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Buxton Lighthouse, NC
Summary
Let me tell you about the East Coast. It’s very different from the West Coast. There are landforms and geographies and nooks and crannies and sandbars along that Atlantic seaboard over there that have no parallel on the other side of the continent. California sandbars are measured in feet and yards and fractions of a mile. On the east coast, sandbars are measured in miles and tens and hundreds of miles.
In North Carolina, the Outer Banks are a 200-mile string of barrier islands left behind by the last Ice Age, which separate the Albemarle Sound and Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic Ocean. Think of a sandbar that starts at Malibu and ends around La Jolla, and protects all that coastline from the big bad ocean. That’s the Outer Banks.
Kind of weird, but also kind of cool, because this stretch of barrier islands projects way out into the Atlantic Ocean, skipping over and negating a lot of the Continental Shelf, and also happens to be at the juncture of a lot of cold water in the Labradorian Current pouring down from the north and warm water from the Gulf Stream flowing up from the south.
And when warm and cold meet in swift collision, we all know what that means: ocean action.
There is a lot of sand and a lot of ocean and a lot of history in this outer crust of North Carolina. Virginia Dare was the first New World baby born to English parents in 1587, in the Roanoke Colony, which was the first English colony to be established in the New World, by Sir Walter Raleigh. Virginia Dare and her parents and the rest of the colony all disappeared between 1587 and 1590, and their fate remains the stuff of the History Channel.
In the first third of the 1700s, Edward “Blackbeard” Teach used Ocracoke Island as a base for his pirating up and down the coast. For a few years around 1717, Blackbeard roamed the coast in a commandeered French slaveship he christened Queen Anne’s Revenge. Blackbeard nearly tripled the amount of guns on the ship from 14 to 40 and went dog nuts, taking other ships and even blockading the port of Charleston, South Carolina. Blackbeard’s reign of terror was short-lived and the Royal Navy hunted him down and killed him on Ocracoke Island in November of 1718.
More recently, the first flight in a heavier than air vehicle happened at Kill Devil Hills on the Outer Banks in December of 1903. The lads who pulled that one off were the Wright Brothers, and now we all can fly to Bali in 20 hours or less, so hat’s off to them.
The Outer Banks are known and feared as The Graveyard of the Atlantic, the site of scores of shipwrecks caused by currents, storms, hurricanes and shifting sandbars. There is no doubt this area around 35 degrees latitude is volatile, but that same volatility makes the Outer Banks a Mecca for East Coast surfers from Miami to Maine, who make the long drive out to this outer crust of coast to get some legendary East Coast beachbreak, over the bones of pirates and ships.
The Outer Banks are 70 miles long, but this Spot Check is specifically about the easternmost point along the Outer Banks, which is an icon to East Coast surfers: the black and white, candy-striped lighthouse at Buxton. This Zebra-striped phallus is a symbol that lives in the hopes and dreams of all East Coast surfers. It was designed as a beacon to warn mariners to stay away, but to surfers it is a beacon of the most consistent surf on the East Coast. The Buxton lighthouse original overlooked three rock jetties designed to trap sand and protect the lighthouse from the ravages of the sea. The lighthouse was moved a couple thousand feet inland at the turn of this Century, but those three rock jetties are still there, and so is the ravaging sea, and together they make beautiful music from all that swell pouring in from most points of the compass.
The Good
Surf surf surf. Fun fun fun. Fish fish fish. Party party party. The Outer Banks is mostly immune from the drag of the Continental shelf and other blockages and cutoff problems suffered by most of the rest of the southeast corner of the state. Whether it’s a Noreaster from the north or a hurricane from the south, whatever burp or billow is happening in the Atlantic, the Outer Banks will pick up some swell from it, making this the most consistent surf area on the east coast.
John Stouffer grew up in Virginia Beach and now works for Fuel TV, but he remembers these good things about Hatteras fondly: “The cool thing about the Lighthouse is that it really is at the corner of Hatteras, and you can see swells coming from a hurricane south hit one side and miss the other, or see a Northeaster come from the north, and it’ll be flat right around the corner. Lots of surf spots to check right around there, and worth stopping and looking over the sand dunes. There used to be a spot called S Turns that was good, and you could see a shipwreck right next to it (it was a spot called Shipwrecks in the day, but I don’t know if it’s still there.) And an institution on the east coast is the Brew Thru drive through liquor stores! Super famous.”
Beyond that, the Outer Banks are natural, beautiful, special, and there is a lot of it, so it’s always possible for the surfer, even in this crowded world, to seek the perfect sandbar on the perfect day and be alone with the surf and his thoughts.
But don’t take our biased, jingoistic word for it. Here’s the word from true blue Aussie and renowned Seppo-hater Nick Carroll, as quoted in Matt Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing: “I defy any surfer to walk out to the top of sand that is the Cape and not leave aware that the Banks is one of the world’s greatest surfing areas; as unique as the North Shore of Oahu, or the Gold Coast of Queensland.”
Okay then.
The Bad
Cold in the winter, muggy in the summer, but so what? There are sharks and carnivorous bluefish by sea and mosquitoes and Republicans by land, and that is worth worrying about.
And the crowds have gone to redline and above. Buxton and the Lighthouse have long been the focal point of Cape Hatteras surfing, going back to the early 1970s, when the Eastern Surfing Association began holding it’s National Championships here.
The lighthouse at Buxton is the focal point for Cape Hatteras surfing, which means surfers from Virginia Beach and Florida and all over the East Coast and the world focus on that area, and it gets more than a little crowded from spring into fall.
As for the bad, John Stouffer said: “Used to be a lot of horse flys that would eat you alive. I’ve heard there still are. If it’s flat on the east coast, it’s just plain flat. Sometimes you drive for hours and don’t find a thing. That kills the spirits.”
This is also not the place to be when a hurricane comes to town. Kevin Welsh says: “Back in 1992 (I think) Hurricane Emily came up Pamlico Sound, flooding the town of Buxton. The water level in the lobby of the Surf Motel was about four feet high. The flood waters were coming from the Sound, not the ocean.
“I had to evacuate the OBX one time. Drove 15 hours from Cocoa Beach to Rodanthe to have to wake up a few hours later to the sound of locals boarding up their homes. Mandatory evacuation was announced as Hurricane Gloria was bearing down on us. Drove all the way back home to find our home break going off. Actually scored a cover shot for East Coast SURFER of Jesse Fernandez surfing Indialantic Boardwalk.”
Is drowning bad? Then heed the advice of a local surfer: “ Paddling out can be a nightmare on a big swell. Sometimes it is easier to walk up the the north jetty, start paddling, take a pounding and hope you make it out by the time you drift down to the first jetty. If not you better paddle in and try again because you will get dragged across some pretty gnarly spikes of steel that lurk underneath the water. Two years ago a surfer got his leash wrapped around one of the spikes and drowned. About a month later there was a near drowning under the same circumstances.”
You’ve been told. Caution is a form of valor, too. You don’t want to drown out there and end up like one of those ghosts in Pirates of the Caribbean, with the face of a squid and tentacles for lips. Gross.
The Strange
Where to begin? Some say the Outer Banks are a part of the Bermuda Triangle, with all the talk of methane explosions and UFOs and disappearing ships and yachts and fighter planes. It’s strange the Wright Brothers would have come all the way out there to launch their first airplane, and the whole disappearing Colony of Roanoke deal is one of the greatest mysteries in American history.
More recently, it was pretty cool that the Government managed to shift that giant, brick lighthouse away from the deep and dark blue ocean without breaking it. The Hatteras lighthouse was built of bricks from 1868 to 1870 at a cost of $167,500, which is around $2.5 million in modern dollars. The lighthouse was supposed to be painted with a diamond pattern as it was built to be seen 20 miles out and warn coastal mariners of the Diamond Shoals, which extend 14 miles out to sea. But someone screwed up and got the plans mixed up, and so the Hatteras light ended up with that Zebra/candy stripe design that is permanently engraved into the souls of 90% of the surfers on the East Coast.
The Hatteras light survived the Civil War and lightning strikes and hurricanes and the constant bombardment of wind and rain and sun, but by 1935 the ocean was threatening to undermine the lighthouse and it was decommissioned for other structures.
Still it was popular with tourists and in 1999, an ambitious plan was undertaken to uproot the entire 900 ton building and move it inland. This inspired lawsuits and all other kinds of nonsense, but by the turn of the century, the lighthouse had been moved 2,870 feet inland at a pace that made the Space Shuttle look like a cheetah.
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