Groove to the Music with Dance Classes Near Folly Beach, SC

It's only twelve miles south of Charleston's historic homes and manicured window boxes, but the salty little town of Folly Beach ditches the Holy City's refinement in favor of an easygoing, barefoot sensibility that feels a bit more California than Carolina. Known to locals as the Edge of America, Folly is everything a beach town should be. Surf shops line the main drag; cover-ups count as appropriate lunch attire; and nobody takes themselves too seriously (they drop a pair of LED-lit flip-flops to celebrate New Year's Eve). Here's where to stay, eat, relax, and play in South Carolina's super chill surf town.

Where to Stay

For a feels-like-home experience coupled with the charm and convenience of a boutique hotel (complimentary breakfast and happy hour daily, plus a free shuttle to the beach), book The Regatta Inn. Its best amenity of all, though, is the view: a spectacular vantage of Folly River and the surrounding marshland.

Every single room at Tides Folly Beach comes with an ocean view. Perched at the end of Center Street, the town's main thoroughfare, the hotel is steps from both the beach and an array of local shops and eateries.

For families looking to stretch out a bit more, there are a boatload of rentals to choose from: Opt for ocean-front properties that will sleep a crowd or cozy cottages with marsh and Folly River views. And for people who wouldn't dream of traveling without their four-legged companions, there are plenty of pet-friendly rentals too.

Where to Eat

You won't go hungry on this island. Fuel up for the day at Lost Dog Café, a local staple that serves coffee and all-day breakfast (so you can sleep in as long as you'd like). Don't miss their Lowcountry eggs Benedict, which they top with fried green tomatoes.

Fish tacos, Vietnamese-inspired lettuce wraps, and Cuban sandwiches all have a place on the colorful menu at Chico Feo, where the vibe is equally colorful. If you're in town for the wave-riding, be sure to check out their website's Surf Report, complete with a live video stream.

Don't let the easygoing atmosphere fool you: Rita's Seaside Grille is serious about its food...and its cocktails. Try one of the Signature Crushes, fruity sippers with flavored liquors that pack a punch.

End the night at Sand Dollar Social Club, a dive bar where you're invited to come as you are, so long as you're a member; membership costs $1, so bring your cash (you won't find a credit card machine here).

Though technically not on Folly (it's about two miles away), you'd be remiss to make a trip all this way without carving out time for a meal at family-owned Bowens Island Restaurant, a family-owned joint where the walls are graffitied and the oysters are locally harvested.

Where to Relax

The island's six miles of beachfront are its main attraction, and it'd be easy to while away a week with no plans beyond putting your toes in the sand. Spend a day shelling, sunning, surfing, or searching for shark teeth.

At the northern end of Folly Beach, the Morris Island Lighthouse provides a stunning backdrop from the shore. Get a closer look from the Lighthouse Inlet Heritage Preserve or via kayak. Several guided tours leave from Folly Beach to visit Morris Island for shelling, photography, and lighthouse history. The historic lighthouse is not open for viewing. How close you can get to the lighthouse depends on the tides.

Where to Play

Pack your fishing poles (or rent one) to test your fishing luck off the beloved Folly Beach Pier, which reopened in December 2022 after extensive renovations. If you're visiting in the summer, put on your dancing shoes—flip-flops count!—and head back to the Pier for one of the Moonlight Mixers, a music-filled family event held once monthly May through September.

For those looking to build an action-packed itinerary, there are plenty of activities that highlight the destination's natural beauty: Book a guided kayak tour with Charleston Outdoor Adventures, rent a stand-up paddleboard to explore the tidal creeks, or hop on a boat to discover uninhabited beachfront, where you can look for sharks' teeth and other fossils.

Stop by McKevlin's Surf Shop, South Carolina's oldest surfing outfitter, to peruse their selection of gear. You can also rent a surf or body board from the shop if you don't have one of your own; first-timers should consult their recommended list of surf instructors. Once you've got it down, catch some of the area's best waves at The Washout—or take a seat on the beach and see how the local pros do it.

South Carolina is famous for its beaches, but I didn’t know them. Folly Beach, which I discovered looking for escape from a dark, grueling New York City winter, advertised exceptional surf breaks and beach town tradition. Yeah, I thought, Folly Beach! Brilliant water, four-generation family beach houses, surfer subculture, and only one bridge on and off the island; my Southern friends were surprised I’d found it.

I missed kicking off the new year with the “Bill Murray look-alike” polar bear plunge, for which one dresses like a favorite Murray character and runs into the ocean. Motto: Freeze your balls off! No matter, I was just happy to find it was 20 degrees warmer than New York, and empty except for year-round people and diehard surfers. End to end, Folly is only six miles of wide beaches broken and protected by a series of jetties, and I planned to walk them all.

My rented house faced “The Washout,” a long beach break that got rowdy during storm swells and on windy days when the blow whipped up classic, rolling surf. A 20-minute walk up the beach was the Lighthouse Inlet Heritage Preserve with nesting sites for threatened loggerhead turtles. A local said you could find shark’s teeth there, but I never really looked. Off the beach, was marshland and maritime forest with stopover and winter roosting sites for flyway birds including the endangered piping plovers that I saw.

If I walked west, I would end up at Folly Beach County Park, acres of bone-white sand and scrub dunes bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and the wide (at that point) Folly River. A day-tripper magnet between Memorial Day and Labor Day, it was now almost deserted except for people walking with dogs (only allowed in winter).

I had been warned about the weather, but on some of my best days the rain would come and go several times, leaving a freshness on the magnolias that perfumed the salt air coming off the water. My backyard had magnolias, too, and two stands of 60-foot palmetto palms with large fronds, as well as hemlocks with dense green umbrella tops— excellent nesting cover for the robins, mockingbirds, and woodpeckers that fed on the palmetto cones and seeds. A swinging back gate opened onto wetlands that rose and fell with the tide.

By the time my month was up, the lessons of Folly would stay with me in the specifics. The birds and the trees and the long beach walks, learning the tides, the endlessly changing rhythms of the Atlantic. The way the sun would rise over the wetlands just outside my back gate, where early one morning I saw a family of raccoons, perhaps heading for the preserve.

Driving north over the Folly River Bridge at the end of my month, I knew that hordes would descend all summer and surfers would complain it was too crowded just to go left. But those high-season inconveniences weren’t my concern. For a month in the middle of winter, Folly was the perfect beach.

• • •

Terry McDonell is a media executive, literary editor, and published author. He has won numerous awards for his editorial work at various magazines and websites and has written and produced for film and television. Known for his acclaimed book The Accidental Life, McDonell returned to memoir with his most recent book, Irma: The Education of a Mother’s Son.

This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue of Southbound.

FOLLY BEACH, S.C. (WCSC) – A collaboration between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Folly Beach with hopes of repairing beaches in the area after storms created erosion is beginning within the month.

The Folly Beach renourishment project was announced back in January with the price tag of $18 million to protect future coastal storm damage, dredge the Folly River and place material on Bird Key.

READ MORE: Bird Key-Stono Seabird Sanctuary almost complete in time for nesting season

Officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Friday that the project will begin within the month and be completed before the 2024 peak hurricane season.

“The nor’easter did increase the erosion on the island; so at the end of the day, when we design the project, we had to increase our quantities,” Army Corps of Engineers Project Manager Wes Wilson says. “The last time that we did a Folly Beach renourishment project of this scale was in 2018 due to impacts from Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Irma. That was a similar project and scope, scale and complexity.”

The project was awarded to Gator Dredging which will place 1.3 million cubic yards of sand on the beach. The amount is equivalent to 130,000 dump trucks.

“The contractor, depending on how much sand they need to place in each section, typically is in a 500-foot section between two and five days. Areas of the beach that are more eroded, they’re typically spend more time in it, but areas that look kind of healthy from an erosion standpoint, they’ll move pretty fast through,” Wilson says.

Folly Beach Mayor Tim Goodwin said the beach needs to be built back up so tourists and locals can enjoy the entire beach.

“It’s very important. Every beach renourishment is very important from the standpoint of it protects the infrastructure of the beach, it protects the homes and protects the roadways,” Goodwin says. “The real importance of it is to build up a system for protection from storms.”

The project is completely funded by the Corps of Engineers, removing the burden of paying for the renourishment from Folly Beach.

“That money would go to beach renourishment, scraping or placing sand,” Goodwin says. “This money, we say this time, is in the pot for repairing the beach of the next storm and the storms after that.”

Portions of the beach will be closed throughout the project’s duration. Click here to see where construction is currently taking place.

“Safety is one of our primary concerns on the project. We encourage folks to do avoid the sections that are closed during the active construction,” Wilson says.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.

CHARLESTON COUNTY, S.C. (WCIV) — After heavy rain, wind, and waves along the shores on Sunday, beaches are still recovering.

One Folly Beach staff member said, on average, about 20 feet of sand dunes were pushed back to land. Thursday, the Coastal Science and Engineering team visited FollyBeach for a scheduled data collection trip.

“If you go down to the Isle of Palms or to Folly Beach portions of those communities that, before the storm, had a high dune or had a lot of sand in front of the houses, actually faired relatively well," Patrick Barrineau said.

Barrineau is the vice president of Coastal Science and Engineering, a group that collects data and studies coastal zones. They are headquartered in Columbia.

Read more: "USS Yorktown shifts due to Nor'easter storm, Patriots Point Museum temporarily closes."

"Portions of the beach that had a relatively narrow beach or had relatively low dunes did not [fair well],” Barrineau added. “We ended up seeing some damage. So it's a mixed bag. It depends on the recent project history.”

Barrineau said the Coastal Science team has been collecting data for the state for about a decade.

“We're ultimately looking at the elevation of the beach surface, how it changes over time," he said. "We're measuring it from where it doesn't change. So, landward of the dune out to 20, 30, 40 feet deep waterway offshore. And using those elevation data, we can sort of group certain profiles together that are adjacent to one another and keep track of the volume of the beach over time."

The goal is to provide helpful information to protect land and property during storms like the Nor'easter.

Read more: "Edisto Beach feels impact of Sunday Nor'easter."

"And there are pretty strong relationships between the amount of storm damage you see after an event like what we saw on Sunday and the volume of a beach," Barrineau said. "So, if you can maintain a certain threshold, minimum ideal volume, then you can sort of guarantee your community that storms up to a certain intensity will not cause substantial damage."

The United States Army Corps of Engineers Charleston District said they plan to award a construction contract to an upcoming renourishment project, aimed to be completed before the 2024 hurricane season.

FOLLY BEACH, S.C. (WCSC) - The city of Folly Beach revisited its short-term rental ordinance, with its first reading before the council at Tuesday’s meeting.

This time last year, the city voted to cap rentals like condos and Airbnbs to 800 across the island, but some residents still have concerns.

Residents are divided about the ordinance.

Some are still concerned about the rental cap affecting potential investments while others approve of the cap and feel it prevents disruptive renters.

During the work session the council clarified the language as far as how many nights a property can be rented for, waitlist and rental license requirements, and adding definitions to the ordinance to give it more structure.

What did not change was the cap of 800 for short-term rentals.

“This is an ordinance, and it’s like all ordinances everywhere. It never goes away, it’s always there. It can be amended many, many times going forward,” Folly Beach Mayor Tim Goodwin said. “As time goes on, and you see where you are and you say okay, well, A is not really where you want to be. We want to be over here at C. So, you can make an amendment to get you where you need to be.”

Last year more than 1,200 people turned out to vote for or against the short-term rental cap. Ultimately, 655 residents voted for the cap and 577 against it.

Folly Beach Mayor Tim Goodwin was among those who voted for the cap.

It will take several years for current short-term rentals to dwindle down to 800 from either people selling their property or no longer renewing their licenses.

“We’re trying to create a balance, and this is a compromise so everybody is not happy as you heard some of the council people alluded to that tonight,” Goodwin said. “Give a little take a little. Nobody’s going to be completely happy with what you’re doing, but that’s what happens and in politics that’s probably the best place you can be.”

There will be a second reading next Tuesday to discuss any further amendments.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.