Daufuskie Island Tours: Gullah History by Boat and Golf Cart

Outside Hilton Head runs the History & Artisans Excursion from its kiosk at Shelter Cove Marina. It lasts about four and a half hours: the boat across, then a golf-cart tour with a naturalist and historian to First Union African Baptist Church and its praise house, the Mary Field School, the Bloody Point Lighthouse and the artists’ studios, including The Iron Fish. It also runs the same trip privately for up to 16 people, Monday to Saturday all year, and a private Taste of Daufuskie trip that ends with a meal outdoors at the Old Daufuskie Crab Company.

Two shorter boat trips include time on Daufuskie. Lowcountry Watersports’ two-hour dolphin trip from Palmetto Bay Marina stops on the island, and Island Life’s three-hour beachcombing trip leaves the dock behind the Old Oyster Factory on Broad Creek. For more trips on the water from Hilton Head, see our Hilton Head tours guide.

A guided trip from Hilton Head takes about four hours, and the boat ride is part of it; the tour carries on by golf cart once you land. Dress for the weather and bring water, snacks and sunscreen, as Outside Hilton Head asks; there is only a small store near where its boat lands. Parking at Shelter Cove Marina fills up in summer, so arrive early.

Tours stay on the public side of the island. Haig Point and Melrose are gated private communities, and Haig Point’s lighthouse and golf course are for its members and their guests. To get across without a tour, see every boat and its times on our Daufuskie Island ferry page.

If you would rather take the public ferry and meet a guide on Daufuskie, two island companies run tours. Sallie Ann Robinson grew up on the island, was taught by Pat Conroy at the Mary Field School, and writes about Gullah cooking; her three-hour tour meets visitors at the Melrose dock, where the public ferry lands, and your ferry ticket is separate. Explore Daufuskie runs guided tours of the island’s history and culture as well as boat trips, and rents carts if you want to carry on alone afterwards.

The guided tours share most of their stops, in the old Gullah settlements in the middle of the island. First Union African Baptist Church, built in 1884, still holds services, with a replica praise house behind it. Down the road is the two-room Mary Field School, where Pat Conroy taught in 1969 and 1970 and found the story for The Water Is Wide. Our Daufuskie Island history page tells that story and lists the other sites.

At the south end is the Bloody Point Lighthouse, and the tours stop at artists’ studios on the way, among them The Iron Fish, where Chase Allen makes fish and mermaids from steel. The studios are on our Daufuskie Island shopping page.

You can see the same places on your own. Take a boat across, rent a cart from one of the Daufuskie Island golf cart rentals, and follow the Daufuskie Island Historical Foundation’s self-guided trail of historic sites; its museum is on Old Haig Point Road. Daufuskie Adventures sells a round-trip boat from Hilton Head for a day on the island and can add a guide. A self-guided day costs less and runs to your own clock; a guided one tells you what you are looking at.