new ramp came in shallower than that. The fix was projected to cost about $125,000 and take up to three months, with the older Water Street ramp staying open the whole time as the town's fallback.

Why Five Feet Is the Number That Mattered

It is easy to read "not deep enough" as a vague construction hiccup. It is not. Five feet of water at the end of a boat ramp is the difference between a trailer that floats free and one that grounds out with a $40,000 center console still strapped to it. For a town that markets itself as the final link in the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, where transient cruisers and local anglers alike depend on being able to launch without guesswork, a few inches of missing depth is not cosmetic. It is the entire function of the structure.

That is also why the repair got prioritized as a rework rather than a patch. NCWRC did not add fill or paint a new stripe on the old surface. Crews pulled up the concrete launch and rebuilt the slope to meet the depth standard, which is the same reason the Hull Truth boating forum lit up in June with locals asking why a ramp that had barely opened was suddenly torn apart again.

Where Things Stand Heading Into October

According to the Town of Belhaven's own current projects page, the Pantego Creek ramp is open again, but the town is careful to note that some additional work may still need to be completed, and that if the ramp closes again for any reason, the older NCWRC access at 135 W. Water Street will remain the backup. That is not a minor caveat. It is the town telling residents, in plain language, not to treat the new ramp as a finished product yet.

Here is how the two options compare heading into tournament season:

If you are hauling a boat to Belhaven this October, the practical move is to know both addresses before you leave the driveway, not just the one that made the news in April.

The Weekend This Was All Leading To

None of this would carry much weight if Belhaven's boating calendar were quiet in the fall. It is not. The 4th Annual Belhaven Trout Tournament & Festival runs October 23 and 24, 2026, hosted by the Eastern Carolina Inshore Club. The mandatory Captain's Meeting is set for Tuesday, October 20 at 6 p.m. at River Forest Manor, the same waterfront landmark where the Intracoastal Waterway's completion was celebrated back in 1928. Online registration closes at 6 p.m. on October 19, and the club has been explicit that no one can register or add side pots at the Captain's Meeting itself. If you are fishing it, that deadline is not a suggestion.

Beyond the weigh-ins, the festival fills downtown with craft and art vendors, live music, raffles, a pork cooking competition, and a silent auction, the kind of weekend that turns a boating town into a genuine street fair for two days straight.

A few things worth knowing if you plan to be part of it:

• The Captain's Meeting is mandatory and happens four days before the tournament itself, not the morning of.
• Registration and side pots close online the night before the meeting, with no exceptions made in person.
• Both boat ramps will see heavy trailer traffic that weekend, and the newer one is still the less proven of the two.
• River Forest Manor, the meeting site, sits within walking distance of most of downtown's restaurants and shops, so plan parking accordingly if you are staying for dinner after.

What This Actually Tells You About Belhaven

The easy story here is "new ramp had a hiccup, now it's fixed." The more useful story is what the hiccup reveals about a town that has outgrown its old infrastructure faster than the new infrastructure could catch up. Belhaven did not build a 75-trailer parking lot because someone thought it would look impressive. It built one because a town whose entire identity runs through the Intracoastal Waterway had been squeezing tournament-weekend traffic through a single aging ramp behind the fire department for years. The depth problem was a construction error, not a design error. The demand that made the new ramp necessary in the first place has not gone anywhere.

That is worth sitting with if you spend your weekends on Pantego Creek or the Pungo River. A town this small does not add a $900,000 public amenity on a whim, and it does not rebuild that amenity within two months of opening it unless getting it right matters more than getting it done fast. For anyone who already calls Belhaven home, that is a decent proxy for how the town treats the water it depends on.

Foote & Moorefield keeps a close eye on what is actually happening in the towns across Nash and Beaufort Counties, not just what shows up on a tourism brochure. If you are curious about the rest of Beaufort County's waterfront communities, from Belhaven's Pantego Creek to Washington's Harbor District, our Beaufort County guide is a good place to keep exploring. And if a Belhaven weekend on the water ever turns into a conversation about actually living here, Foote & Moorefield is glad to talk through what that looks like.