Murrells Inlet occupies eighteen miles of tidal creeks and salt marsh that form the northern shoulder of Winyah Bay, a coastal estuary system older than the Santee rice plantations that once lined its freshwater tributaries. The inlet's name traces to a 1730s land grant issued to a Charleston merchant whose shipping operation used the protected channels as a hurricane refuge. By the 1930s, the inlet had become the Carolina coast's most concentrated shrimping port, and the wooden trawlers that still moor along its main channel represent one of the Southeast's last working fleets operating inside an urban tourism corridor. Today the inlet functions as both a commercial waterway and a recreational gateway to the Waccamaw River delta. The marshy lowlands that frame its eastern shore support dense populations of bottlenose dolphins, which follow mullet schools through the shallow inlets during the warmer months. Brown pelicans and great blue herons use the spartina grass islands as nesting grounds, and the exposed oyster beds at low tide draw wading birds in numbers that can exceed two hundred individuals per acre. The sunset hours bring a tidal shift that pulls cooler Atlantic water into the marsh channels, often triggering surface feeding by dolphins and creating the conditions that make evening wildlife observation particularly reliable. The sunset dinner cruise Murrells Inlet experience centers on narrated tours that depart from the U.S. 17 Business marina corridor, a half-mile stretch of deep-water docks that replaced the inlet's original fish houses in the 1980s. Most operators use pontoon vessels or shallow-draft catamarans capable of navigating the one-meter-deep secondary channels where dolphins and marsh birds concentrate. Dinner service aboard these cruises typically includes regional preparations—steamed Carolina shrimp, she-crab soup, fried oysters—sourced from the inlet's own commercial fleet. The routes trace the historic Waccamaw Neck, passing the remains of nineteenth-century rice trunk gates and the shell middens left by Waccamaw and Winyah peoples who harvested the estuary's oyster beds for more than three thousand years. As the sun drops below the pine ridge that marks the inland boundary of the coastal plain, the marsh grass takes on the copper and violet tones that have made this stretch of the Carolina shore a subject for plein-air painters since the 1920s.