About Me
Before retiring from DuPont, I was a tournament bass Fisherman for over 25 years. My wife and I had decided to retire on a lake somewhere in the Carolinas or Virginia. We chose Lake Murray, South Carolina because it had excellent bass fishing, and my wife is from Columbia, SC, so we would be near all my outlaws and in-laws.
We started looking at lakefront property in 1989. My wife spent a week with a realtor but came home (Wilmington, DE) with no hot leads. She said,” Everything she liked, we could not afford; and everything we could afford, she didn’t like.”
In the next 10 years, I fished tournaments in at least 10 different states. I retired from DuPont and formed my own consulting company. I became much more serious about buying lakefront property. In February 1999, I was at Lake Murray for a BASS tournament. I took a day off from fishing and spent a day with a realtor. The lake was drawn down ten feet for aquatic weed control, so it was easy to tell if a property had “year-round water.” We had completed a day of looking at many properties, and I was beginning to understand my wife’s frustration. We were on our way back to the realtor’s office, and she got a call on her cell phone. A property had come back on the market, and we were about ¼ mile from it.
When we got to the property, it was almost dark. I told the realtor I did not need to look inside until I knew if the dock had water. The dock did have enough water to float my bass boat, so I wanted to make an offer. The next day, my offer was accepted, and I was the owner of what I now call Burke’s Landing.
I became friends with Dot, my next-door neighbor. Dot was about the same age as my mother-in-law, and they became good friends. My consulting business was doing very well, and I kept thinking of the boat I had at my property on Lake Murray, and the fishing I was missing. I decided I could run my business from anywhere that had telephone service, internet, and an airport. Columbia had an airport, and I had telephone service and dial-up internet at the lake.
In 2000, Dot made the decision to move to Newberry, and I was fortunate enough to be able to purchase her property. I bought Dot’s property in July 2000 and, in 2001, decided to rent it as a vacation rental.
In 2003, when they drew the lake down fifteen feet to build the second dam, the striper (striped bass) fishing was great! I just about quit fishing for largemouth bass and switched to striper fishing. For the past several years, I have been almost exclusively fishing for striped bass. I have won some catfishing tournaments along with the striper tournaments, and I still enjoy catching a mess of white perch.
In 2005, my wife retired, and we sold our home in Delaware and bought another lakefront property. We began renting Burke’s Landing as a vacation rental also. Over the years, we have had several hundred guests in our properties. Several have purchased lakefront property and are now permanent lake residents. In the process, we have made many new friends.