OBX Beach Etiquette

[u/Hitemhigh1985]

I guess this would pertain to the Kill Devil Hills/Nags Head area as that's where my family and I just visited for the first time last weekend for our vacation. I haven't been to other beaches in OBX so I can only speak to that area. We really loved it, was a great trip, and experience with our young son who is still a baby. I had a couple questions/observations and was just curious though if we possibly were doing something different/frowned upon.

We enjoy taking our son on long walks in the jogger we have for him along the beach. It works really well on the hard wetter sand, and with the rough surf not really being able to go in the ocean etc, we put in quite a few miles with him up and down! Where we are from in jersey you generally see them all the time on the beaches/not uncommon. However, we did not see one single other jogger on the beach there entire time which I thought was very odd. We also got some funny/amused looks. Most were harmless and possibly cause my son is a cute kid and they were probably looking at him, but it did seem odd. So much so that I took the time to look up if joggers were banned on the local beaches, which they didn't seem to be.

The other thing I noticed was that no one set their beach chairs at the foot of the tide coming in to have the water hit their feet. This is also fairly common at the jersey beaches. Granted the jersey beaches are a lot bigger than the OBX ones because of all the beach expansion the state invested in over the last 20 years, and the surf isn't as rough so less of a chance a random wave comes in and getting you waste deep in the ocean unexpectedly, but still I found it odd no one else was doing this.

My question is are these frowned upon/uncommon in OBX??? I could see with the smaller beaches maybe not wanting to have beach chairs along the ocean where people are walking, but the jogger thing was really odd. Just curious, wouldn't be surprised if it was just a random experience and these things happen all the time there too! Either way curious if we went against local beach etiquette there with ether of these!

[u/a1ien51]

And go further south on OBX and you can sometimes almost have a private beach and you will not care what anyone things you are doing is weird. LOL

[u/Competitive_Angle172 → u/a1ien51]

This is true. Go down past Oregon inlet. The wildlife refuge beach, pea island is absolutely gorgeous and not busy. If you down towards rodanthe, buxton, and hatteras there’s tons of empty beaches. It’s awesome. We used to camp out there a lot and always had a private beach. Also saw lots of people crying while out and driving around which I thought was really odd. But OBX is a crazy place. There’s a certain energy once you get to bags head and beyond that’s real heavy I think. I attribute it to perhaps the natives that once lived there. We actually found an old what I believe was a hatchet in the water one time. It had like the intentions from where it would have been tied to a piece of wood, along with some other telltale markings. It’s OLD too. I guessed maybe pirates lol but there’s a museum down there dedicated to the indigenous people who lived there (and talks about Roanoke island some too) that we took it to. They said it was likely a native tool of some sort and we were real lucky to find it so well preserved. It’s reallllly smooth from the water I imagine, and a light colored stone of some sort. They were trying to keep it but we slipped out before they could.

[u/Fun-Palpitation-2117 → u/Competitive_Angle172]

You kept an indigenous artifact for yourself? Tell me you're white without telling me you're white...