St Augustine, FL to Fernandina Beach, FL
We were away from St Augustine around 7:00 AM as we were expecting a long day on the water. We really enjoyed the view of the city and the Castillo de San Marcos fort from the water. The plan for the day was to go to Cumberland Island, with a planned stop on the way at Port Consolidated LTD in Fernadina Beach to fuel up. This is a great fuelling stop just before Georgia because if you're leaving Florida you don't have to pay the Florida tax on the fuel that is charged to pleasure boaters.
We were fuelling up and some Gold Loopers from Destination pulled in behind us. We had a lengthy discussion with them about the weather, and safe options to stay, as a nasty storm was moving in and fuelling our boat was taking much longer than expected. We finally decided to take a mooring ball right where we were in Fernadina Beach, only 5 miles short of Cumberland. The weather moved in a couple of hours later. It stormed on and off for the rest of the day with severe thunderstorms and golf ball sized hail predicted. We kept a close eye on the radar while we listened to the thunder booming nearby to the north of us, complete with a lightning show. As we watched the radar, somehow the storm cell divided into two and passed to the north and south of us. That was a lucky break! The worst of the storm was over by 10:00 PM and we had a good night's sleep.
Fernandina Beach, FL to Cumberland Island, GA
The next morning we made a very short run to Cumberland Island. We had made it to Georgia! Our boat had been in either Florida or Bahamas for the last five months. Georgia was a definite sign that we were moving north. This was our second venture into Georgia on our Loop. You may recall that on our side trip to Chattanooga we took the Chattanooga Choo-Choo to a small community that is half in Tennessee and half in Georgia. This visit to Georgia would be longer, but still only a week.
For the first time since the Bahamas, we got our dinghy down and we dinghied to shore for a hike on Cumberland Island. We tied to a dock, found a QR code on a sign to pay our park fees, and found a Ranger building for trail information. We checked out the very scary sign on Georgia snakes, got our bearings, and headed out for the Dungeness Ruins. The walk toward the ruins was through a very long archway of old oak trees draped in Spanish Moss. It
was so beautiful! When we got to the ruins, we downloaded an audio tour on our phones which was very well done and made for an interesting and free tour. The land was first granted to Nathanael Greene as payment for his military service in the American Revolution. He and his wife Catherine Greene wanted to settle there with their five children, but Nathanael passed away before they managed to do anything with the land. Then Catherine married her plantation manager and children's former tutor, Phineas Miller, and built Dungeness. Unfortunately, it burnt down and then sat empty for about 15 years before Thomas and Lucy Carnegie bought it. The Carnegies started building Dungeness Mansion in 1882 out of coquina and brick so it was more substantial. Sadly, Thomas Carnegie died in 1886, just a year after completion of the mansion. His wife Lucy was a strong and active force and raised their nine children there. She also liked to entertain a lot and built a Recreation and Pool House in 1990 to host her parties. At one time there were 200 slaves on the island. In later years, Lucy had a staff of about 100. There were other homes on the estate for four of her adult children, a recreation area, a pergola, staff residences, a carriage house, and other work buildings. Dungeness Mansion was abandoned in 1924. Then in 1959 it appears that poachers set it on fire. The lands were protected until the death of her last child in the early 1960's and then the Carnegie family donated the grounds to the National Park Service,
leaving their cattle, pigs and horses to roam free. Since then, the cattle have been removed due to overgrazing, and the pigs have been culled due to endangering the sea turtle population. We saw lots of wild horses, a couple of armadillos, a wild turkey, and lots of birds. The hike back to our dinghy was very long and hot!
Back on the boat, we tried to watch two rocket launches. Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to see the first launch and the second one was aborted. We figured that would be our last opportunity to see a launch.
Cumberland Island to Jekyll Island Harbor Marina
It was beautifully still the next morning. We had been watching a weather window on Saturday for a few days to cross the Saint Andrew Sound. We rechecked our forecasts and decided that it was still good to go as long as we were across before 2:00 PM. Embarrassingly, we had not checked the weather beyond that afternoon. As we were leaving, a boat hailed us to ask where we were going to get out of the winds. The winds were predicted to be in the high 20s or low 30s that night with gusts into the low 40s. Yikes!
We were so focused on finding good conditions to cross the Sound that we missed the upcoming winds. That was a lesson for us to always be aware of the long-range forecast. We were lucky that we had reservations at a marina! Shortly after leaving Cumberland Island we passed Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base. The base is huge and the structure we could see in the adjacent photo is used for docking submarines.
We arrived at Jekyll Island in time for lunch. We could not believe how nice it was crossing the Saint Andrew Sound. It was hard to believe that the Sound was so exposed to the Atlantic. As we were crossing the Sound, we saw four shrimp boats so we decided we needed to have fresh shrimp while we were there. It turned out that the best place to get fresh shrimp was right at Zachry's at the marina. Dining at Zachry's was in our near future! We asked about using a golf cart for the afternoon but they were out so we used our bikes instead. We had a great ride through all the old historic homes and then we went to the northeast end of the island to Driftwood Beach. That was the most unexpected sight!
Instead of driftwood, it's more like a forest of long dead trees, most of which have toppled over. Just as we arrived we got a severe weather alert. We figured that we had a half hour before we were hit with a nasty storm so we snapped a few quick photos and left. We had already gone 10.5 km on our bikes and our battery range was 20 km. At about 18.5 km Cam’s battery was dead while Heather still had two bars of power. We had been using top speeds to get back before the storm arrived and Cam ended up on pure pedal power. We got back to the marina and decided that the storm was still an hour or more away!
We joined Dave and Sonia from Crew Lounge at Zachry's for dinner that night. We had travelled with them from Nassau to Chub Cay but we really hadn’t gotten to know them. We had an enjoyable evening of swapping stories on the restaurant's patio. We had seen a light rain but no storm in the forecast for the evening, however, Mother Nature wanted to prove that she was still in charge. So, just as we were finishing our dinner, the winds picked up with a gust front so we quickly paid our bills and headed back to the boat for a windy night.
It calmed down a bit overnight so sleeping wasn't difficult but it picked up pretty strong on Sunday. We put out nine fenders on the port side of the boat as the winds and waves were hitting us hard on the starboard and the waves were splashing over the docks between the boats. We decided that it would be a day for chores. Cam changed the oil and we got four loads of laundry done. Heather worked on
the blog for a while but started feeling seasick so she went for a walk. There were three other folks out walking because they felt seasick too! Heather put on some Sea Bands and put MotionEase behind her ears but she still didn’t want to be on the boat so we took some drinks with us and sat by the pool. Fortunately, it calmed down enough to have dinner on the boat. We were lucky enough to catch another rocket launch that evening. This one was the sixth launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy. It was carrying three satellites to distant geostationary orbit. Cool!
On Monday, some people left but we didn't like the sea conditions and decided to stay another day. We finally got to borrow the golf cart. We decided to explore Driftwood Beach again and really enjoyed our walk. The beach is huge! One little tree had been decorated with sea shells by all the tourists but it looked like petals. We saw several marooned and dead jellyfish left behind when the tide receded. We crossed the island through a campground and came across a ruin called Horton House, built of tabby in the late 1700s. Tabby is extremely durable. It is made from burned oyster shells which creates lime. Then the lime is mixed with sand, crushed shells, and water and poured into forms to make blocks. Horton was the first to settle on the island. Across from that was the cemetery for the later DuBignon family who were the second family to settle on the island.
We returned the golf cart, did a little cleaning on the boat, had lunch, and then got the bikes down again. This time we went to the little shopping district, where Heather picked out a mug for Cam’s birthday. Then we biked to the Mosaic Museum and took a Trolley Tour through the Jekyll Island Club. This was an elitist club/getaway for the elite rich. At one time they said one-sixth of the world's wealth resided there. It included the Pulitzers, Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and more. They built the club, but they were outgrowing that so the Morgans built the first 6-unit condo. After that there were 14 or 16 separate cottages built of which 11 remain. We got to tour Indian Mound Cottage also known as Rockefeller Cottage. The whole area was mostly deserted during World War II and the government seized it for back taxes after the war ended. We toured the museum before biking back to the boat.
When we got back to the boat it was windier than it had been on Sunday! So we secured the bikes and then went back to Zachry's for dinner to let the winds calm down. We were lucky to enjoy another meal of fresh shrimp. Our nine fenders worked very hard at this Marina. We even blew one fender clip and had to replace a line!
Jekyll Island, GA to Kilkenny Marina
Finally, the winds settled down and we left the next morning at 7:05 AM, just after high tide. The water was pretty shallow in our first section. We saw nine feet at one point. I wouldn't want to do that section at low tide. Soon afterwards the water was wide and deep enough so we went at speed, changing our destination time from 4:00 PM to 2:00 PM. We had to cross four sounds today. St Simons Sound was very well protected. The next was Doboy Sound and the winds were in the right direction for an easy crossing. The third was Sapelo Sound. The winds had picked up to about 12 to 13 knots out of the west so the waves were a little over one foot and it was very manageable. The fourth was St Catherine’s Sound. By then the winds were picking up and there were white caps. The waves were close to 1.5 feet and we were taking them on the beam for a while but it wasn't too bad. We learned afterwards that a boat had sunk there the day before!
We arrived at Kilkenny Marina shortly after 2:00 PM. Suddenly, on our final approach, we were out of the wind, and the calm and peace returned for a perfect docking. We scrubbed the boat for well over an hour as it was thoroughly coated in salt. Then we enjoyed docktails at a picnic table on shore with Over ‘N Out and Nine Lives. We were exhausted!
Click on the photos below to view the images in slideshow mode. You can also watch our video on this stretch of our Loop. Coming up next, we go through Hell and arrive in Savannah, Georgia.
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