May 22, 2008

After dodging the promise of severe weather last night we decided to spend a day doing a few repairs and then some shelling.

Yesterday, while underway one of our Lazy Lacks chafed through and ended up lying on the deck. Our boom is so high off the deck that we use our Lazy Jack system as a neat means of gathering the sail when we drop it at the end of the day.

While I was up the mast Christy had the opportunity to snap a few pictures of one of our nuclear submarines being escorted up the river to the Kings Bay Naval Base. A surface vessel leads while another one trails behind. There's a chopper circling above and an innocent looking but fairly sinister tender along either side. Its quite the procession and everyone has to yield the river to this group.

So, first order of business was to have Christy use the windlass to haul me up the mast to replace the broken line. She hauled me up and then tied a line to the backstay so I could pull myself aft, above and along the boom. It was very Spiderman, you know, except for the gay tights. After that there were a few more small chores and it was off to the beach.

Cumberland Island is a fabulous state park. There’s a nice dinghy dock to leave the dink. As you walk the half mile east across the island the first section is very tropical with Bayonet Palms and other exotic underbrush. Then the dense growth gives way to hundreds of Live Oaks covered in Spanish Moss; its absolutely beautiful.




Finally the Live Oaks yield to a series of huge scrub covered sand dunes that border the beach. This place reminds us of the backdrop for the movie Jurassic Park, it’s really a step back in time.

When you walk out onto the beach its really quite spectacular. The beach is very wide and several miles long in either direction. It’s also hard as hell. I’ve driven on the beach in Daytona and this beach is even harder than that. After walking several miles over the course of a few hours my legs were killing me. We did find several really nice shells in spite of the competition from several other shell seekers so Christy was pretty happy.

Another bonus here is that there is free wifi from a Sea Scout camp located here on the island. So we spent a relaxing evening checking for a weather window to start heading north again.