When to Camp Near Oak Island & Southport

Autumn, which is the answer

September still feels like summer and is noticeably quieter the moment the schools go back. October is the month. Daytime temperatures in the seventies, nights that want a fire, an ocean that has spent all summer storing heat and gives it back slowly, and a run of festivals within half an hour of the gate, the U.S. Open King Mackerel Tournament in Southport at the start of the month, the North Carolina Oyster Festival at Ocean Isle in the middle, and Festival by the Sea at Holden a week or two later.

It is also the month the beach stops charging. Oak Island’s paid parking season ends on 30 September, so from 1 October the whole thing is free again.

The consequence of all that is simple: the first three weekends of October are among the tightest of our year. If you want them, book well ahead.

Spring

March is unpredictable and can be glorious. April and May are reliably lovely, everything green, the azaleas doing their work up in Wilmington, and water that is swimmable from about the middle of May if you are not fussy. The bugs have not really started. The light is long.

Two things to put in the calendar. Wilmington’s Azalea Festival in early April fills every room in the city and pushes the overflow south to us. And Oak Island’s paid parking starts again on 1 April, so a late-March beach day is free and an early-April one is not.

Summer

Hot, humid and the busiest stretch of the year, and still the time most families come, because that is when families can come. The honest picture: daytime highs in the upper eighties and low nineties, dew points that make it feel warmer, and an afternoon thunderstorm that arrives at four and is gone by five rather often.

What makes summer here work is the shade and the water. Forty acres of loblolly pine is a meaningfully cooler place to sit than an open gravel lot. Not every site is under the trees, some are more open than others, so if shade matters to you say so when you book and we will point you at the right numbers. The pool is shallow at both ends, and the sea breeze on Oak Island takes the edge off from late morning. Go to the beach early, come back for the hot part of the day, and go out again at four.

Book early for late June into the Fourth of July. Southport’s North Carolina Fourth of July Festival runs the best part of a week and brings forty to fifty thousand people twenty minutes from our gate, in the middle of peak beach season. It is the single tightest week of our year.

Winter

We are open all year, and winter here is not the joke it would be three hundred miles north. January days are frequently in the fifties and sometimes the sixties. Frost happens and snow effectively does not. The park is quiet, the beaches are empty and free, the shelling is at its best after a winter blow, and Southport and Wilmington are much more pleasant towns without the season on them.

Not everything runs: the pool is seasonal, and some of the attractions on the coast go to winter hours. But if what you want is a fire, a long walk on an empty beach and a cabin with the heat on, February on this coast is remarkably good value.

Hurricane season, honestly

It runs from 1 June to 30 November, and the peak is from the middle of August to the middle of October. Most of it passes without anything happening at all.

Two things are worth knowing. We are inland of the barrier islands, under trees, on the mainland side of the waterway, a different proposition from a site on the dunes. And the leash time on these systems is now days rather than hours, so the sensible approach is to watch the forecast in the week before you travel and talk to the office early if something is tracking this way, rather than on the morning.

Travel insurance for a September or October trip is a reasonable thing to buy. We would say the same to our own family.

The best time to camp, and which weekends go first

• Late June into the Fourth of July. The tightest week of the year.
• The first three weekends of October. Three festivals in four weeks, all within thirty-five minutes.
• Early April, if the Azalea Festival lands then. Wilmington sells out and the overflow comes south.
• Our own tree-lighting weekend in December, which a number of families book a year ahead.

The events page keeps the running list, and it works itself out from the calendar rather than from somebody remembering to edit it, so what is on it is what is actually coming.