Meet the 23-year-old fighting to preserve Brunswick's beachfront

Henry Cooke spends most of his free time on the beach.

Unlike most 23 year olds, his beach days don’t typically involve surfing or swimming, sunbathing or spikeball. In fact, Cooke spends most of his time on the beach with his back to the ocean.

“I’m out here so often I don’t even realize the ocean is there,” he said with a laugh.

Instead, he’s looking down, planting individual sprigs of beachgrass one foot apart on the shoreline.

“I had someone ask me the other day if I ever stop and lift up my head and just look out,” Cooke recalls. “I said, ‘No, my work is right here.’”

Cooke’s grandparents settled in Ocean Isle Beach in 1957. His father was born and raised on Ocean Isle Beach. His family operated Cooke Realty and managed rental properties until impacts from severe storms effectively put the company out of business a few years ago.

Hurricane Isaias flooded the island in 2020, and Cooke said the company was left to pay homeowners half the rental fee for previously booked and canceled stays when the storm closed the beach.

“We were put out of business,” Cooke said. “We obviously couldn’t take that hit, so we had to sell our business.”

At that point, it became personal. When two severe storms, effectively, ended his family’s business, he wanted to work to stop that from ever happening again. At 22 years old, Cooke set out on a mission to learn more about how to protect beach front land and property from severe storms.

“It was really just being on the beach, knowing storms are bad and wondering how we fix it,” Cooke said. “I said, ‘I’ll do what I can do.’”

After studying how to best protect beaches from storms and erosion, he founded Dune Doctor, a company that works with real estate developers and private residents to survey their beachfront land and determine the best ways to reinforce and better prepare that land for storms – largely by installing sand fencing and beachgrass to “reverse engineer a dune.”

In early February, Cooke and his team set out to plant 250,000 plants – American beachgrass – and various sand fencing systems as part of a reinforcement project on roughly 2.5 acres of land on the east end of the island.

Sand fence, Cooke said, works to control the volume of sand that blows from the beach. It acts as a barrier to catch the sand and build layers of protection for property near the beach. The fence stands four feet tall and twists deeper into the sand when it is blown.

“It’s built to be beaten up,” he said.

Beachgrass is another method to prevent erosion, Cooke said. American beachgrass serves as a natural ground cover and the root systems hold the sand in place.

“They don’t go down very deep, but they definitely hold what’s there in place,” he said.

The developer of the land reached out to Cooke early last year, struggling to get building permits because they required the density of the vegetation to be much larger than what currently existed.

“A lot of homeowners don’t realize that it is their right and their obligation to protect their house, not only with a security system but with a dune system,” Cooke said.

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In order to build on oceanfront land, Cooke said, a buffer of at least 100 feet of dune and vegetation is required to protect the home. This land had roughly 30 feet of vegetation.

“Oceanfront homeowners are held to a higher standard,” Cooke said. “It’s just the same as updating your electronics or your microwave. If something is broken, you have to fix it, especially if it’s for your security and your property. These lots alone are a million dollars. You have to protect that.”

Jamey Cross covers Brunswick County for the StarNews. Reach her at [email protected] or message her on Twitter/X @jameybcross.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: At Ocean Isle Beach, a 23-year-old works to preserve oceanfront land