What Southport is
It is a working river town that happens to be beautiful, which is a different thing from a beautiful town that works at it. It sits where the Cape Fear meets the Atlantic, which made it a pilot town (the men who took ships over the bar lived here) and the waterfront still has that shape: boats that go out to work, a few that go out for fun, and a park where the river is wide enough to feel like weather.
The whole center is walkable in an afternoon. Park once, near the waterfront or on one of the side streets off Howe, and do not get back in the car until you leave.
The two ferries
Southport to Fort Fisher: the one that takes your car
This is a North Carolina Department of Transportation vehicle ferry across the mouth of the river. You drive on, get out, stand at the rail, and come off on the Fort Fisher side within walking distance of the North Carolina Aquarium and the Fort Fisher State Historic Site. As a way of reaching an aquarium it is hard to beat.
Two pieces of advice. Check the current schedule and tolls with NCDOT before you plan around it: the state has been adjusting both, and departures differ between the spring, summer and winter timetables. And if you want to take something large across, go on a weekday and go early; the ferry does carry oversize vehicles at a higher toll, but the space is finite and in summer it fills.
Southport to Bald Head Island: the one that absolutely does not
The Bald Head Island ferry leaves from Deep Point Marina at 1301 Ferry Road, about five minutes from the center of Southport, and the crossing takes roughly twenty minutes. It is passengers only. There are no private cars on Bald Head Island. You get around by tram, golf cart, bicycle or on foot, and the effect of that on the noise level is the first thing everybody notices.
Parking at Deep Point is paid, around thirteen dollars a day in the general lot. On the island there is Old Baldy, the oldest standing lighthouse in North Carolina, a conservancy with a turtle program, fourteen miles of beach and a maritime forest you can walk through. It makes a very good day and a slightly expensive one; go knowing that.
What to do between boats
- The Fort Johnston Museum and Visitor Center. Small, free, and run by people who know the place. Start here and take the film-location map.
- The waterfront walk. Fifteen minutes end to end, with the pilot boats on one side and the river on the other.
- Howe Street. Antiques, a bookshop or two, and the Southport Coffee Co. and Kitchen if the morning needs rescuing.
- Price’s Creek Lighthouse, which you cannot visit but can see very clearly from the Fort Fisher ferry, the last of its kind on the river.
- Brunswick Little Theatre, if something is on.
Eating
The names people round here say without thinking are the Provision Company, Oliver’s on the Cape Fear, Edgewater 122 and Fishy Fishy Cafe. The Provision Company is the one to do at lunchtime on the water with a basket of something fried and a view of the boats; it is the most Southport hour available.
The Fourth of July, and a warning
Southport’s North Carolina Fourth of July Festival is the state’s official one, it runs for the best part of a week, and it brings somewhere in the region of forty to fifty thousand people into a town of three thousand. It is genuinely good, and it is the single tightest week of our year for bookings. If you want to be here for it, book early, not in June.
Getting there from the campground
About twenty minutes from 1600 George II Highway SE in Bolivia, by way of NC-211 and NC-87. It is the easiest day trip we have: you can go in for breakfast, walk the town, take a ferry, and still be back in time for a fire at your own pit.
Twenty minutes from the waterfront
Forty acres of loblolly pine, full-hookup RV sites and cabins, and a fire pit at every one of them for afterwards.