A Pilgrimage to the Promised Land of Kiteboarding

The water beneath my kiteboard looks like glass as I arc through a slick — one of dozens of creek-like fingers that wend through acres of marsh grass on the sound-side of North Carolina’s Hatteras Island. This particular slick is around 20 feet wide, not the narrowest by a long shot but one that leaves little room for error, given the 20-knot wind powering me across the water.

But this precise feeling is a high I chase, so I’ll risk a faceplant in the mud to keep cooking along. Tucked as they are amid the swaying reeds, these slicks are sheltered from the wind, offering the kitesurfing equivalent of powder skiing, turn after buttery turn.

If I want more room to move, it’s only a few seconds away; the slicks make up a minuscule fraction of Pamlico Sound, a huge body of open water that stretches for up to 30 miles between the ribbon-thin barrier island of Hatteras and the mainland. I’m in the middle of a 10-mile downwind run, tracing the shoreline from a lonely patch of Cape Hatteras National Seashore to the village of Waves.

No Better Place to Learn

Hatteras Island is the promised land of kiteboarding — and windsurfing, kite foiling and the rapidly growing sport of wing foiling — for a number of reasons.

For one, the island elbows into the Atlantic Ocean south of Nags Head for around 50 miles, with nearly endless launches on both the ocean and Pamlico Sound. Second, most nearshore areas of the sound are shallow enough to stand, which takes a major fear factor out of the equation for those learning and progressing. Third, much of the island is national seashore, so beach access is a non-issue. And fourth, Hatteras Island takes a right-angle turn at the village of Buxton, which means that kiters — from beginners to professionals — can find places to practice and progress in the ocean or sound almost regardless of the wind direction.

“There’s no better place in this country to learn to kite and facilitate true progression,” says Katrina Yaukey, a former Broadway performer who left New York for Hatteras during the COVID pandemic and now teaches kite lessons out of OceanAir Sports in Avon, one of seven villages on the island. “Hatteras has miles of decently flat water and so many places to kite safely. When I came here I’d never kited. I took one lesson and said, ‘What is this? This is the best thing I’ve ever done!’”

Because of the low housing density on the island — it’s both ribbon-thin and largely national seashore — kite and surf spots are never crowded. But there’s also enough of a diehard wind-sport community that you’re rarely out on the water alone.

“I tell people there’s something magical about this place,” Yaukey says. “The sunrises and sunsets, the endless water. It’s such a place of meditative beauty, and it never gets old.”

Coming in from the north, as almost everybody does, you’ll cross the nearly three-mile bridge over Oregon Inlet, a watercolor of currents, marsh and sand shoals where the sound meets the Atlantic Ocean. You’ll then cruise 13 miles of pure nature, through Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, where the two-lane road bisects ocean and sound, a streak of tar on a sand bar. The refuge is home to hundreds of native and migratory bird species, but the one that always catches my eye is the red-winged blackbird, which flashes brilliant crimson when it opens its wings.

When the refuge ends at the village of Rodanthe, if there’s any wind at all, you’ll see kites pivoting across the horizon and, as you draw closer, windsurfers and wings tracking hither and yon on the sound.

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Welcome to REAL: Wind-Sport Mecca

Much of the activity is clustered around the handful of outfitters that offer kiteboarding and wing-foiling lessons, and the king of these is REAL Watersports, just south of Rodanthe in the village of Waves.

REAL is as close to an all-inclusive kite resort as you’ll find in the U.S.: a massive flagship store; condos next door overlooking Pamlico Sound; a battalion of instructors (and jet skis) to take students into the sound for lessons; a huge, grassy rigging area, and staff to help launch and land riders; and a restaurant serving fresh local seafood, microbrews, coffee and more.

“In most destinations you have a kite shop or a kite school — rarely both in one business — and you need to find a place to stay on top of that,” says Trip Forman, who co-founded REAL. “We knew that for this sport to really take off here we needed a one-stop solution.”

Forman moved to Hatteras from New York in 2001 specifically to start a business that would help kiteboarding grow, and avoid the stall-and-decline trajectory that nearly killed windsurfing.

Last May, on the day before my slick downwinder, I roll into REAL in early afternoon, inflate my kite using one of the many compressed-air hoses lining the lawn and head into the sound.

Within two tacks I hit a big jump and splat unceremoniously to the water, losing my sun hat in the frothy chop. I return to shore, ask a staffer to hold my kite while I run into the store to buy a new lid, this one with a clipping chin strap to prevent another loss, and in under three minutes I’m back on the water.

When the wind backs down in mid-afternoon, I swap to my kite-foil gear and stay out until I’m physically spent. As I sit on the deck of Watermen’s Bar and Grill (part of the REAL complex), working my way through a sushi-grade yellowfin tuna steak and an IPA, it hits me that I’m at the wind-sport equivalent of an amusement park — the colors, the adrenaline, the communal joy. Staff and guests navigate a kaleidoscope of kites and wings that lay on the lawn.

At the next table, three 60-something guys from New Jersey who come to REAL annually are reliving their day over beers while a few feet away a dad from Quebec is giving his 23-year-old son a shore-based wing-foiling lesson. Even at 7 p.m., the sound is alive with activity — foilers performing their improbable maneuvers just offshore, and further out hotshot teens on twintip boards launching huge air in the slick behind a small island, its lime-green grasses aglow in the setting sun.

Strong Winds, Endless Water

Versions of this scene play out on virtually every windy day from Rodanthe to Hatteras, the southernmost village on the island. And the beauty of it — aside from the actual physical beauty of such a wild, isolated and tenuous place — is that watersport enthusiasts would have a hard time growing bored here.

My friend Brad Golomb drives 13 hours from his home in Clearwater, Florida, to Hatteras three times a year due to the quality and consistency of the wind. “We definitely get wind in Florida, but rarely as strong for as long as I can get in Hatteras. This is the Mecca of kiting on the East Coast, plus if it’s not windy you have the surfing, fishing, hanging on empty beaches…it’s all so nice.”

My affair with the island started in the late 1970s, when I first visited as a kid and was smitten with the wild, ever-shifting coastline, the churning surf, the raw dominance of nature that contrasted so refreshingly with the boardwalks and crowds I’d known from other beach towns. In the 1980s, friends and I would plan Hatteras camping trips to bodyboard storm swells, and, in the 1990s, windsurfing sojourns to Frisco Woods Campground. These days my kite trips feature a mix of foil progression, brawling with waves in the ocean and downwinders alongside locals I’ve come to know well — even my friend Sean’s 85-year-old dad, Don Casey, who still occasionally catches respectable air.

The appeal of downwinders starts with a sense of travel and discovery. You’re actually going somewhere, versus tracking back in forth in roughly the same spot (sometimes derisively referred to as “mowing the lawn,” although as I often tell my friends, lawns need mowing). And with that travel comes opportunity: I can surf this swell until it peters out, cut into that creek over there or try to jump over this knuckle of marsh jutting into the sound.

On the predominant southwest winds that strafe the island for much of late spring and summer, one can downwind in the sound from Buxton to Rodanthe, or from Frisco all the way to Avon, and in the ocean from Hatteras to Frisco, or Buxton to Avon (if you’re skilled enough to manage a side-offshore wind). On the north and northeast winds that prevail in fall through early spring, just flip those names and go the other direction.

On each trip here — I average four per year — I find new challenges. Four years ago, I did my first strapless surfboard downwinder in the ocean, alighting from near the southern tip of the island and surfing my way north to Frisco, skimming over two six-foot-plus (but wholly disinterested) sand tiger sharks along the way. Last summer I did my first ocean kite-foil session, gliding silently through tropical-green waters outside the shore break. And a few months later Brad and I set out from Avon in a 25-knot northeasterly and kited three miles out into the sound to Clam Shoal, a sand bank where swells peel off of one side and the water lays flat in the lee of the other. We teed off here for 30 minutes — two howling adrenaline junkies at play — before rocketing downwind another five miles into the north edge of Hatteras Village.

If you need bright lights, loud bars or big retail to complete your kite trip, look elsewhere. But if you get your kicks immersed in pure nature, with a steady wind to ferry you along, head to Hatteras Island. Just know what you’re leaving behind — because you might not look back.