How the company helps women and girls take the helm
The marsh doesn’t ask permission; it spreads and breathes and pulls the tide in and out on its own schedule, indifferent to whoever stands at the helm. Courtney Hutson, the founder of Golden Girls Outdoors, has known this since she was a girl, kayaking out to a then-vacant Daniel Island with her father, combing the pluff mud for shark teeth.
Her father’s Navy career moved the family 11 times before Hutson turned 11, eventually landing in Mount Pleasant, where she met her now-husband, Jim Hutson, a local fishing guide. They started dating the summer after their senior year of high school, and the water was their sanctuary. “All day, every day, we were on the boat, exploring, camping, fishing,” she recalls.
At the College of Charleston, Hutson received a degree in biology and joined Barrier Island Ecotours as an intern and then a naturalist and captain for 16 years, earning her US Coast Guard master captain’s license. Hutson guided thousands of children and adults through the salt marsh, teaching them that the marsh itself is infrastructure, acting as a natural sponge between each storm and every home behind it. “It showed me how irreplaceable our ecosystem is,” she explains, “and even locals loved learning new things on our excursions.”
After a documentary aired about Mallory Beach, a teenage girl killed in a drunken boating accident off Beaufort in 2019, Hutson thought immediately of her own daughters. “I felt a huge shift,” she said. “I needed to help women.” In August 2024, she launched Golden Girls Outdoors, offering boating training specifically for girls and women.
From the Isle of Palms Marina, aboard her 16-foot SilverKing skiff, Hutson runs three-hour private lessons for females from age 11 and up. Boating 101 covers navigation, safety, and boat handling, while Boating 102 focuses on anchoring and docking. Her nonnegotiable lesson is the emergency cutoff switch: Wear it every time, no exceptions. “Having a designated driver on a boat is as important as it is in a car,” she adds.
According to the US Coast Guard, 69 percent of boating deaths in 2024 involved operators with no education or experience, with alcohol, inexperience, inattention, and excessive speed topping the list of contributing factors.
So far, Hutson has taught more than 120 students. “Every single one of them walks away with a smile,” she says. “They’re so excited to have the autonomy to take their family out whenever, to be an active participant instead of a passenger princess.”
The ripples have reached further than Hutson planned. At a recent women’s coastal skills workshop with Barrier Island Ecotours, she watched her 12-year-old daughter, Wren, teach a group of women how to cast a fishing rod. The crowd broke into applause. Someone called out, “Wren for president!” And for a moment, standing in the salt air with her daughter at the water’s edge, Hutson felt the full weight of what she had built.
By the Numbers
