Around four in the afternoon, when the light off Pawleys Creek goes flat gold and the charter boats start coming back in, Sunset Cay Marina earns the kind of quiet that most waterfront spots spend a lot of money trying to manufacture. It doesn’t try. It’s a working marina first — fuel dock, boat slips, a small ship store — and whatever atmosphere it has comes from that, not from the decor.
The marina sits on the creek side of Pawleys Island, just off Myrtle Avenue near the south end of the island. It’s not a resort setup and it’s not pretending to be. What you get is a real boat yard feeling: weathered wood, pelicans on the pilings, a parking lot that fills up with truck-and-trailer rigs on weekend mornings. If you’re launching your own boat, the ramp here is in good shape and the fee is reasonable — usually under twenty dollars, though it’s worth calling ahead since rates shift by season.
The draw for people who aren’t trailering anything is simpler. There’s open water access, a small dock area where you can sit and watch the creek traffic, and enough of a marina vibe to make you feel like you’ve actually left the beach-strip tourist corridor behind. On a weekday afternoon you might have the whole area to yourself, watching the egrets work the shallows on the far bank while a shrimper idles past.
If you want to get on the water from here without your own boat, a few local charter and rental outfits work out of or near the marina, offering everything from flats fishing to paddleboard rentals, depending on the season. Availability shifts, so don’t count on walking up and getting something on a Saturday in July — but mid-week, mid-spring, it’s usually easy to piece together a few hours on the water without much advance planning.
The ship store carries the basics: ice, bait, some tackle, cold drinks. It’s not a destination shop, but after a morning on the water it’s exactly what you need. The staff tends to be straightforward and actually knows local fishing conditions, which is worth more than a glossy brochure about what species are supposedly running.
What makes this place worth noting in a town with no shortage of waterfront access is precisely that it doesn’t perform. The Pawleys Island beach side gets the Instagram traffic, the vacation rentals, the families hauling coolers across the dunes. The creek side is different — quieter, more functional, more honest about what this stretch of coast actually looks like to people who live and work here year-round. Coming down to Sunset Cay on a slow afternoon and watching someone back a flats skiff down the ramp is a small but real reminder that Pawleys Island is still, underneath the rental cottage economy, a place where people fish for a living and take their boats out because they want to, not because it’s on an itinerary.
If you’re staying anywhere on or near the island, it’s worth driving down Myrtle Avenue at least once and stopping here for twenty minutes. Don’t expect a restaurant or a gift shop. Do expect actual water, actual boats, and a version of the South Carolina coast that the brochures tend to skip over.
