Critter heaven

Because its sand has never been artificially replaced, Pilkey says, the island beach is “a rich ecosystem. So full of critters — mole crabs, coquinas.”

Up to 30 loggerhead turtles crawl ashore each summer to nest, says Carmel Zetts, coordinator for the 65-member Sunset Beach Turtle Patrol. Members check nests beginning at 5 a.m. and, when hatching occurs, they escort the hatchlings to the ocean.

Farther down the beach, on what was separate Bird Island before shifting sands filled in an intervening inlet, more dunes and marsh make up the 1,400-acre, state-owned Bird Island Coastal Reserve.

“It’s an incredible area to go kayaking in, so many tidal creeks. Just drift past the herons and the egrets and the willets and they’ll just be sitting in the grass looking at you,” says Jim Barber, coordinator of the Bird Island Stewards, who leads birding tours.

Between the natural wonders — ”The sunsets are absolutely indescribably beautiful,” says Edward Gore— and the small-town atmosphere, Sunset Beach is “a wonderful place to live,” concludes council member Karen Joseph.

Kindred Spirits

The peaceful Bird Island dunes off Sunset Beach inspire contemplation, and many visitors are moved to pour out their hearts in a notebook found in an isolated mailbox there.

“It’s an inspiring place when you get down there,” says Frank Nesmith, 86, who with a visiting vacationer, the late Claudia Sailor of Fayetteville, put up the mailbox that included the first notebook in the 1970s.

“Some people get a religious feeling, ” he says. “Some people get a patriotic feeling. Some people get a feeling of being close to nature.” They started calling the mailbox “Kindred Spirits”

Nesmith forwarded the hundreds of filled notebooks to Sailor, until her death in January. He continues to replace them, but now the filled notebooks will go to the archives at UNC-Wilmington.

“Some of them will bring tears to your eye,” he says. “A bunch of cousins wrote that their granddaddy had a house down here at Sunset Beach. One of the things they did when they came down was go to the mailbox. One Thanksgiving he was not with them anymore. Even had a special service for him down there.”

Underground power lines

Electric service on the island of Sunset Beach is provided by Brunswick EMC, the member-owned Touchstone Energy cooperative serving Brunswick and Columbus counties. In recent years, Brunswick EMC has moved all distribution and individual service lines on the island from overhead to underground. This conversion was made possible through a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant of more than $6.25 million obtained by BEMC to mitigate electric system damage from hurricanes on the barrier islands of Brunswick County.

Underground lines are protected from both wind damage and the corrosive effects of salt air; this increases system reliability and greatly reduces the volume of power outages from major storms.