Ocracoke

We are spending a couple days on Ocracoke Island. To get here we took the motor home on a forty minute ferry ride from Hatteras Island. The island is almost entirely national seashore except for the southern most point where the village is built around Silver Lake. We have been here in the summer when you can hardly move because of the number of people but at this time of the year the streets are empty. We walked and drove around and enjoyed the great weather and scenery. Driving along the northern end of the island the dunes are gone and you are very close the the ocean. Nearer the village the beaches are very wide. We saw at least a dozen dolphin in the water close to shore. They were jumping out of the water and circling to feed on the fish. If you look closely you can see a fin and the swirling of the water. We also saw the Ocracoke ponies that arrived here from ship wrecks along the coast in the 1500 & 1600's. At one time they roamed freely but have been penned because of the increase in traffic. We visited to the lighthouse which is the oldest in North Carolina. The campground is beside the British Cemetery where British sailors whose bodies washed ashore are buried. Most of these are from WWII when they patrolled the Atlantic coast looking for German U-boats. The U-boats sank so many ships in the area it was named Torpedo Alley.