THE OUTER BANKS - HATTERAS

The ferry ride from Ocracoke Island to Hatteras Island is much shorter - 40 minutes. We arrived to find a loaded ferry and the deckhand waving us on. We were the last vehicle to load. This is the eighth ferry crossing our Lazy Daze has made.

The ferry from Ocracoke Island to Hatteras. People bring their golf carts with them to the islands. We even saw one driven onto the ferry.

The ferry going in the other direction. Notice that the vehicles are facing backward.

Hatteras Island is 50 miles long, one of the longest in the contiguous United States and has a land area of 33 square miles. While much of it is protected as the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, there are seven towns. The population of 4000 is no longer isolated from the mainland and you now rarely hear the unusual dialect once prevalent on these isolated islands. 

Development has run rampant on Hatteras Island. It's much more accessible with a bridge at the upper end.

One of the many behemoths on the beach. 

We had no intention of paying $50 a night again, and none of the NPS campgrounds was open yet, so we looked for a Passport America campground. The only one on the island was in Avon on a quiet back street. 

Sands of Time RV Park. We liked it very much and thought $24 was fair.

A creative use for beach seashells, mostly conchs and whelks.

We visited our (that's the collective 'our') property on the North Carolina coast. You'll be happy to hear that it's in fine shape. Ranger Jay Snow at Death Valley NP taught us that we weren't guests. It was our property and we were visiting it. It makes us very happy to see our tax $$ preserving our parks.

Most of the island is protected as part of the National Seashore.

Just offshore of Cape Hatteras is an area called Diamond Shoals, where the warm Gulf Stream meets the colder Labrador Current. This creates powerful ocean storms and sea swells, causing the sea floor to shift and change. The number of ships that have run aground on these shoals gave it the name Graveyard of the Atlantic. In 1797, the U.S. Congress appropriated funds to build a lighthouse warning mariners of the dangers.

Linda had climbed the Hatteras Light in the 1970's and was eager to see it after it was moved. The lighthouse was relocated 2,900 feet to the Southwest in 1999 to rescue it from erosion.

"Oh, darn!"

At 210' the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is the tallest brick lighthouse in the U.S.

 In the evenings we drove down to a spot where we could access the sound to watch the windsurfers and the sunset.

The island is only a few feet wide at some points.