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Seventy-two-thousand Tides & Counting
In 1959 an undertaker by the name of Jim Dunbar arrived with his family on Hilton Head Island.
He and his wife Peggy came to open a marina at the end of a dirt road that terminated at a tidal creek.
Piles were driven into the soft mud and a single floating wooden dock was lowered with a crane that would double as a boat lift. A building was erected. Then in May 1959 the marina opened with a staff that included the Dunbars’ son, Stewart, and 13-year-old daughter, Dottie.
“We knew we had a customer whenever we heard a truck with a boat trailer rattling down the dirt road,” Dottie recalled. “There was no telephone service.” When the phone lines were laid a few months later, locals could dial 3-9-1-0, and a Dunbar would answer the telephone.
Life on Hilton Head Island would never again be the same.
During the summer Dottie, Stewart and their friends spent their days in cut-off jeans. “Kids would be dropped off by their parents to fish and crab from the docks,” Dottie said. “Then their parents would leave to go to the beach.”
The marina became home to the island’s first charter boat when Captain Buddy Hester began the island’s first sport-fishing charter company.
With this, an island avocation became a vocation. “He was responsible for a lot of the young men who went into the same industry,” Dottie recalled. In the winter months pilings were added to support another floating wooden dock.
The Dunbars sold the marina to Sea Pines in 1965 but the marina remained a second home to an extensive gallery of unforgettable characters.
Captain Woody Collins pulled up to Palmetto Bay Marina’s docks in the mid-1970s. His days were spent shrimping and fishing the local waters; in the evening he sold the day’s catch on the dock.
“It was a real sleepy, tight-knit community of people down there,” Collins recalled. “We would get together and cook up a big pot of something on the wood-burning stove.”
John Rumsey arrived on Hilton Head in 1977, the same year Ted Turner won the America’s Cup. He came with a brilliant young architect named Carl “Bunky” Helfrich. Bunky had been a friend of Turner’s since their boyhood in Savannah. At the time Turner owned a smattering of billboards and a small television company in Atlanta that broadcast the Braves.
Rumsey crewed on several of Turner’s many yachts, including the 12-meter American Eagle and 60-foot Tenacious. In 1977 he, Helfrich and their friend Gary Wheatley decided to purchase the marina. They installed more dock sections and a larger travel lift that would handle much larger boats, including Turner’s.
“In those days people would bring their boat here to have work done,” Rumsey recalled. “Then they would head off to the next race on the circuit. Ted loved sailing and he was a fun guy to be around.”
Apparently Turner was as quotable then as he is now.
“I hate the sea,” Ted Turner once said to Rumsey. “But I hate land worse.”
The marina continued to change hands down through the years, with new owners improving the facilities to varying degrees.
“Every now and then entire sections of dock would float away in the middle of the night with boats still tied to them,” Collins recalled.
Inevitably, the marina’s footloose atmosphere slowly slipped away with each capital improvement. When the marina again changed hands in the mid-1980s, it wasn’t certain that the new owners would allow Collins to sell his shrimp off the dock. Rumsey suggested that he set up a little shop a few yards away from the marina office.
In that moment an institution was born. Collins and his wife Lynn set up a couple of tables to clean the shrimp. Soon the shrimp cleaning moved indoors and the tables were surrounded by chairs to seat customers. Over time the outdoor space evolved into Captain Woody’s Bar and Grill, the restaurant so near and dear to the hearts of Hilton Head Islanders.
Robert Graves arrived in the late 1970s and began building sport-fishing boats in a shed on the premises. Meanwhile, Helfrich went on to design the Chart House and the Yacht Club of Hilton Head, just a few yards away from the marina. Fuzzy Davis, a legendary inshore fisherman, based himself at Palmetto Bay Marina, working the local creeks and sounds.
“A number of people lived on their boats at the marina in those days,” Rumsey recalled. “They were young and enthusiastic about fishing and sailing.”
One of those people was Pat Horn, who lived on a 42-foot houseboat at the marina for two years with his wife and daughter.
“It was a special way to live,” he recalled. “It was pretty funky back then. Definitely a little different than it is now.”
“Living at Palmetto Bay Marina was like traveling while standing still,” Woody Collins recalled. “People from up and down the Eastern Seaboard would pull in, stay a few days, and then head off. Then some interesting stranger would pull in to take their place.”
Within a few years condominiums and businesses began to spring up around the marina. In 1992 Dottie started her own fishing competition — Dottie Dunbar’s All-Women Fishing Tournament, an annual event that now attracts anywhere from 35 to 60 anglers each fall.
For more information on Palmetto Bay Marina activities, click here.
