A Seabrook day: 36 holes, a beach ride to the inlet and dolphins on the sand

A Seabrook day can start on a golf course that plays out to the dunes and end on horseback at Captain Sams Inlet, timed to low tide, when the shorebirds are feeding and the island's dolphins are pushing fish up onto the sand. Inside the gate at the end of Seabrook Island Road are 3.6 miles of beach, 36 holes of golf, an equestrian center and a racquet club with 15 clay courts.

The golf is two courses. Crooked Oaks, Robert Trent Jones Sr.'s 1981 design, is named for the live oak on the left of the 4th fairway and finishes at the Island House, with water on three sides of the 18th green. Ocean Winds, Willard Byrd's 1973 course, renovated by Rees Jones in 2020, turns toward the ocean at the 8th and 9th and follows the dunes on the 10th. Its 15th, a par 3 with the marsh behind it, is the signature hole, and the Club rates the 17th, a double dogleg over protected wetland, the hardest of its 36. Both play all year, mornings belong to members, and in 1996 they were the first courses in South Carolina certified as an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary.

The Equestrian Center has been on the island since 1976: three miles of trails, open pastures and 42 stalls, with boarding for owners and off-island riders. Its beach ride, $175 for riders 12 and up, heads to the inlet on North Beach around low tide. Riders 7 and under get a half-hour pony walk under the magnolias. The herd is worth meeting: Silky and Belle are Marsh Tackies, South Carolina's heritage horse, and Sam, Zeke and Sapphire are Mustangs that came through the Bureau of Land Management.

The Racquet Club on Long Bend Drive has 15 clay courts, four of them lit, and seven pickleball courts with play-by-level sessions every day. It hosts the Fleming Open, a national Level 3 and ITF tournament for players from 30 to 80, which started on Seabrook in 1992 as the USTA Senior Clay Court Championship.

The beach has two ends. Pelican Beach, near the mouth of the Edisto River, is the island's sunset beach; North Beach and the inlet face the sunrise. Strand feeding, when dolphins herd fish onto the sand and slide up after them, is most common in spring and fall and usually within three hours of low tide; the Town asks watchers to stay at least 15 yards back from the water line. From mid-May through October the Turtle Patrol walks the beach every morning, and lights facing the beach go off by 9 pm.

Off the sand, SIPOA's Lake House is a 27,500-square-foot community center with a 25-yard indoor pool heated all year, an outdoor pool, a gym and classes. The Natural History Group keeps four walking trails, and there are birders, an Artist Guild of more than 80, a photography club and the Green Space Conservancy, which has kept dozens of properties as permanent green space since 2000. The Club's Beach Club adds two oceanfront pools and the Pelican's Nest, which looks out over the Atlantic to Deveaux Bank.

Living here comes with the Club. Since January 1, 2005, every new owner has joined at closing, at one of four levels: Golf, Racquet Sports, Neighborhood or Homesite. Each carries a one-time capital fee and yearly dues, and a Golf member plays unlimited golf for the cart fee and books tee times 30 days out. Every Seabrook fee, with its source and date, is on our Seabrook fee page. If Seabrook is on your list, Mike Olson can walk you through which membership fits how you would use the island, and what is for sale inside the gate right now.