Cat Island Outfitters has been sitting at the edge of the Pawleys Island causeway long enough that locals stop thinking of it as a shop and start thinking of it as a landmark. The building is small, the parking is tight, and the screen door still slaps shut behind you the way screen doors should.
I first walked in a few years ago looking for a decent fishing hat and ended up staying forty minutes. That’s the thing about this place — it doesn’t feel curated, it feels lived in. The racks carry fly-fishing gear alongside casual coastal clothing, and the selection makes sense because the people who work here actually use it. Ask about a specific lure for Winyah Bay flats fishing and you’ll get a straight answer, not a sales pitch.
The Perch & Provisions side of things is worth its own paragraph. It started as a nod to the idea that people coming off the water need coffee and something to eat, and it’s grown from there. The coffee is good — not fancy, just consistent — and the pastries rotate depending on what’s come in that morning. On a weekday in late spring, I had a cinnamon roll and a cold brew on the small deck overlooking the marsh and watched a great blue heron stand perfectly still in the shallows for about ten minutes. Nobody inside seemed particularly impressed by this. It happens every morning.
The merchandise leans toward quality over quantity. You’ll find Patagonia basics, some locally made items, the kind of canvas tote bag that you actually keep using. Prices are fair for what you’re getting — a decent fishing shirt runs $45–$65, coffee drinks are under $6. It’s not trying to compete with a big outdoor retailer and it doesn’t need to.
What makes the Perch & Provisions stop genuinely useful is the information density. If you’re new to paddling the local creek systems or want to know where the redfish are running this week, the staff here tends to know. They’re plugged into the local fishing community in a way that the bigger shops in Myrtle Beach simply aren’t. I’ve seen people walk in with vague plans about an afternoon on the water and walk out with a rough itinerary, the right tackle, and a cup of coffee for the drive to the launch.
Go in the morning if you can, ideally before 9 a.m. on a weekend, before the causeway traffic picks up and the small parking lot fills. Weekdays in the shoulder season — March, April, October, November — are ideal. The marsh out back looks best in low-angle morning light, and the coffee tastes better when you’re not in a hurry.
It’s on the Pawleys Island side of the causeway, which means you’re already in the right mindset by the time you arrive. That approach across the water has a way of slowing people down, and Cat Island Outfitters rewards the kind of unhurried browsing that follows.
