Every beach town has a personality that only shows itself off-season. North Myrtle Beach spends its summer being loud and generous with strangers — shag music drifting out of the Ocean Drive clubs, traffic backed up on Highway 17, kids sunburned and happy. Then October arrives, the crowds thin, and something else surfaces. The town turns its attention inward, toward the people who live here year-round, and it does so with a particular kind of care.

You notice it first in the color. Purple ribbons appear on shop doors along Main Street. Purple pumpkins turn up on porches in Cherry Grove. On a Saturday morning in the middle of the month, a few hundred people gather at the amphitheater behind the lake at the North Myrtle Beach Park & Sports Complex, in matching purple shirts, to walk a single mile together. The distance is the point. A mile is short enough that nobody is excluded — not the grandmother with a cane, not the toddler in the wagon, not the woman who arrived alone and did not tell anyone why she came.

Domestic violence is a subject most communities prefer to keep at arm’s length. It is uncomfortable, it implicates neighbors, and it rarely produces a tidy story. What makes this stretch of the Grand Strand worth writing about is that it has decided not to look away, and has built a steady, unglamorous habit of showing up instead. The annual walk is the visible part. Underneath it runs a year-round network of civic clubs, churches, small businesses and advocates who handle the subject with a gentleness that is easy to miss unless you live here.

The October When the Town Turns Purple

October is national Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and South Carolina has long had a hard stake in it. For more than two decades, the state ranked among the ten worst in the country in the Violence Policy Center’s annual study of women killed by men, and it topped that list several times. The center suspended its state-by-state rankings beginning in 2023, citing reliability problems in federal crime data during the FBI’s reporting-system transition, so there is no current ranking to point to. The memory of those years has not faded here, and it shapes how seriously people take the month.

The GFWC North Myrtle Beach Woman’s Club, federated since 1974, carries most of the local weight. Its members organized the first awareness walk in October 2021, drawing more than a hundred participants and roughly thirty local sponsors on a first attempt — the kind of turnout that tells a club it has touched something real. The event has run every October since. The sixth annual walk is set for Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026, with a ceremony at 9 a.m., the walk at 10 and raffles at 11.

One Mile Around the Lake, and What It Carries

The choice of venue says a lot. The sports complex on Citizens Circle in Little River is where this community holds its ordinary Saturdays — travel baseball, soccer tournaments, dog walkers on the paved loop that circles the lake. Staging the walk there, rather than in a rented ballroom, puts the subject squarely inside daily life. Participants circle the water on flat ground at whatever pace they have. Leashed dogs come along. Chairs are set out near the amphitheater for anyone who would rather sit through the ceremony than walk it, which is its own form of hospitality: nobody has to explain why they are staying seated.

Around the mile, the club builds a small festival. Past years have brought survivor speakers and local officials to the microphone, live music and a DJ, food trucks, craft vendors, children’s activities, raffles of decorated baskets, and resource tables staffed by the agencies that answer the phone at two in the morning. Police and fire crews turn out. The tone is deliberately warm rather than solemn, which is a decision organizers appear to have made early and stuck with. A survivor who came to hear someone speak can also buy a funnel cake and let her kids get their faces painted, and go home having had a normal morning.

The 2026 walk is listed as a free public event, a change from prior years when a registration donation of about $20 covered adults and children under 12 walked free. Lowering the barrier to zero is consistent with how the club talks about the morning: the goal is a crowd, and the giving can happen on its own terms.

The Quiet Network Behind the Mile

A walk raises money for one morning. What happens the other 364 days depends on a thinner, less visible structure. The Family Justice Center serves Horry and Georgetown counties from offices in Conway and Georgetown, coordinating advocacy, safety planning, counseling and support groups at no cost, with a crisis line staffed around the clock. For years, Horry County had no dedicated emergency shelter for domestic violence victims at all, and efforts to build one have been a recurring local story. That gap is precisely why a civic club’s fund matters more here than the dollar amount suggests.

Churches carry another share of it. Hope’s Kitchen Mission, connected with Ocean Drive Presbyterian Church, has served hot meals and run food distributions in North Myrtle Beach for years, and Woman’s Club members have worked shifts in its kitchen. None of that is filed under domestic violence services, and all of it is: a hot meal and a bag of groceries are often the first thing a person needs after leaving, and a church basement is a place someone will walk into when an agency office feels like too big a step.

What holds the pieces together is proximity. This is a town where the officer who takes a report, the woman who runs the boutique on Main Street and the volunteer staffing the resource table are likely to know one another. That closeness has a cost — privacy is harder in a small town, and shame travels fast — but the community has largely used it the other way, building the kind of familiarity that lets a person ask for help without filling out a form first.

Storefronts That Keep the Conversation Going

Local retailers have done quiet, consistent work for this cause, and two of them come up every year. PURPLEologist at Barefoot Landing, a shop built entirely around the color purple, has served as a ticket outlet for the walk — an alignment so natural it almost looks planned, since purple is the awareness color. Hope Taylor & Company, the ladies’ boutique at 312 Main St. in the Ocean Drive section, has done the same, putting the walk in front of shoppers who were only stopping in for a candle or a gift.

The value of that arrangement is not really the ticket sales. It is that the subject ends up on a counter in a cheerful shop, in the middle of an ordinary errand, where a customer can pick up a flyer without anyone watching her do it. Awareness campaigns often aim for the dramatic gesture. On this stretch of coast, the more effective version has been a stack of cards by a register at Barefoot Landing and a purple ribbon taped to a door on Main Street, left up all month.

A Calendar of Care: The Club’s Fall Season

The awareness walk is not a standalone gesture but one entry on a service calendar that runs from late summer to Christmas. Seen together, the season reads like a portrait of what this community decides to care about, and how evenly it spreads that care across causes.

Note where the domestic violence work falls on that list — not isolated in its own difficult corner, but sitting between a children’s cancer walk and a Thanksgiving meal drive. That placement is itself a message. The club treats a woman leaving an unsafe house as a neighbor in need, the same as a family short on groceries in November, and the normalcy of that framing does more to remove shame than any slogan would.

How the Money Actually Reaches a Neighbor

Proceeds from the walk go into the club’s domestic violence victims fund, which is spent across the year rather than handed over in a single ceremonial check. Club materials describe it plainly: food, gas, counseling, education and awareness. Those four words cover most of what falls through the cracks of formal assistance. A shelter bed is a program. The tank of gas that gets someone to a family court hearing in Conway is not, and neither is the first month of counseling before insurance sorts itself out, or the school supplies a child needs after an abrupt move across the county line.

The fund also crosses the state line, supporting victim services in Horry County and neighboring Brunswick County, North Carolina. Anyone who lives near Cherry Grove understands why: the border is fifteen minutes up Highway 17, families straddle it, and a survivor’s life rarely respects a county map. Organizers are still seeking sponsors for the 2026 walk and can be reached at info@northmyrtlebeachwomansclub.org or 843-206-5105, and donations can be made year-round through the club’s website at northmyrtlebeachwomansclub.org.

Where to Find Help on the Grand Strand

If you are reading this because of your own situation, or someone else’s, these lines are answered by people trained for the conversation. Calls are free, and you do not need to have decided anything before you call.

If You’re Here on Vacation That Week

Mid-October is the season locals keep for themselves. The water is still warm enough to wade into, the rental rates have dropped, and the beach in front of Cherry Grove in the morning belongs mostly to shell hunters and a few fishermen. Visitors who happen to be here that weekend are welcome at the walk, and there is something clarifying about spending an hour with the year-round version of a town you usually see in July.

The sports complex is a short drive from every rental corridor on this end of the beach. Families staying in Ocean Drive can walk Main Street afterward and see the purple ribbons up close; guests in Crescent Beach and Windy Hill are ten to fifteen minutes out, with Barefoot Landing on the way back for lunch. Fall is also when the larger properties open up, so a family reunion that would be unaffordable in June fits comfortably into an oceanfront home in October, and couples traveling alone tend to do best in an oceanfront condo within walking distance of the sand.

Confirm event times with the Woman’s Club before you go, since schedules and weather plans can shift in the final weeks.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: GFWC North Myrtle Beach Woman’s Club event, donation and news pages; North Myrtle Beach Times coverage of the annual walk; Violence Policy Center, When Men Murder Women; Family Justice Center serving Horry and Georgetown counties; WMBF News reporting on Hope’s Kitchen Mission. Event dates, times and admission reflect the club’s published 2026 schedule and should be confirmed before attending.

Healing Waters: The Those Who Served Foundation Is Bringing Hope to Veterans on the Grand Strand

One captain. One boat. One boy who once fished beside his father. And a movement that is quietly changing lives along the Carolina coast.

There is something about salt water that does not ask you anything. It does not want your story. It does not care about the weight you carry from whatever country you left your peace in, or the shift you worked where everything went wrong. The water simply moves, and it takes something with it when it goes. People have always known this, even if they could not say exactly why, and along the Carolina coast where the creeks run brown and copper-colored through the marsh grass and the inshore flats stretch wide and quiet toward the sea, a man named Captain Rick Roberts has spent a lifetime watching the water do its quiet work.

He did not set out to build a foundation. He set out to fish. He learned how from his father — a 26-year Navy Commander who understood both the discipline of service and the particular mercy that comes when you are standing in a boat with a line in the water and no place you have to be. The two of them spent years out on the inshore waters of Central Florida, reading tides, learning patience, saying the things men say when they are not looking at each other. Then the elder Roberts was gone, and Rick carried forward what had been passed to him, not just the technique but the understanding — that the water is a place where burdens can lift.

What began as a boyhood education became a charter business, and what became a charter business became a calling, and what became a calling is now the Those Who Served Foundation — a nonprofit operating out of Longs, South Carolina, just inland from the beaches of North Myrtle Beach, devoted to putting veterans and first responders on the water for free. No cost. No catch. Just a morning on the Grand Strand waterways with a man who knows them well, and a chance, for one day, to remember what peace feels like.

It is a small thing, in the way that all essential things are small. And it is changing lives.

The Water That Started It All

Rick Roberts owned his first boat at fourteen years old. This is the kind of fact that tells you most of what you need to know about a person. Not the ambition of it, though that is there too, but the pull — the instinctive understanding, even as a teenager, that his life would be organized around the water. He grew up in Central Florida learning the inshore fisheries the way some boys learn a neighborhood: by feel, by repetition, by the accumulated knowledge of ten thousand mornings.

His father was beside him for much of it. A Navy Commander who had given 26 years to his country and carried the invisible freight of that service home with him — the same freight so many veterans carry, the weight that has no name but lives in the body and shows up at odd hours. On the water, though, something softened. The tides and the redfish and the laughter between a father and his boy — these things could not be touched by whatever the Navy had left behind. The water was the one place it all let go.

When his father passed, Rick did not lose the lesson. He carried it forward. He earned his U.S. Coast Guard 100-Ton Master Captain’s License, built a career guiding charters, and brought hundreds of families to the same kind of mornings he had grown up inside. Every trip, he said, was sacred. Every catch, every shared silence, every moment of a child’s face when the line goes tight — all of it mattered. And beneath it, always, the sense that the water had given him something he owed to others.

Captain Rick Roberts: The Man Behind the Mission

Before he was a captain full time, Rick Roberts spent 26 years working for General Motors. He was good at it. He built relationships, he understood people, he showed up. But there is a difference between a career and a calling, and Rick knew the difference the way you know it in the body rather than in the mind. Eventually, he walked away from the automotive industry and walked toward the water permanently, and toward something he had not yet found the right name for.

He began offering free fishing trips to veterans and first responders. Not as a program. Not as a nonprofit. Just as Rick, with his boat, on a Tuesday morning, because he had watched his father manage the unseen wounds of military service and because he understood, in his bones, that the water could help in ways that bureaucracies and waiting rooms sometimes could not. The response was not modest. Each time he posted an opening, two hundred, three hundred requests would come in. Men and women describing PTSD. Isolation. The particular grief of losing someone in the line of duty. Families that had not laughed together in longer than anyone wanted to count. All of them reaching for one morning on the water.

Rick could take four at a time. Reading the other two hundred and ninety-six requests, knowing most would not fit on the boat, broke something in him. And then came the wheelchair-bound veterans — heroes who reached out hoping for a trip and found that his vessel could not safely bring them aboard. The thought of those men and women standing at the edge of the dock while the boat pulled away was, he has said, unbearable. It became the thing he could not leave alone.

And so Those Who Served Foundation was born — not from a grant or a strategic plan, but from the particular heartbreak of a good man standing at the intersection of what he could do and what still needed doing.

Those Who Served Foundation: What They Do

The foundation’s mission statement is clean and unadorned, the way true things tend to be: Casting lines. Building bonds. Honoring service. Based at 104 Cassina Drive in Longs, South Carolina, just minutes from the waterways that feed into the Grand Strand, Those Who Served Foundation provides free fishing charters to veterans and first responders — active, retired, and disabled — at no cost to the participants.

The trips are managed entirely. Veterans and first responders simply show up. Bait, rods, reels, snacks, drinks — all of it is provided. What the participants bring is themselves, and what they leave with is, by most accounts, something they did not know they were still capable of feeling. The foundation operates on the inshore waterways of the Grand Strand, where the fishing grounds and the quiet of the Carolina marsh offer a particular kind of restoration that is difficult to replicate anywhere else.

The foundation has already supported more than 600 veterans and their families. The goal, as the organization grows, is to expand the fleet — and critically, to acquire wheelchair-accessible vessels so that no veteran is ever turned away because the boat cannot accommodate their needs. A national chapter model is part of the longer vision, so that waterways throughout the country can become pathways to the same kind of healing that Captain Rick has been offering along the Carolina coast.

Local businesses have gathered around the mission as well. Supporters include Cricket Cove Marina, Royal Bliss Brewing, Voodoo Brewery in Myrtle Beach, Xtreme Adventures, and Mama Jean’s Home Cooking — a cross-section of the Grand Strand community showing up in the way communities do when something real is happening in their midst.

The Ripple Effect: Stories From the Water

There is a Marine Corps Corporal named Darren Law who went out on the water with Captain Rick. Darren is 100% disabled, a veteran who manages high anxiety, PTSD, and stage 4 metastatic melanoma — the kind of load that would crush most people. He was cautious about outdoor activities. The sun, for him, is always a consideration. But he went, and what he found on that boat was a man whose enthusiasm and care were so genuine that the anxiety loosened its grip almost immediately. Darren caught a shark that day. He said he would remember it forever. He later joined the foundation’s board of directors.

There is a Marine Corps Lance Corporal named Jesse Lind who described the experience as bringing him inner peace in what he called a chaotic life. Jesse caught the biggest fish of his life that morning. But more than that — he met another disabled veteran on the boat, and the two of them have continued a friendship since. One trip. Two men. A friendship that did not exist before the boat left the dock.

There is an Army Specialist named Larry Lee who came aboard knowing nothing about saltwater rods and reels and left having caught redfish, speckled trout, and stingrays with a patience Captain Rick extended without reservation. Larry called it an absolute blast. He said he would recommend it without hesitation to anyone.

These are not outlier stories. The foundation describes what it calls the ripple effect — the understanding that when a veteran finds peace, a family heals. When a first responder remembers what stillness feels like, the community around them is strengthened. The boat holds four people. But the water they carry home reaches further than that, always.

The People Who Show Up

What has grown around Captain Rick is a team that looks like America at its better angles. Mike “Mo” O’Grady, the foundation’s Vice President, is a recently retired outside sales professional with 25 years in the automotive and industrial lubricants industry whose father served in the Army during the Vietnam era and whose son served in the U.S. Navy. He came south in 2004 for the warm climate and the Southern hospitality, settled eventually in Conway, South Carolina, and brought to the foundation’s leadership a career’s worth of relationship-building and the particular devotion of a man with military service deep in his family’s marrow.

On the board sits Captain Dennis Sechler, a U.S. Navy veteran who holds his own 100-Ton Master’s License and spent 45 years with the State Law Enforcement Agency alongside two decades as a reserve officer with the North Myrtle Beach Police Department. Dennis now runs charters for the foundation, bringing the same steadiness to the water that he brought to decades of law enforcement work. There is also Patty Stroud, an Army veteran and Myrtle Beach area community advocate who coordinates fundraising events and bridges the foundation to the broader coastal community. Bob White, a combat medic from 1967 to 1969 who later led programs for disabled veterans and served in Project Healing Waters — a fly-fishing recovery initiative — brings to the board a lifetime of understanding what healing through the outdoors actually looks like from the inside.

They are different people from different decades and different branches and different corners of the country, gathered around a dock in Longs, South Carolina because they believe that veterans and first responders deserve to be out on the water, and that no one willing to show up should be turned away from the boat.

A Grand Strand Story

You cannot understand North Myrtle Beach without understanding its relationship to the water. The town did not grow up around a single industry or a single institution. It grew up around the ocean — around the way light falls on the Atlantic in the early morning, around the tidal creeks that run back through the salt marsh, around the particular pleasure of being in a place where the living is organized by tides and seasons and the temperature of the air coming off the sea. The Cherry Grove Beach neighborhood, the Ocean Drive district, the long stretches of Crescent Beach and Windy Hill — these are not just addresses. They are ways of being near something larger than whatever you carried with you when you arrived.

Those Who Served Foundation operates in the same waterways that make this stretch of the Carolina coast worth living near. The inshore fisheries around Longs and the Little River Inlet, the tidal flats that fan out behind the barrier islands, the marshes that pulse with redfish and speckled trout from spring through fall — this is Captain Rick’s territory, the water he knows the way he knows his own hands. When he takes a veteran out on a charter morning, the Grand Strand’s landscape is doing part of the work. The place itself is healing.

Visitors who come to rent an oceanfront home or an oceanfront condo along the North Myrtle Beach strand often feel it — that particular softening that happens when you have been near the ocean for a few days, when the salt air and the sound of the surf have done their quiet work on whatever stress you arrived with. Captain Rick and the foundation have simply made it their life’s work to offer that softening to the people who need it most.

How You Can Support the Mission

The foundation runs entirely on the generosity of people who understand what it means to say thank you in a way that actually costs something. Each charter trip — the fuel, the bait, the rods and reels, the snacks and drinks provided to every veteran who comes aboard — is funded by donations. Every dollar that comes in goes toward putting more men and women on the water, and toward the long-term goal of a fleet that includes wheelchair-accessible vessels so that no veteran in a chair ever has to watch a boat leave without them.

Donating is straightforward through the foundation’s website at thosewhoservedfoundation.org/donate. Veterans and first responders interested in requesting a trip, volunteers looking to get involved, and local businesses interested in becoming sponsors can reach the foundation at (854) 854-6104 or by email at donate@thosewhoservedfoundation.org. The foundation maintains an active presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok for those who want to follow the work as it unfolds.

If you are visiting North Myrtle Beach this season and you feel moved by what this organization is doing, you are not far from the dock where it all happens. You are not far from the water where veterans catch sharks and make friends and remember, some for the first time in years, what it feels like to be at peace. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.

Those Who Served Foundation — Key Facts

Frequently Asked Questions

Information in this article is drawn from the Those Who Served Foundation’s official website at thosewhoservedfoundation.org. Thomas Beach Vacations encourages readers to visit the foundation’s site, follow its social media channels, and consider supporting its work.