Ocean City Inlet
Sinepuxent Inlet, a navigable waterway through the barrier island during the colonial era, was located just south of the Assateague Island National Seashore day-use area. In September 1698 French pirate Canoot seized a Philadelphia-based sloop "as he was coming out of Cinnepuxon Inlet." The Inlet was closed in a hurricane in 1818, and was filled in by sand in 1860. Sinepuxent was a once-thriving community on the mainland about a half mile north of the Verrazano Bridge, also destroyed in the same hurricane.
The current inlet, known as Ocean City Inlet, was cut by the great 1933 Chesapeake–Potomac hurricane, also known as Hurricane Six of 1933. The new inlet was stabilized by rock jetties constructed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, with work commencing in October 1933. Because of the changes that the creation of the Ocean City Inlet made to tidal flows in the bays, the United States Army Corps of Engineers now internally defines the Isle of Wight Bay as extending south to the inlet, and Sinepuxent Bay extending south from the inlet to Chincoteague Bay, despite historical naming conventions.