Hurricane Felix Weakens Off North Carolina Coast : Weather: The storm system is not gaining any strength from warm waters. Predictions on when it will hit land is now anybody’s guess.

Hurricane Felix, huge in diameter but barely ferocious enough to be called a hurricane, slowed to a crawl Wednesday off the coast of North Carolina, causing considerable uncertainty but so far little damage.

Felix’s top winds were 75 m.p.h.--the threshold for hurricanes is 74 m.p.h--and the storm did not appear to be picking up any strength from the warm Gulf Stream waters.

Felix’s landfall, earlier predicted to occur this morning, became anybody’s guess. Wednesday evening, the storm was centered about 145 miles east of Cape Hatteras, the outermost point of the Outer Banks.

At least four people have died in rough surf since the weekend. Lifeguards closed East Coast beaches as far north as Maine, and Amtrak canceled trains running between New York and Florida because of the risk of flooding, fallen trees and signal problems.

Authorities in Wilmington--120 miles south of the Outer Banks, the fragile chain of barrier islands that jut into the Atlantic Ocean--were relieved by signs that Felix was weakening.

But the late summer tourist business seemed ruined as 200,000 vacationers and others--expecting the worst from Felix--had already fled to the mainland and perhaps back to their homes.

“At the very least, we’re probably in for two or three days of nasty weather,” said Marvin Beard, a veteran Nags Head, N.C., realtor. Like Beard, many year-round islanders were ignoring Felix and staying put as the Atlantic churned around Nags Head’s main pier.

At Carolina Beach on the mainland, several miles inland from the exposed Outer Banks, several tourists seemed more concerned with tanning than hurricane warnings.

“I’m convinced it’s going to miss us. God knows we need the vacation,” said Richard Rankin, a Richmond, Va., resident who was accompanied by his wife and two children.

“We’re stocking up on videos for the kids and margarita ingredients for us in case it does hit. But we’re not heading home.”

Even if the storm’s center continued to stall offshore, the National Hurricane Center in Miami predicted that Felix could cause storm surges of five to eight feet above normal tides as far north as the Washington, D.C., area. The storm had winds above 70 m.p.h. extending 70 miles from the center.

“We’re dealing with a slow-moving dinosaur that could pound us for a long time,” said Dan Summers, emergency management coordinator for this part of the state.