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North Carolina's Ocracoke Island named best beach

The US' best beach this year is North Carolina's Ocracoke Island, a place so remote that even people in the offices of "Dr. Beach" -- Florida International University professor Stephen Leatherman -- did not know where to find it on the map.

"It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here," Leatherman said from Ocracoke, the first beach not in Florida or Hawaii to earn the top spot in his annual ranking of the US' top 10.

Technically, it is Ocracoke Lifeguarded Beach that is the nation's best. But Leatherman said there is little that separates those 275m of postcard-perfect sand from the rest of the island, almost all of which is protected from development as part of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

"Here, you have 14 miles [22km] of unspoiled, undisturbed barrier beach," said Leatherman, director of Florida International's laboratory for coastal research. "Where do you find that in the world?"

Ocracoke is at the southern end of the Outer Banks, the fragile chain of barrier islands along North Carolina's coast known as the "graveyard of the Atlantic." Accessible only by boat or private plane, there are only about 800 full-time residents of the island where the pirate Blackbeard met his untimely death at the hands of the Royal Navy in 1718.

"People shouldn't come here to play golf, and don't come here for the Hilton spa or something like that," Leatherman said. "They're not going to find those things here."

Ocracoke has been a favorite of "Dr. Beach" for years -- he ranked it No. 3 last year and No. 2 in 2005. By winning this year, it will be retired from consideration, along with other past champions.

"Obviously, it's a great honor to be put up at the top of the heap," said Julia Howard, the administrator for the Ocracoke Island Museum and Preservation Society.

Leatherman ranks beaches on 50 criteria, using a 1 to 5 scale. No beach has ever gotten all 250 points, and Ocracoke ranked somewhere in the 230s, he said. The sand, for example, isn't lily white, so it lost points there.

He considers only swimming beaches, which leaves out those along the Maine and Oregon coastlines, where the water is too cold. Beaches with lifeguards get high points, as do those that balance the natural environment and the man-made environment.

Earning the No. 1 ranking on the "Dr. Beach" list is usually a tourism booster. But the remote nature of Ocracoke and its place as part of a national seashore should spare the island's 8m sand dunes, topped by sea oats, from an onslaught of beachcombers.

"When things are inundated with people, it isn't quite the same place any more," Howard said. "We hope people who do come here would honor our beauty and keep it looking the way it does for a long time."
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