KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C. — The air is filled with salt and the low hum of ocean. A gentle surf is heard breaking below, and above, a wispy breeze carried an osprey up and over into a dive. Here atop the Avalon Pier in Kill Devil Hills, fishermen cast plugs. Baited hooks, slung over railings, drop some 20 feet before hitting the water.

Far removed from the waves, the anglers still feel them. The pier, first constructed in 1958, has since been baptized by nor’easters and survived hurricanes. Weatherworn pylons sway with the pull and shove of currents. Planks tremble with the tides. Here the Atlantic is felt through dry boots.

“You can feel the water move out here,” said David McGee, a local mainlander who crossed over the Currituck Sound this morning to fish. “You’ve got your choice of piers. You could go somewhere with modern construction. But this one has a character.”

The pier is a local gathering spot. Its community of regulars is tight-knit. Most days, waterspout or sunshine, especially in the offseason, the “pier rats” of Kill Devil Hills can be found either fishing the Avalon Pier or drinking at its bar, which often opens at 9 a.m. six out of seven days a week.

Noticeably sunbaked Rob Schweida, leaning on a railing, watched a pod of dolphins surface about 200 yards off the nose of the pier. His silvery metal necklace looked as if it were pulled from a shipwreck.

“We’re all pier rats here. But I’m ‘the’ pier rat,” he said.

He’s also a self-proclaimed “pirate.” “That’s right,” he said with a grin, “A pirate.”

The 62-year-old retired bouncer used to work the door during summer evenings when bands would play at the pier.

“This place is hallowed ground for me. Sacred,” he said, before seeing a friend walk into the pier house. “Yeah. Sit down, man. Have a drink.”

Inside, John Criner leaned against a wall with his dog, tail wagging, at his feet. The small canine ventured to the tackle shop and sniffed down a row of arcade games before making a lap around the circular bar, greeting one customer after the next. Everyone gave the little guy a familiar rub and pet.

“A lot of us have been coming here for a long time,” he said.

Criner, 72, explained that in 1976, he’d been in his early 20s when he started to hate his job at a shipyard in Newport News. It was dangerous work. He said co-workers were getting “killed right and left,” and wanting a break, he and a few friends drove to Kill Devil Hills. He fell in love with the tranquility of the Outer Banks.

“I was too broke to move or go anywhere else, and rent was cheap,” he said. “You could rent a three-bedroom house for $150.”

So he got a lease and never left, he recalled. Back then, the town of Duck didn’t exist. N.C. Highway 12 stopped, simply ended where sand began, around what is now The Sanderling Resort. He said there were six houses in Ocean Sands and no commercial chain stores, just privately owned mom-and-pop shops and “wide open” beach.

A lot has changed, he said, the pier too.

Its earliest advertisements list it as having been 750 feet in length. But the many years and different storms have taken their toll. In 2012, it sustained two major breaks during Hurricane Sandy. Hurricane Dorian ripped away a large segment of the pier in 2019. These days, the pier is roughly 450 feet long.

But some things don’t change.

Sitting at the bar, Kevin Holland said he moved here for one reason: “to fish.”

The last wooden fishing pier to be built on the Outer Banks, it was built by the Avalon Pier Corp. for an investment of $125,000. When it opened in April 1960, the company’s president, C. A. York, bragged in the press it’d be hotspot for anglers, due to its location near two shipwrecks. Marine growth on wrecks attracts fish.

The Kyzikes, an oil tanker, ran onto a shoal off Kill Devil Hills in 1927 after encountering a heavy gale. The vessel broke in two and was a total loss, according to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. Two years later, The Carl Gerhard, a 244-foot-long Nordic freighter, crashed into the same sand reef, hitting and further breaking the hull of the abandoned Kyzikes.

Holland said he used to hook big stripers along the pier’s beach.

“Things should start firing up here soon,” he added. “We’ll get some trout and drums showing up. And that’s really what I like to catch. I like to fish for the big drum in the fall, catch them off the piers.”

Successful fishing at the Avalon Pier has been documented for decades. The Daily News of Jacksonville, N.C., reported a king mackerel being caught in 1983 from the pier despite the species’ preference for deeper water. They’re typically found in depths of 115 to almost 600 feet of water, according to NOAA Fisheries. The water is about 12 to 15 feet deep at the end of the pier.

And people fishing on the pier still haul in sea mullet, spot, flounder, triggerfish, striped bass and speckled trout.

Schweida climbed a flight of stairs to the second-story deck on the outside of the pier house to face the ocean. His piratical necklace glinted in the noon sun like treasure. He lifted his arm and pointed at the waters beyond the pier.

“I’ve seen whales right there,” he said. “Sea turtles too.”

He squinted toward the horizon. The sky was bright, a cloudless Carolina blue.

“I’ve seen everything right here man, there is to see out there.”

If you go

— Where: Avalon Pier, 2111 N. Virginia Dare Trail, Kill Devil Hills, N.C.

— Summer hours: 6 a.m. to midnight

— Price to fish: $17.50 for adults, $6 for children

— Details: avalonpier.com

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