We’re still in Fort Lauderdale, exactly where we were the last time we talked, and we’re still knee-deep in boat jobs. The boat is a disaster again, much like it was before we left in September. Stuff everywhere. The laundry mountain wasn’t helping, so I’m catching up on the blog while everything becomes clean again.

We have a lot of stories about the Sunshine State, but I’ve been meaning to tell you about Jekyll & Cumberland Islands…our two last stops before we got to Florida.

Jekyll Harbor Marina, Jekyll Island (24-Oct-2012 to 01-Nov-2012)

For a variety of reasons, most of them weather and nice-people related, we spent eight nights at Jekyll Island, Georgia, which is the longest we’ve stayed at any stop along our journey.

As you know, we stayed at the Jekyll Harbor Marina ($1.50/ft plus electricity if you want it), where we sat tight while Sandy passed to the east of us. We arrived early in the afternoon on October 24th.

I got lazy and didn’t keep up with the log entries, so I can’t remember exactly what happened when during our stay. I’ll just show you some pictures and tell you about a few highlights.

The marina has free loaner bikes, so we both had wheels. We took a bike ride somewhere each day we were there. Here’s a sample – I think this was the day after Sandy passed by.

It wasn’t open when we visited, but there’s an educational center run by the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences at the south end of the island. We had a look at a their outside exhibits…

It was a day or two after we arrived before we explored Jekyll Island’s historic district.

Founded in the late 1800’s, the Jekyll Island Club was an exclusive winter retreat for America’s obscenely rich and powerful, including the Morgans, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Pulitzers.

Here are a few samples of their “cottages”.

As you can imagine, with such a high concentration of powerful people kickin’ back together, Jekyll Island was the setting of a few historical events. On January 25, 1915, AT&T president Theodore Vail made the world’s first transcontinental phone call from Jekyll Island. In 1910, under the guise of a “duck hunt”, the plans behind what eventually became the U.S. Federal Reserve System were hatched here. (I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about The Fed, and could go on and on, but I’m not quite ready to let my freak flag fly).

The Faith Chapel was completed in 1904, and was used as an interdenominational place of worship. The stained glass window you see on the front of the chapel was designed, installed, and signed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and is one of only five such pieces in existence.

Right around the corner from the cottages, the Jekyll Island Club and the Chapel is the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, a marine turtle rehabilitation, research, and education facility.

It provides emergency care to injured and sick turtles (and not just sea turtles – we saw a these marsh turtles out for their daily exercise when we visited).

Aside from the ones at the centre, we saw no turtles, but during our island bike riding, we encountered other local wildlife.

Here is the best footage we managed to get (and it’s not good) of a manatee.

Do a search for manatees on youtube – our video is terrible (you can barely tell they’re manatees).

So the bad weather kept us at Jekyll Island longer than we’d planned, but all the nice people we met made staying easy. There are quite a few year-round live-aboards at the marina, who kindly invited us to their get-togethers, let us tag along on trips to Brunswick, and in one case, lent us her truck. Lots of material for several Kindness & Generosity posts.

We also met a fellow traveler during our stay at Jekyll. To us, he’s “Bill the Kentucky Toxicologist” (we’ve met a few Bills and this is our way of distinguishing him). He’s a retired toxicologist and has been cruising single-handed for eight years. He has a great outlook on life, loads of sailing experience, and we learned a lot from him.

Almost reluctantly, we finally got moving again November 1st, when we headed to Cumberland Island.

Cumberland Island, Georgia (01 to 02-Nov-2012)

This was our view as we rounded the north end of Cumberland Island on the afternoon of November 1st.

I’ll tell you about the horses of Cumberland Island a little later, but this was our first glimpse of them.

We passed a little island that looked to have hundreds of pelicans in various stages of development, so we speculated that it might be a rookery.

A few miles before our anchorage at Cumberland Island, we passed the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base.

We were settled at anchor shortly before sunset, so we postponed our visit to the island until the next morning.

The walk to the beach through what the visitor’s centre described as maritime forest, was really beautiful. I can’t get enough of the live oak trees.

It was a little more than half a mile from where we left the dinghy to cross the island to the beach.

Before we saw any of the Cumberland Island horses, we saw evidence of them.

We headed south on the beach, and didn’t get too far before we saw a dead horseshoe crab.

Then another one…

It became apparent that there had been some sort of horseshoe crab armageddon on the beach at Cumberland Island. We never got around to looking into it, but we assume Hurricane Sandy had something to do with it. It couldn’t be normal for so many dead crabs to be washed up, could it?

And it wasn’t all dead crabs.

We had to take a close look at this thing before we realized it was the dried up business end of a shark, that must also have been beached with all the other stuff.

If we had visited Cumberland Island on a Georgia getaway road trip, I’d probably have picked up a few shells to take home, but we live on a boat, and every new thing we bring on board means more stuff to shuffle, so I refrained.

But let me tell you about what Phill collected. You’ll never guess. I’m still not sure how it caught his eye among all the perfect shells and horseshoe crab devastation. I guess it takes a true Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning guy to collect from a beautiful Georgia beach, of all things – coal!

Yes, coal.

He assures me he wasn’t pickin’ up stocking stuffers for Christmas – we’re going to try burning it on a beach in the Bahamas.

It wasn’t long after Phill’s coal-hoarding maxed out the capacity of his horseshoe crab shell when we saw some wild horses approaching in the distance. Actually, the Cumberland Island horses are not wild. A couple of hours after we took this picture, we were chatting with some kids who were on a school trip to the island, and Phill asked them if they’d seen any of the wild horses yet. One kid said “Uh…they’re not wild horses. They’re feral.”

The teacher overhears and asks the child to explain to us the difference between wild and feral. A feral animal is one that was once domesticated but has become wild or untamed, whereas a wild animal was never domesticated.

This is a bit of a side note, but our friends from Guelph occasionally refer to me and Phill as “Pharyl” – a combination of our names, pronounced like “Feral”. We use it as our skype user name and in the email address for the blog (which you’d know if we ever get around to doing the “contact us” page). Anyhow, we thought it was a neat little co-incidence, since we were once, not long ago, also domesticated.

We toured Dungeness, the ruins of a mansion built by Thomas M. Carnegie (brother of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie). Thomas died before it was completed, but his wife Lucy lived there until 1925 or so.

After our tour of Cumberland Island on November 2nd, we made our way to Fernandina Beach, Florida, our first stop in the Sunshine State.

As Bill the Kentucky Toxicologist told us, when you leave Georgia headed south, the culture changes to become more like up north. Florida’s a great place, but we just don’t get asked “How y’all doin’?” on the street like we did in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia.

We’re glad we spent as much time as we did in the Peach State. Georgia will be on my mind for a long while…