People ask us what "Ace" means. It's not a playing card and it's not a fighter pilot. It's the ACE Basin: the stretch of South Carolina Lowcountry where the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto rivers run together into St. Helena Sound, about an hour south of Charleston. It's where we grew up hunting ducks. It's also the name of the dog. This is the short version of what the place is and why it matters.
Three rivers, one estuary
Take the first letter of each river and you get ACE. The three rivers drain a big piece of the coastal plain and meet in a tangle of tidal marsh, old rice fields, cypress swamps, and pine flats. Depending on who's drawing the line, the Basin is somewhere between a 350,000-acre core and a 1.7-million-acre watershed. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calls it one of the largest undeveloped estuaries left on the Atlantic coast, and more than 300,000 acres of it are now permanently protected.
What makes it different from most coastal marsh is the rice. Two hundred years ago planters built miles of dikes and wooden "trunks" (tide gates) to flood and drain fields for rice. Rice quit being a business after the Civil War, but the dikes and trunks stayed, and today they're managed to flood those same fields for wintering waterfowl. Old infrastructure, new job.
How it got protected
In 1988 a group of private landowners, Ducks Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formed the ACE Basin Task Force. The idea was simple and a little unusual for the time: keep the place rural. Farming, timber, hunting, and fishing were fine. Resorts and industry were not. Most of the protection came through conservation easements on private land rather than government buying everything up, which is why the Basin still looks like a working landscape instead of a park.
The public pieces came along with it. The Ernest F. Hollings ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1990 and covers about 11,800 acres in two units, with the old Grove Plantation house as its headquarters. Bear Island WMA, roughly 12,000 acres at the end of Bennett's Point Road, and Donnelley WMA, about 8,000 acres near Green Pond, are the two state-managed areas most duck hunters know by name.
Why the ducks care
The ACE Basin sits on the Atlantic Flyway. When the weather pushes birds south, the managed impoundments here are some of the best wintering habitat between the Chesapeake and Florida. Wood ducks live here year-round. Teal show up first, then gadwall, wigeon, pintail, shovelers, ring-necks, and the occasional mallard and black duck. SCDNR's longtime waterfowl biologist Dean Harrigal put it plainly in a Ducks Unlimited piece: he hunts the ACE Basin because that's where the ducks are. He also warned about the big water and six-foot tides, which anyone who has run a jon boat down the Ashepoo in the dark can confirm.
Can you hunt it?
Yes, and that's the point. Bear Island and Donnelley run lottery hunts through the SCDNR waterfowl draw (applications open September 1 and close October 15 every year). The rivers themselves are public water, and plenty of people freelance the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto from public landings at Bennett's Point, Fields Point, Wimbee Creek, and others. We wrote a separate post on how the South Carolina public-land draw works if you want the details.
Why we named a clothing brand after it
Because it's home, and because the whole idea of the brand is the stuff you wear on the way to and from a place like this. Not waders. Not a technical shell. The trucker cap you throw on at the landing, the hoodie you wear to breakfast after, the tee that's fine at work on Monday. Clean, simple, no giant logos. Ace Waterfowl is a few regular guys from Charleston who hunt public water, and the ACE Basin is the water.
If you've never been, drive Bennett's Point Road to the end one afternoon in February and stand on the observation platform at Bear Island. You'll get it.