Cape Hatteras, NC tide times

Cape Hatteras sits at the eastern apex of the Outer Banks, the long ribbon of sandy barrier islands that runs about 320 kilometres from the Virginia line at False Cape south past Nags Head, Rodanthe, and Avon to the working harbour at Hatteras village and on through Ocracoke and Portsmouth Island. The cape itself is the seaward bend where the islands turn from north-south to east-west and where the warm Gulf Stream and the cold Labrador Current converge offshore over the Diamond Shoals — a long shifting bar of sand and shoal water that has accumulated more than 2,000 documented shipwrecks since the seventeenth century, earning the regional name Graveyard of the Atlantic. 5 on neaps.

Two highs and two lows of comparable size about twelve and a half hours apart. Pamlico Sound on the inland side of the islands runs a much smaller wind-tide signal where the lunar phase barely registers and the wind direction over a 50-kilometre fetch dominates water-level variation by 30 to 60 centimetres on sustained events. The defining historical feature is the United States Life-Saving Service.

The federal precursor to the modern Coast Guard built a chain of life-saving stations along the Outer Banks coast through the 1870s and 1880s — Pea Island, Chicamacomico, Little Kinnakeet, Big Kinnakeet, Cape Hatteras, Creeds Hill, Durants — to rescue crews from the constant shipwreck traffic over the Diamond Shoals. The Pea Island station was the first US Life-Saving Service crew composed entirely of African American surfmen and operated from 1880 through 1947. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the tallest brick lighthouse in North America at 64 metres, was built in 1870 and moved 880 metres inland in 1999 to escape the eroding shoreline that had crept within 36 metres of the foundation.

Surf at Avon Pier, S-Turns at Rodanthe, and the cape itself at Lighthouse Beach reads the open Atlantic swell and the sand-bar geometry that reshapes after every nor'easter. The Frisco fishing pier, the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry, the Avon Pier striped-bass autumn run, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore beach-driving permits, and the Pamlico Sound flats fishing for redfish and speckled trout all read the table for different windows. Hurricane and nor'easter season can both stack water above predicted by a metre or more — Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 cut a new inlet through Ocracoke Island that the National Park Service eventually filled.

NOAA CO-OPS runs the authoritative gauge network and harmonic predictions; the National Hurricane Center is the authoritative real-time source during tropical landfall events.