Felix Plays Cat-and-Mouse With Coast : Weather: Weakening hurricane continues to dawdle off Virginia-North Carolina shore. Anxious residents are weary of waiting for landfall.

Hurricane Felix, like a playful pet, pawed at the North Carolina-Virginia coastline Thursday while continuing to languish 275 miles offshore.

The unpredictable storm drifted slightly north, enough to worry residents and vacationers at Virginia Beach, Va., as it had feinted a day earlier at the Outer Banks, North Carolina’s barrier island vacationland.

The threat from Felix, however, seemed to be dwindling as it edged farther away from the mainland. Although high seas and strong winds continued to harass much of the two-state coastline, the size of the storm shrank and a hurricane watch that had extended as far north as New Jersey was downgraded to a storm warning.

National Weather Service forecaster James Ireland predicted that the hurricane “will wobble or drift on a circular path northeast to due east of Hatteras for the next 72 hours,” giving the coastline inclement weather but causing little property damage.

Residents of Cape Hatteras, the easternmost point of the Outer Banks, were growing impatient Thursday with the uncertainty. One store owner spray-painted on the plywood that boarded up her windows: “Felix, You Cat, Scram!”

The same sentiments were evident farther north at Virginia Beach, where patrons at Ocean Eddie’s Tavern imbibed a mysterious green drink called Felix. “It may or may not hit you the next morning,” one explained.

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“I wish it would hurry up and come in,” said Maggie Quillin, glancing across a nearly empty beach usually dotted with August vacationers. More than 200,000 tourists already had evacuated the Outer Banks, and additional thousands moved inland from the Virginia Beach area.

Ireland reported winds at Cape Hatteras were being clocked at only 17 m.p.h. to 22 m.p.h., with gusts near 30 m.p.h., down from more than 50 m.p.h. the night before. “We really haven’t received much precipitation, only two one-hundredths of an inch,” he said.

Hurricane force winds, which earlier had extended 115 miles from the center of Felix, diminished to a radius of 90 miles. Their 75-m.p.h. velocity qualified Felix only as a Category 1 hurricane, far from the devastating Category 4 hurricanes of recent years--Hugo in September, 1989, and Andrew in August, 1992.

If Felix’s winds should dip below 74 m.p.h., the disturbance would lose its status as a hurricane and become a tropical storm.

State Route 12, the only highway on the Outer Banks, reopened Thursday after being closed a day earlier because of high water, and mandatory evacuation orders were lifted. But high seas continued to pose the threat of beach erosion.

Authorities said a high-pressure zone from Pennsylvania to Texas that has kept Felix offshore might continue to keep it spinning in place for two or three more days.

Along the East Coast, surfers eager to ride the big waves churned up by Felix headed to closed beaches. Those who violated the orders to stay out of the water risked being fined. But in many places surfers were not turned away.

Four people have been killed since the weekend in rough surf, including a teen-ager whose body was found off a beach in Deal, N.J., still tethered to his surfboard.