New Year's Eve, as the sun sank in the west, people began arriving and making their way out to
the very tip of the sand spit, walking as far out as they could before the swash chased them back
with threats of wet feet on a winter day. The sand spit is known locally as Cape Point; it is the
last piece of land that makes Cape Hatteras. This place can be seen from space, you can point to
it on a world map, or on a globe, and say, "I was there."

Offshore, two major ocean currents collide with warm Gulf Stream waters coming up from the south
and cold waters of the Labrador Current traveling down from the north. The ocean currents carry
loads of sand, from the north and from the south, that piles up in a long ribbon stretching
seaward from here for tens of miles out into the Atlantic, beneath the waves - Diamond Shoals,
the "Graveyard of the Atlantic", so named for the 600 or so vessels that have run aground and
broken apart on the shifting sands hidden just beneath the ocean's surface.