The bell rings at Tugs Soundside most evenings right around the moment the sky over the Pamlico Sound goes from orange to something closer to purple. A few dozen people are usually on the deck when it happens, some with kids running barefoot between the picnic tables, some just off a full day of fishing at the Avon Pier a few minutes up the road. Nobody organizes this. It just happens, because for the first time in a long time, Avon has a place built specifically for that ten minutes.
That sentence would have sounded strange a year ago. Avon has never had trouble filling a Tuesday afternoon. It has the island's only chain grocery store, its medical center, its fishing pier, its farmers market. People have called it the Center of Hatteras Island for years, and they mean it as a compliment about convenience, not culture. What Avon has lacked, consistently, is a reason to stick around after the errands are done and the sun starts to drop. This summer, for the first time, it has one, and it did not happen by accident.
The village that had everything except an evening
Sherry Murray, who opened Tugs Soundside Taphouse and Brewery with her husband Travis this year, put it plainly when a local reporter asked her about the timing. She said it is not lost on them that there has never been much for locals to do here year round. That is not a criticism from an outsider. Sherry and Travis moved to Hatteras Island because they wanted to live here, and they spent more than a decade watching the gap she is describing.
Travis started homebrewing in 1999, long before craft beer became the fixture it is elsewhere in North Carolina. He kept at it through years of living somewhere else, and the two of them talked for more than ten years about relocating to the island and building something of their own. When the former Po House space on the Pamlico Sound came open, next to Ocean Air Sports, they took it. What they built is now the first brewery, in any form, that Hatteras Island has ever had.
That is worth sitting with for a second. Hatteras Island runs through Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, and Hatteras Village, and until this year none of those villages had a brewery. Not a small one, not a seasonal one. None. Avon got the first.
A taphouse built by people who planned to stay
Tugs is not pretending to be something it isn't yet. The brewing side is still working through permits, a process that involves federal licensing on top of state and county approval, and Travis expects the timeline to stretch into early 2027 before house-made beer is actually on tap. Until then, the taphouse is running on 20 rotating guest beers, wine, and a partnership model with food trucks and nearby restaurants rather than a full kitchen of its own.
That phased approach tells you something about who this was built for. A pop-up aimed purely at summer traffic doesn't spend a year waiting on federal brewing licenses. A business planning to be there in February does. Sherry has said they want the space to be fun, and part of what she means is that Hatteras Island has never had much going on in the off-season, and she wants that to change too.
The sunset bell fits into that same plan. What started as an idea the Murrays were kicking around during the spring buildout, something to mark the moment the sun drops below the sound, has become a nightly fixture. Guests gather along the soundfront deck, the light shifts through orange and pink and gold, and when the sun finally goes down, someone rings the bell. It has become part of the routine at Tugs in a way that neither Travis nor Sherry could have fully planned for when they first floated the idea.
Friday mornings now belong to Kinnakeet Shores
The other new anchor point in Avon's week happens at the opposite end of the clock. Every Friday morning this summer, at 8 a.m., a few dozen runners and walkers gather at SUN Realty in Kinnakeet Shores for the Run Hatteras Summer Series, a run that has been going on for years but changed shape this year in a small, telling way.
For 2026, organizers added a shorter 1-mile out-and-back option alongside the standard 5K. That is not a change you make for serious racers. Serious racers want the 5K, the chip timing, the age-group awards. A 1-mile add-on is a change you make when you want to pull in people who would not otherwise show up, families with younger kids, older residents who want to be part of the morning without running a full 5K, visitors who came for the coffee and post-race breakfast as much as the course itself. Race director Matt Costa has run the series across eight Friday mornings this year, starting June 19 and continuing through August 14.
The course itself runs flat through Kinnakeet Shores, inside the boundary of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which means the run is as much a walk through the neighborhood as it is a race. That is probably the point. A race series that only rewards speed builds a leaderboard. A race series that adds a 1-mile option and keeps the same start line every week for two months builds a habit.
Put those two things next to each other and a shape starts to appear. Friday mornings start at SUN Realty in Kinnakeet Shores. Most evenings end at the sunset bell on the sound. Neither of those existed in this form before this year.
The tavern that already knew how to do this
None of this happened out of nowhere. Avon has had one place doing a version of this for years: Pangea Tavern, tucked into Koru Village near the Avon Pier. It is owned by Joe Thompson, a Hatteras resident of more than 30 years who locals affectionately call the Mayor of Koru Village, and the tavern has quietly built the same kind of loyal, regular crowd that Tugs is now working toward. There is a grassy area and a playground for kids while parents wait for a table, an eclectic menu that leans into the pirate history of the island, and a reputation as the kind of spot where the same faces show up week after week.
What Pangea proves is that the appetite for a gathering spot in Avon was never the problem. The demand was there the whole time. What Avon lacked was a second anchor, a reason for that same kind of evening to happen in more than one place, on more than one night of the week. Tugs did not create the demand. It gave it somewhere else to go.
A week you can actually describe now
Layer in the Avon Farmers Market, which runs weekly through the summer with local produce and homemade goods, most recently open August 11 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and Avon starts to look like a village with an actual rhythm instead of a village people pass through on the way to somewhere else. A resident who has lived here for years could now describe a typical week with specifics: farmers market midweek, a Friday morning run through Kinnakeet Shores, dinner at Pangea some nights, the bell at Tugs most others.
That is a different sentence than the one people used to say about Avon, which was some version of it has the grocery store and the medical center and not much else. Avon has never lacked places to eat during the day. Muffins and Scones has been serving coffee and baked goods out of the heart of the village for years. Bros Sandwich Shack has the burger crowd covered. What was missing was the part of the day after the plate was empty, the part where you stay because there's a reason to, not because you're waiting on a to-go order.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it should
It is easy to read a list of a new brewery, a running series, and a farmers market and think none of it adds up to much. On its own, a taphouse is just a taphouse. But the specific shape of what opened this year, a business built by people who plan to be there in the off-season, waiting through a permitting process most business owners would find a reason to skip, and a race series that added a shorter distance specifically to bring in people who were not showing up before, points at something more deliberate. Both of these were built for residents first, and visitors second. That is a different bet than most new openings on Hatteras Island make, and it is the reason this summer in Avon feels different from the ones before it.
The bell will keep ringing at Tugs long after this particular season ends. Whether that turns into the kind of year-round gathering place Sherry Murray says she wants Avon to have depends on what the off-season actually looks like once the vacation traffic clears out. For now, the evenings have an anchor they didn't have before, and so do the Fridays.
If you already call Avon home, or you're weighing whether Hatteras Island's quieter, more practical village might be the right fit, Cooper & Jenny Hawk have spent years watching this stretch of the Outer Banks change season by season. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what living here actually looks like, and let us help you Find a Home that fits the rhythm you're looking for.
