Bogue Sound

Bogue Sound, at the southern end of North Carolina's Outer Banks (a chain of barrier islands), is a kind of lagoon. It's a body of salt water that's about 25 miles long and between about 2½ miles wide as its widest point. The waters of the sound are protected from ocean waves and currents by the barrier island called Bogue Banks. Here's a link to a map.

At each end of the sound there's an inlet that lets salt water flow in and out of the sound with the rhythm of the tides. There's als. a bridge at each end of the sound linking the barrier island to the mainland.

This kind of bridge lets yachts and smaller boats ply the waters of the sound without impeding car and truck traffic traveling back and forth between the island and the mainland. This is the bridge that links Morehead City to the resort town of Atlantic Beach on Bogue Banks.

Don't be misled by the size of this ship. It's in port at Morehead, having passed through Beaufort Inlet onto the calmer waters of the very eastern end of the sound, where it meets the inlet. The N.C. sounds are not naturally very deep but a channel deep enough for fairly large boats has been dredged through them. It's known as the Intracoastal Waterway and runs from New York to Florida. Before the dredging, I'm sure it was possible to walk across Bogue Sound at very low tide.

The waters of the sound can get choppy when the wind is blowing. In this last photo, you see the big houses along the north shore of Bogue sound in Morehead. The word "sound" in this sense, by the way, derives from the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse term sund, which was the name for a narrow body of water, as a lagoon protected by a barrier island, or a strait or inlet. Don't ask me where the name Bogue came from. There's a fish called a bogue but it lives in European waters. Maybe the first European settlers saw fish in North Carolina waters that resembled the bogues they knew in the Old World. In French, une bogue is the spiny husk of the chestnut.