This NC beach town is the best in the US for dolphin-watching, study says
If spotting wild dolphins is on your travel bucket list, a new study says a North Carolina beach town is the best place in the country to make it happen.
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According to a study from BoatBooker highlighted by Southern Living, Buxton in the Outer Banks ranks as the top U.S. destination for seeing wild bottlenose dolphins. The ranking comes from an analysis that examined hundreds of thousands of documented dolphin sightings using scientific data.
BoatBooker based its rankings on bottlenose dolphin records from OBIS-SEAMAP, a peer-reviewed database maintained by Duke University’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The study analyzed 243,809 documented bottlenose dolphin sightings across 356 coastal towns in the United States. Based on that data, Buxton claimed the No. 1 spot with 20,128 recorded bottlenose dolphin sightings since the mid-20th century.
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If you want to do more than watch dolphins, the town is best known as the home of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which was built to help guide ships past the treacherous Diamond Shoals, part of the coastline known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
The village is a favorite destination for beachgoers and outdoor enthusiasts, offering miles of beaches, maritime forests, world-class surfing at Cape Point, fishing and kiteboarding.
A handful of other Southern destinations also earned spots among the nation’s best places for dolphin watching, according to BoatBooker’s study:
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