Jolly Roger Oceanfront Motel & Pier

About

Nearby:

(all within 3-4 blocks, easily walkable)

The Jolly Roger Oceanfront Motel & Pier is a motel in Topsail Beach, NC. It consists of three structures:

the office and pier
a two-story block of rooms - lower floor faces the street, upper floor has an ocean view; appears to be cinder-block construction
a three-story block of rooms - all rooms face the ocean, but the lowest floor is below the level of the retaining wall and has no ocean view; building appears to be of wooden construction

There is no internet available from the hotel, but cellphone data is within reach from at least two providers (see reviews).

Reviews

The Hypertwins -- 2015/07/26-31

They have microwaves now (at least in the King Suites). The one in our room is finicky about how you enter times: you can't enter '90" for 90 seconds; you have to punch it in as "130" or the display will just show "Err" when you tell it to start.

Broadsail was unavailable when we were here in 2014 (the service seems to have been shut down), so this year we brought two different mobile hotspots with us. The T-Mobile was only able to get 2G service (the device's web interface reports peak transfer speeds around 200Kb/s), but with a pretty solid connection; works well (slowly but usably) for one user at a time, gets a lot slower for more. The iWireless phone (admittedly with a hacked tethering ability) reports a 3G connection, but a speedtest still reports well under 1Mbps.

The Hypertwins -- 2013/07/04-07

Room 328 (top floor of the larger block), an "efficiency", has a small kitchen with a stove and refrigerator as well as wooden ocean-facing deck (very nice view) and 31-inch LCD TV with HDMI and component-video RCA connections. The kitchen has no microwave, and the refrigerator is a small full-size unit with no internal light. The controls on the stovetop are iffy.

The porch lends a wonderful view of the ocean and one can sit and watch the waves in relative comfort (and shade). The down side is that all the porches are open to one another (see this photo) so there is little privacy if any of your neighbors are also on their porches. One night our immediate neighbor on one side left their porch light on all night which was problematic since the only covering for the picture window were blinds and barely were light-blocking. There also is no sliding door, but a regular one with a deadbolt & chain (since one's neighbor could easily step over the dividing rail and just walk right into one's room).

There is no in-house internet but one can pay to gain access to the BroadSail wireless internet service. This, unfortunately, was spotty; it tended to be better during the evening and early morning, but it was always better closer to the landward side of the room. We frequently had to work next to the door or even open the door and hold the laptop out over the walkway to get a signal good enough to load web pages, submit posts, etc. There was no signal at all on the ocean-side deck. BroadSail's access points 47 and 48 seemed to be approximately equal in strength.

The entire motel has a strict no-smoking (and no pet) policy and is clear about charging an additional $200 fee if they find evidence of either when cleaning.