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Wadmalaw Scout camp offers fun, brings back memories
By ANDY BRACK, publisherpermalink
JULY 18, 2011 -- A visit last week to a Wadmalaw Island camp run by the Boy Scouts' Coastal Carolina Council was a trip down memory lane.
Thirty five years ago as a 15-year-old, I served as a counselor at a brother camp in the north Georgia mountains. That entailed sleeping in a tent for six weeks (on a cot with a wooden pallet floor), highly- structured days that began and ended with bugle sounds, sweating with mosquitoes, and teaching campers about knots, cooking, camping and First Aid.
It's much the same today at Camp Ho Non Wah along the Bohicket River just over 20 miles southwest of downtown Charleston. Campers (and counselors) still sweat in the heat, crowd their way into the dining hall for family-style meals and enjoy outdoor activities -- everything from long hikes and shooting sports to boating and all sorts of aquatics.
Camp Ho Non Way, which translates to "land between the waters," handles about 350 Scouts and leaders a week -- and had its largest week in 40 years earlier this summer with 380 guests. Its facilities are outstanding -- eight individual campsites, fixed camping huts, activity shelters, a half-size Olympic pool, boat docks for fishing and boating, a non-denominational outdoor chapel overlooking the Fickling Creek marsh, a nature center and a trading post. There's even an office where Scouts can learn how to be Ham radio operators.
It is a remarkable place, observed Scout Executive Legare Clement, a hometown Eagle Scout from Troop 50 at St. Philip's Episcopal Church.
"I can remember coming out here as a kid and thinking it was way out in the country," he recalled.
Eleven-year-old Nick Fanchette of Walterboro's Troop 648 said he was having a blast during his first visit to Camp Ho Non Wah as a Boy Scout. The Tenderfoot, who spent the week working on merit badges for First Aid, nature, cooking and swimming, said he most enjoyed "the freedom to be able to roam around."
For 54-year-old Gary Mocarski of Murrells Inlet, leader for Troop 396, Camp Ho Non Wah is the best camp offered by the scouting organization.
"You don't get this many aquatics at any other Scout camp," said Mocarski, former head of the state Fire Marshals Association. "I block out my vacation time to come here."
Because of the array of waterfront offerings, Clement observed, "This is going to be a destination camp in the future," adding that scouts come from Pennsylvania to Florida to spend a week at the 180-acre camp in rural Charleston County.
Camp Director James Barton, who said the 60 members of the staff served 1,568 campers over the summer, has a countdown already set for the start of a winter week of camp just after Christmas. That's how much he loves the place. As do hundreds of boys every year.
Camp Ho Non Wah is an unheralded Lowcountry gem. If you don't have your kids or grandchildren in scouting (there are options for girls too), you should check it out. Why? Because if they have a chance to enjoy this camp, they'll remember it for the rest of their lives.