Two days of storms swept the world clean. Everything sparkles. The sky is so deep and blue you can almost see stars, the water is a galaxy of tiny suns. I break out a gator for both the chill and the bright burn. By the time we motor out of Wahoo River into a rising sun, a southwest wind comes up from the Atlantic. We raise canvas, cut the motor, and will sail all day long.
Beyond the dividings of St. Catherines Island, the marshes open up wide. Tight creeks relax into broad flat sounds and bays with clear air and easy tacking in the few places we need to. It’s glorious easy cruising. All day we slide through a vast watery wilderness – no docks, no marinas, no hotels or houses. Just sawgrass prairies, palmetto hammocks, and pine forests. We even have the tide with us, riding the current from one island to the next like a magic carpet.
The destination is a small marina on the south end of Skidaway Island. Late morning I get a text message from Saudi Arabia. It’s from my daughter and son-in-law, both teachers there. They have friends in Amsterdam, who happen to be sailors, who happen to be following our progress, and happen to have family on Skidaway Island. The message includes a phone number and says to send our ETA to it. A short time later we have an invitation for dinner at “the club”, from perfect strangers who are several degrees of separation from anyone we know. Marvelous! Now we have something else to look forward to, if we get there in time.
This marina is the smallest yet, more like a trading post stuck out here on the tip of St. Simons Island. But we can get diesel and ice, use the facilities. Get some local knowledge from the clerk. And a weather report.
As we fuel up, a young entrepreneur pulls up in a skiff. He’s a fellow son of the South. I recognize him immediately. He swaggers up, all animated in camo and a Skoal cap, and launches into conversation without a greeting, just “Hey, you guys know sailboats, right?” He’s local. I speak his language.
Islands in the marsh called “hammocks”
He has noticed all the wrecks scattered around his watery neighborhood. They’re like Easter Eggs dropped in the tall grass of his lawn. Though he’s not familiar with these seafaring craft from distant lands, he perceives (correctly) they represent significant reservoirs of capital. Seems a shame for them to go to waste, just abandoned by their owners, folks who can afford insurance policies, from northern corporations with no interest in retrieving their investment.
“Come to think of it, nobody owns them! The captains sold their boats to insurance companies, and got paid! So they don’t own them anymore! The insurance companies don’t want boats, they just pay good money to leave them out there and rot! Maybe what they’re REALLY buying is Captains, not boats! That would explain it, right?. Think about it!”
We’ve had beautiful weather for 8 days and 150 miles, all the way from Daytona. That will change today.
Doug returned from Brunswick with a bounce in his step and a smile on his face. He finally found that rarest of treasures: a new phone case. He has bags with enough provisions to last several days. Anything seemed possible now! We stow the food, shove off, and head north. The gleaming tower of the Jekyll Island Club recedes over the trees like Cinderella’s castle, and I get to hear the story of his quest.
Turns out Brunswick is quite the busy little town now. When I was a kid, all I remember seeing of Brunswick was huge piles of ragged pine stumps – roots and all, mountains of them.
Most visitors would never guess this sleepy little island on the coast of Georgia gave birth to the most powerful financial system in modern history. Or that the genesis transpired in total secrecy. But that’s what happened, right here. How that came about in this remote place is an interesting tale, with an interesting backstory.
All vowels, no consonants. Add extra syllables, but wander off before you get to the end of words, like you lost your train of thought, or just couldn’t be bothered. Sound the way a jellyfish swims – a drifting pulsing rhythm, a heartbeat without hurry, journey with no destination. Speak as from your deathbed, expiring in the ubiquitous oppressive heat and humidity, as we surely are, and you’ve got pretty close.
There are no awards for diction. Honors go to the most elaborate expressions for the simplest things, so surplus phonemes are thrown in for good measure. Here the shade tree mechanic patching your leaky tire (in a wrecked rural town well off the interstate, cicadas throbbing the air like a migraine) will point at the tiny hole he found and not call it tiny. He will instead proudly gesticulate to it with the nub of a missing finger, tip back his ballcap, and share with you his sincere wonder that miracles still astound us every day, if you but have eyes to see. Like a king tapping with his ceremonial sword the shoulder of a new knight, he will pronounce the hole “minuscule.” And still, he will draw out those three syllables closer to five.
This is how you speak Southern.
Doug grew up in NJ and was educated in the King’s English – trained, tested, and ranked. He made a living by speaking and writing very clearly to explain medical and bureaucratic arcana to those not inducted into their mysteries. And he was good at it. So it came as quite a surprise that he needed a native Southerner like me to be his interpreter in the Lowcountry. “We ARE still in the US, right?”
So much drama for such a tranquil place. Past AND present.
Kings Bay Drydocks on the horizon
It’s about 4 in the afternoon when we drop anchor in Brickhill River, “river” though not much wider than a creek here. The tide is low and slack, just starting to turn. Toward the west is a broad marsh, so wide and flat we can see the dry-docks of Kings Bay on the horizon to the south. A forested mainland sweeps all the way north in a thin blue line.
Distant mainland
We row ashore and climb the sandy bluff to a sand road. It curls along the bluff under live oaks, circles a grassy lawn big as two football fields. Through the trees are the white columns of the Carnegie mansion known as Plum Orchard. We get views of Tidings as we walk the road. Doug pauses and cocks his head.
“Something doesn’t look right. See how she’s swinging back and forth?”
Tidings a little cockeyed when we leave her
Though the current is still weak, she seems broadside to it, and gently swings to and fro like a pendulum.
“Hmm. Odd. Maybe just the wind. She’s probably fine, right?” I can see Doug pondering while we stroll around to the back of the house.
Though Cumberland is the largest of the sea islands at 20 miles long, we only need to go half that far to the anchorage at Plum Orchard. If we continue up the East River, we could bypass Kings Bay Submarine Base to reconnect with Cumberland Sound. But charts show shoals that way. With the tide falling we don’t want to risk it. The more prudent route is back south and around to the west to follow the ICW, which runs right past the base.
ICW passes near Kings Bay
We prefer to give these twitchy military folks a wide berth, so skirt the edge of the channel as far outside as we dare. Last thing we want to do is run aground right here, of all places, and make a nuisance of ourselves. A disconcerting problem is the ICW presently passes through the middle of the “special security zone”. It appears the Army Corps of Engineers dredges frequently for subs to navigate easily; but the ICW is allowed to follow a natural shifting course. Instead of dredging a route to move civilian traffic away from the base, they just move the channel markers.
The marked route now carries us closer and closer to nuclear submarines with their pack of aggressive guard patrols. Doug has me looking for red markers with binoculars while he steers. A sub at the end of the dock looms larger and larger like a beached whale, and still we have to continue toward it.
“Here come the dogs,” says Doug. I put down the glasses and see two patrol boats prowling out from the base. They then stalk us like junkyard dogs. Doug waves to them in the most unthreatening way possible and tries to smile big enough for them to see. They do not wave back. We’re not liking this. I see the next red marker, even closer to the base, and say, “That can’t be right, can it? It’s way over there!”
Doug is trying to steer while looking over his shoulder, keeping an eye on the patrol. With all the twisting, the cushion he uses for a back rest goes over the side. The wind and tide push it merrily toward the patrol boats. It’s a new white cushion, one of a pair he bought just for this trip. He really, really wants that cushion back.
Too close for comfort, still in the ICW
“Doug, the only thing they’ll like less than you throwing cushions at them is us trying to fetch it. And I don’t think they are going to pick it up and bring it to us.” The nearest patrol is close enough now I can see that’s not a harpoon gun mounted in the bow pointed at us, it’s a really big machine gun. I don’t think they like me pointing a camera at them, either.
While Doug runs through scenarios that involve getting the cushion back without getting shot, I look back at the chart to figure out how this makes sense. I touch one of the little warning icons, which I assumed just says don’t piss anybody off here. In fact, it says, almost nonchalantly, the red/green markers reverse and switch sides right here at the base. We’re going the wrong way. We’re outside the channel, over a sandbar, and way too close to that submarine. No wonder the dogs are stalking us.
Our route following the “Red on Right” rule
Doug makes a 90 degree turn around Red 46 and points us at the nearest green 100 yards away. It’s shallow enough we can see sunlight on the bottom. We raise the centerboard halfway, and hold our breath until we clear the bar. Back in the channel I see the red marker we should have followed was bent over like it had been hit. No wonder we missed it.
Everything improves the further we get from Kings Bay. Broad marshes fan out on both sides. A fresh breeze comes up from the east, and we have the best day of sailing yet. We aim for Brickhill River, a side creek that curls along the bluff of Cumberland Island. We can anchor there for the night next to Plum Orchard mansion.
We’re still sailing well, but Cumberland Sound narrows quickly. Sandbars emerge above the water on both sides, temporary buoys are canted over in odd places. Apparently things move around a lot here. Many warning notes in the charts about shifting shoals and boats run aground. This place is known as The Dividings. It’s what Steve Early and I have been calling the Head of the Tide; but in sailing logs for the past several hundred years these places are referred to as “dividings” – where opposing tidal currents meet, then divide and flow opposite directions. At such places, rivers peter out to narrows, and stalled currents let sediment settle out in bars and shoals. Which we now see everywhere.
We come to a sharp turn where the channel is only a few boat lengths wide. It’s at this exact point where two separate fleets ran aground in two separate wars, botching the outcome of battles. During the Revolutionary War, a fleet of British schooners came down from the north to meet a landing party at Amelia for an attack on the fort. But the schooners could not tack through the dividings here. They ran aground and remained stuck on the sand until the attack was abandoned. The same thing happened to Union gunboats in the Civil War.
We follow a friendly trawler we met in St. Augustine, and he leads us safely through the turns. We avoid getting stuck, but are so preoccupied that we miss the entrance to Brickhill River, which looks more like a little marsh creek. Catching our mistake we backtrack, then follow it another mile to arrive at the anchorage. It’s secluded, and protected by tall trees. The public dock is closed for repairs, so we won’t have any company. And we have time to row ashore for another hike.
