Well, we should have sensed something bad was about to happen when on the drive down to South Carolina we couldn’t seem to reach anyone.  We tried our guide several times by phone, but no answer and the same was the case with the campground.

It turned out the posted Garmin GPS address for the campground simply doesn’t exist.  But, we were in luck, or so we thought.  The campground listed their Lat/Lon coordinates which we plugged in.  Unfortunately when we approached Elloree, SC the coordinates lead us to the dead end of an unimproved dirt road at the edge of a bean field – it reminded us to much of a CSI scene that we didn’t want to be a part of.

That’s about the time my brother in Kansas called to say, “Are you in trouble?  I’m watching you on the LiveViewGPS and you’ve made three u-turns in the past 5 minutes.  We were as lost as you can get.  We were in the middle of nowhere.  We’ve all been there before but unfortunately it never helps the next time.  An hour later we finally saw a light and to our amazement a person.  They couldn’t explain how to get where we were going.  I thought, “of course not, no one really knows how to tell get out of nowhere”.  They told us to just follow them.  10 minutes later we arrived at the campground.  Again, no lights, no people, you are on your own.  Fortunately we spotted a site and declared Victory!

At 6AM we found ourselves still alone.  Where was our guide?  Multiple phone calls and no answer. At 6:30AM we decided it was time to put Operation FoldCat into action.  We quickly unloaded our inflatable Foldcat boat from SeaEagle and began to load it for catfishing.  We thought we would just grab some bait from a local tackle shop and we would be fine.  By 7:30AM we had confirmed that everything is closed on Monday’s in Elloree, SC and we were left to more primitive attempts at bait.  Right - the refrigerator.  Our options were limited: Grilled Chicken, Mozzarella Cheese Sticks, and Nestle Tollhouse Cookie dough.  I’ve caught a lot of catfish on hot dogs in the past so I figured why not.

Several hours later we were burned out.  We did have one hit on the grilled chicken but no fish.  The sight of the day was a 4 foot long alligator gar that surfaced next to our boat – something Taylor had never seen before so it wasn’t a total loss.

We were anxious to get back on the road and head south to Florida for our try at a Tarpon with world renowned guide Earl Waters of Crystal River. FL.