Things to Do in Avon, NC

Little Kinnakeet Life-Saving Station — Now Open for Guided Public Tours

Little Kinnakeet Life-Saving Station was built in 1874, with a second station structure added on the same site in 1904; it operated first under the U.S. Life-Saving Service and later the Coast Guard until it was decommissioned in 1954. Today it's part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, sitting in Avon itself — worth stating clearly, since it's a genuinely different station from the better-known Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station a few miles north in Rodanthe, and the two are easy to conflate.

The real news here, per the Island Free Press, is that Little Kinnakeet is now offering its first-ever guided public tours — a rare chance to get inside a piece of Life-Saving Service history that has mostly been viewed from the road. Exact tour days, times, and any ticketing details are not part of the confirmed record pulled together for this page, so check current schedules directly with Cape Hatteras National Seashore before planning a visit around it.

Avon Fishing Pier and the Avon Pier & RV Resort Complex

Avon Fishing Pier was built in 1963 by two brothers from Kinnakeet Village, originally stretching 1,300 feet — reportedly the longest pier on the East Coast at the time. Decades of hurricanes and nor'easters, including Hurricane Dorian in 2019, have reduced it to 665 feet today; the Dorian damage required an NPS-funded renovation that was completed in 2020. Because the pier sits within Cape Hatteras National Seashore, it operates under an NPS concessionary lease rather than as purely private property.

The complex changed hands in a real, dated transaction: on July 30, 2025, Joe and Tami Thompson, who had owned the 8.5-acre oceanfront property for roughly 20 years under the "Koru Village" brand, sold the pier, Beach Club, Pangea Tavern, and RV park to three local Outer Banks families — RV and Julie Owens, and Derek and Sharon Hatchell and David and Jamie Hatchell. The new owners have said they intend to preserve the existing character rather than rebrand, and as of winter 2026 the property still operates as Avon Pier & RV Resort, with the pier still called Avon Fishing Pier, the restaurant still Pangea Tavern, and the oceanfront venue still the Beach Club.

The 2025-2026 offseason was unusually kind to the pier — only minor deck-board and railing repairs were needed, with no major storm damage — and it opened for the season on April 2, 2026, one of its earliest openings in recent years. That gives visitors a working pier, a beach club, a tavern, and an RV resort all on one stretch of oceanfront, though current hours, rates, and seasonal details should be confirmed directly with the property before you go.

Canadian Hole (Haulover Day Use Area) — the East Coast's Premier Windsurfing and Kiteboarding Spot

Officially the Haulover Day Use Area, this Pamlico Sound-side spot between Avon and Buxton within Cape Hatteras National Seashore is known almost everywhere else as "Canadian Hole" — a name tied to its long-standing popularity with Canadian windsurfers starting in the 1980s, joined by kiteboarders from the 1990s onward. Coastal Review describes it as the premier windsurfing and kiteboarding destination on the entire East Coast, and the flat, shallow sound water paired with reliable wind makes the reputation easy to understand. The exact origin story behind the "Canadian" nickname itself isn't documented in any single confirmed source — treat it as a well-earned colloquial name tied to decades of visitation, not an officially recorded piece of history.

That Canadian connection became an actual current-events story in April 2025, when Coastal Review reported a measurable drop in Canadian visitation tied to US-Canada political tensions: Canadian border crossings were down 12.5% in February 2025 and 18% in March 2025 according to U.S. Customs data. The reporting included specific, human-scale examples — a 25-person group with a 30-year tradition of visiting canceled its trip outright, and nearby Frisco Woods Campground lost a single reservation covering 23 sites and roughly 60 people. It's a genuinely distinctive, dated piece of Avon's recent story, not recycled tourism copy, and a reminder that Canadian Hole's identity is closely tied to a visitor base whose numbers can shift with the political weather.