Sunday, 9 November 27.3 SM
When you think of Myrtle Beach, what comes to mind? The Grand Strand, right? Hotels, bars, fast food, bars, tee-shirts, bars, miniature golf, Golf-golf and, yes, bars. Don’t forget the traffic, stoplights and here-and-there a few happy folks who appear to have had too much to drink.
A tight channel but enough for big boats.
How about goats mowing the grass? Maybe not so much.
Yesterday’s brief foray to the UPS store brought back memories of the Myrtle Beach we all know and love from the days of our youth. Steadfast slipped into “Myrtle Beach” at day’s end today. At least, that is the post office address of Osprey Marina. But this lovely location is nothing like the Grand Strand.
The narrowest of channels leads off the ICW to a man-made basin filled with boats and yachts of all types and sizes, circled first by well-manicured lawn with dense woods beyond. You just don’t see a marina in a setting like this. (Nor do you see diesel fuel for three-bucks a gallon!) Osprey Marina is special.
Pilots know about VORTAC.
As was the relatively-short run down from Little River, seeing sights you just don’t see that often from a boat…anywhere! Take the “Rock Pile,” for instance, a straight stretch of canal blown out of the granite bed. Don’t stray too far from the center. Loose rock remains strewn along the sides of Pine Island Cut, as it’s called, for nearly twenty miles.
It’s tee time at River Dunes.
Then there’s the VORTAC installation. You come around a bend in the canal and, waddya know, there’s an open field with a flying saucer sitting right there! No, it’s just VORTAC (which, when you look it up, is not far off from a UFO).
A few miles up ahead, a couple of gondolas swing across the waterway from an aerial tram. It’s there to move golfers from a parking lot on one side to the pro shop and first tee on the other. This is the land of the never-ending fairway after all.
Grande Dunes is so important, it has its own bridge.
A bit farther and you’re into (not just any but the) Grande Dunes, a residential-golf development that lines both sides of the waterway with ersatz Spanish architecture, “grande” stucco home with tiled roof after another, for miles.
Don’t miss the turn to Osprey Marina.
The homes become more modest approaching Socasstee and the swing bridge there. Homes then give way altogether to nature as the waterway winds in a more natural path through the woods and marshes until, there off to starboard, there’s a small white painted sign alerting passing mariners to the turn to Osprey Marina.
Osprey’s groundskeepers work 7 days a week.
Miles meets arriving vessels at the fuel dock, Lynn presents a welcome bag full of boater goodies—Koozie, samples of Tide and Bounce, bath soap, Pecan Twirls and a Honey Bun—and the goat herd ambles onto the scene to keep the lawn looking good.
Sure, the Post Office thinks this is Myrtle Beach but we know better. This sure ain’t the Grand Strand.
Steadfast out.
At Sea with Steadfast 
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