Ocracoke is one of my favorite places in the world. It's an island about 15 miles long (a wide sand spit actually) that you reach from the north via a 45-minute (free) ferry ride from Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. The ferry to the south is a larger one which costs $10 or so for a car and passengers.
The island is uninhabited except for a small town at the south end that surrounds Silver Creek, which is a very beautiful little harbor no more than 250 yards across, with a mouth that's not more than a hundred feet wide. No idea of the depth, but probably no more than 15 to 20 feet.
There's a Coast Guard station and a lighthouse there, and a fairly lively tourist business during the summer.
I spent a couple of weeks there in July of '76 and you could walk nude on the beaches north of the village all day and not see anyone else except a few other free spirits similarly clad. Didn't want to do that too close to town though, because the Dare County sheriff's people had a bad habit of arresting those miscreants and parading them through the center of town wearing nothing but a pair of handcuffs (behind the back of course!) I asked the deputy why they did this, and he replied they didn't want these perverts to destroy the evidence of their crime by putting on clothes.
Ocracoke's name is the subject of some debate, with the most interesting being the belief that Teach was told that he would be executed when the cock crowed in the AM, so he spent the early moring calling out, "Oh, crow, Cock." Personally I beleive that's more than likely a crock, and that it's an aboriginal word or name.
After I met Peggy on line we hied ourselves off to Ocracoke Island for a vacation in mid-March. NOT a good time to go unless you want to spend all of your time under a large number of quilts. But that's another story.
I think Jackie's there or near there even as I write.
