The Myrtle Beach cameras worth opening, from the boardwalk to Cherry Grove
At 21:05 local time on 2026-10-18 the Myrtle Beach volleyball camera had the boardwalk to itself. String lights over the empty tables outside Dirty Don's, the palmettos lit from below, the SkyWheel standing lit at the top left of the frame, and past the railing nothing at all, because the Atlantic after dark is just black. Empty decking sounds like a poor frame. It is the best one that camera gives you all day, and the reason is that at nine at night you can see the thing people actually go to the boardwalk for, which is the lights.
Every webcam page for this stretch of coast is a grid of thumbnails. What none of them tell you is which camera is pointed at what, how old the picture is when it reaches you, and what hour is worth setting aside. So I opened them this morning and wrote it down. There are 117 live cameras within 40 km of the boardwalk, counted from the live set on our Myrtle Beach page at 01:20 UTC on 2026-10-19, and the great majority are South Carolina DOT cameras watching US 17 back up. The handful below are the ones I looked at frame by frame.
The four that are awake at nine at night
The volleyball camera is live video rather than a still, so you watch it rather than reload it. It sits high and looks along the decking, with the railing and the palmettos to the right. The SkyWheel is in frame but small. You get the boardwalk itself, which is the point.
For the wheel, the one you want is SkyWheel Ocean Vista. At 21:16 on 2026-10-18 it showed the wheel lit at the left edge, Ocean Boulevard running away inland as a double line of lights, and at the right two ride towers lit in zigzag green and red the whole height of the frame. There is a haze over the lens, so on a damp night every light in the picture has a halo on it. Honest answer: it makes the frame worse and the view better.
Two more are worth the tab after dark. WonderWorks points at the upside down building at Broadway at the Beach, lit pink, with the boardwalk and the lagoon beside it and a blue ice cream kiosk in the near corner, which is a long way from the ocean and worth knowing before you open it expecting sand. The Boathouse looks over picnic tables under two bays of festoon lighting to the Intracoastal Waterway, with a bridge lit blue in the distance and the stage trusses standing empty on the left.
What the clock in the corner tells you
Three of these cameras burn their own timestamp into the picture, which is the only honest way to tell how fresh a frame is.
- The Myrtle Beach Airport camera is a WFXB-TV sky camera, and its frame was stamped 2026/10/18 21:05:23 when I pulled it at 01:16:56 UTC, which is 11 minutes and 33 seconds old. It shows the whole airfield at night as a long low line of approach and apron lights, with an aircraft parked in silhouette at the bottom of the frame and most of the picture given over to sky.
- Boulineaus at Cherry Grove is the freshest of the set. Its upstream snapshot was last modified at 01:15:29 UTC when I fetched it at 01:20:28, five minutes old, and it is the identical 14,899 bytes our own page serves. It does not show the beach. It looks down on the junction outside the store, with the traffic lights red, one car at the line and the road wet.
- North Myrtle Beach is the Prince Resort camera at Cherry Grove Pier and it gives you real surf, two or three lines of it breaking white, with the pier running out as a black spine and its end light burnt right out. Its clock reads about an hour behind: the frame our page served at 01:16:56 UTC was stamped 20:07:13 and the upstream copy at 01:20:43 was stamped 20:17:22. Judge that one by the swell and not by the number.
Two oceanfront cameras go properly dark. The Courtyard Oceanfront and Marriott's OceanWatch both returned a near black frame tonight with two faint white threads of surf across the bottom and nothing else. They are unlit cameras pointed at an unlit sea, which is exactly what they should be, and they come back at first light. One more to set expectations: RipTydz is inside the restaurant, looking down a bar with the football on six screens and the chairs still out, not a beach view at all.
The hour to pick this week
The Grand Strand faces east, so everything oceanfront here is a sunrise camera and nothing is a sunset camera. On 2026-10-19 the US Naval Observatory puts civil twilight at Myrtle Beach at 06:58 and sunrise at 07:24, with the sun setting behind the town at 18:37.
Line that up against the water. NOAA's Springmaid Pier gauge predicts low water of 1.67 ft at 08:08 and the day's high of 5.13 ft at 14:47. Low tide lands 44 minutes after sunrise. That is the widest sand of the day arriving in the best light of the day, and on the Prince Resort camera it is the difference between surf under the pier and a hundred metres of open beach in front of it. The same gauge read a sea temperature of 72.5 F at 21:12 on 2026-10-18, which is why there are still people in the water in the middle of October.
We re-fetch every camera on the site on a nightly check, and the ones that stop returning a picture drop out of the live list rather than sitting there as a dead thumbnail. These nine stay on it through the winter.
The thing I still want for this coast is a camera on one of the piers looking back down the beach. The piers are the obvious place to put one, and every public frame I can find along this coast points out to sea instead. If you know of one that turns round, tell me and I will add it.