Day trip to Jekyll Island

"We need a daytrip...."

With all the cold weather we've been having, we keep thinking about taking a road trip.  I want to go to St. Augustine ... Dan wants to go to Jacksonville ... but we never seem to have a free day to indulge. 

Friday - February 26

We didn't go far, but today we took the whole day off the boat to go visit Jekyll Island, one of the 3 main "Golden Isles".  Jekyll Island is mostly a national park, so the area is very woody with lots of beach area and limited development.  St. Simon Island is the sister island -- very developed, kinda like Hilton Head (we got there at night, so no pictures).  We hope to visit Cumberland Island (the 3rd primary island in the Golden Isles chain) when my cousin Sarah and her husband, Ian, stay there at the end of March (it's about a 10-hr sail for us).  Those of you old enough to remember may recall that John Kennedy Jr got married on Cumberland Island.  These islands were the original summer places of the rich and famous of years past -- the Carneglies at Cumberland, the Rockerfellers & Reynolds at Jekyll Island.

As we cross the bridge to Jekyll Island, you can see the river entrance to the Brunswick Landing Marina on the right.  We sailed under this bridge last summer and up the Brunswick River to the marina last summer.

 

This marks the entrance to Jekyll Island.

It may be unseasonably cold down here, but that hasn't stopped everyone from planting their spring flowers in February (yes, you people in MN, I did say February!  It is so strange to drive to Home Depot and see the entire entrance area covered with spring annuals!.

When leaving Brunswick by boat, you have two choices.  You can go via the Intercoastal Waterway (the ICW is a series on inland waterways, channels and rivers that allows you to travel the east coast w/o going out into the Atlantic Ocean).  The ICW route takes you inland thru Jekyll Sound, but it can can be a tricky passage because it's shallow, and you have to be very careful about the tides, as the water level can drop as much as 9 feet.  The ICW provides a nice alternative when the weather is bad, but the trade off is that you must motor and watch carefully for channel markers.  If you run aground, your only choice is to wait for high tide.

Here's a picture of low tide, and boats at the dock were literally settled into mud.  At high tide, this entire area was covered with water, up to the shore.

The other option is to "go outside" via the Atlantic Ocean.  We are going to take that route when we leave  b/c we prefer to sail. (of course, all the experienced cruisers tell us we'll soon get over that; they always motor-sail because they want to make the best time and the wind is frequently fickle.  However, we're newbies, so we plan to hold to our innocence as long as possible!).   Even though it is was a cool and windy day, we had a great walk on the beach because the wind was from the west and the shoreline is set down from the road so we were fairly protected. Plus, we still cannot get over the fact that we are actually walking the beach -- and it's February!!!