♪ What is a fish camp?

A fish camp is somewhere you can go and spend the night, be it in your camper or into a room or a cabin, and just bring your friends, bring your family.

Wake up each morning your boat's right there in front of your cabin.

fish camp is just a good place to relax and go fishing and not worry about the cares of everyday life.

I'm Kevin Davis, co-owner of Black's Camp in Cross, South Carolina on the Santee Cooper lakes.

♪ Black's Camp has been here since 1951.

It was one of the first fish camps to be built on the Santee Cooper lakes.

It was started by the Blackmon family.

Here at Black's Camp we have cabins for rent, apartments, hotel rooms, full service restaurant, live bait, fishing tackle, gasoline, oil, everything you need to go fishing.

restaurant and blacks camp you can get a really good home cooked meal.

Nothing's pre-prepared.

Everything's cooked to order and really good ground beef for the cheese burgers, fresh seafood, fresh salads, but everything's cooked to order.

If South Carolina were one dish, I know my favorite meal here at Black's Camp and I've eaten many meals here.

My favorite meal is a catfish sandwich with a cup of catfish stew.

Catfish stew is like a fish soup with a lot of fat back in it, so the pork is what makes it taste real good.

Then we take the belly meat from a catfish which is not good to fry, but it's really good in catfish stew.

It breaks down a whole lot more than the filet would.

Catfish stew got the belly meat from the catfish, potatoes, ketchup, onions.

I don't know how to describe it, other than to say, it's delicious.

Here in the restaurant, we have a lot of local people, regulars that come just about everyday to eat, but then the majority of our business is from out of town.

These lakes are so famous.

We've had people from California to Florida to Maine.

We've had some from China, Japan.

They're really well known reservoirs and people come from all over the place to go fishing here and to eat here.

♪ The Santee Cooper lakes are man made lakes.

They were dammed up and flooded in the early 40s, right after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

They are excellent fisheries, one of the best in the nation, because there's many different types of fish habitats.

You got rocks, stumps, drop offs, dykes, deep water, shallow water, sharp drop offs.

So, really just a fisherman's paradise.

Not much development on the Santee Cooper lakes, and to me that's what makes these lakes so special.

Very rural, a lot of thousands of acres of woods and the hunting is very good too, but just a real laid back rural area and when you come to one of these fish camps it's almost like you're stepping back into the 50s or 60s, because it's just so relaxed and people aren't in a rush and that's what I love about this area.

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