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.