Florida! — Cupcake Afloat

First of all, we have almost used up our WiFi allotment for the month and are about to get throttled by the cell provider. So no pictures until we get some free wifi. Sorry. Think about how tough we have it: the billing cycle isn’t up until the 19th! Even more dire: we are nearly finished with the November bourbon bottle.

Halloween was a piece of masterful parenting and organizing by Ellen. Using bits and pieces we salvaged from the hurricane debris at the marina in North Carolina, Moss dressed as a super-cute, super-clever highway cone. We spent the day at a marina near Brunswick, Georgia (cleaning, watering, showering, dieseling, WiFi-ing, grocery shopping, laundering) and then took an Uber to Brunswick for their downtown Halloween celebration.

The event was called “Trunk or Treat” and dozens of cars were lined up on the street with trunks decorated, giving out candy and playing games (bean bag toss, etc.) The sponsors were all churches and boy do Georgians love their Jesus. Moss was nervous talking to these Georgians because she said she had a hard time understanding the accent and often had no idea what they all were saying. But candy is the universal language. We ended up quitting the trick-or-treating before we had walked the entire street because Moss found her candy bucket filled to the rim and figured that was plenty.

After begging in the street, we went to a pizza place for dinner. Our poor waitress was without a doubt the hardest working server we can recall seeing. We all commiserated on behalf of all the schoolteachers who had to deal with the sugared-up kids the next day. Now that is frightening.

On November 1 we headed south once more, across St. Andrews Sound. The day was blustery and rainy, the route was twisty and beset with shoals (which is always disconcerting when the water is brown and the waterway is miles wide but the chart says it’s only a foot or two deep in spots). We anchored in a marsh river at the northern end of Cumberland Island in a thunderstorm.

In the morning we sailed and motored the 13 miles down to the anchorage at the ranger station for Cumberland Island National Seashore. On the way we passed a Navy submarine base and saw a big sub just tied up to a dock. Crazy.

We went ashore on Cumberland and walked across the island to the ocean side. Our efforts were rewarded with one of the loveliest beaches we have seen anywhere. The sand was sugary fine, the beach stretched for miles and miles. Our walk took us south along the beach and we saw lots of big dead horseshoe crabs, very little plastic trash, plenty of shore birds, sand, and horse poop.

Cutting back across the island, we checked out the ruins of a mansion built by one of the Carnegies, a cemetery where the servants were buried in a plot separate from their employers (even in death, gotta maintain class divides), lots of deer, and the famous wild horses.

Here’s the thing with wild horses: they do pretty much the same things as tame horses. They stand around swishing their tails, eating grass, pooping. That’s it. There was no stampeding, no rearing onto hindquarters, no whinnying even. Don’t get me wrong, we were thrilled to see the horses. We were even thrilled to see the massive piles of droppings wild horses leave everywhere they go. But we were not as thrilled as we would have been if there had been just a bit more thundering of hooves.

On the way back to the dock Moss decided we should skip the route that took us through the woods (beautiful Live Oak, Spanish Moss, etc.) and skip the route that took us along the edge of the marsh by the river. Instead we jumped down to the beach on the river and spent a very fun hour or so clambering over big driftwood branches and logs and live trees that crisscrossed the beach. Because it was high tide, we had less beach to work with, that’s why all the scrambling. We were all most concerned about ticks (found none on us) and then slightly less concerned about meeting alligators (we found none).

Although Moss completed the Cumberland Island junior ranger program, the rangers had all clocked out for the day by the time we emerged from the underbrush at the ranger station.

Today we headed out the St. Mary’s Inlet for a little ocean sail down to Jacksonville Beach, Florida. The water at the mouth of the inlet this morning was without a doubt the roughest we have ever sailed. Fortunately, we had the tide with us so we moved pretty swiftly through the big, confused seas. Even more fortunately, Cupcake is a sturdy sturdy girl and managed the turmoil without the slightest problem. At the helm, I was completely confident, but with waves breaking over the bow (bigger, stronger waves than we saw off Atlantic City and in Buzzards Bay) Ellen and Moss were a little apprehensive. Soon after clearing the inlet, the seas settled and we had a pleasant enough ride down to the next inlet where things were significantly calmer.

The really exciting part of the day came when we buried the bow of the boat in a wave and as the water rushed down the side deck, some kind of big fish got scooped up onto the boat with it. At first I thought it was a big pelican that somehow ended up on deck, then I saw what had to be a 20 pound fish flopping like mad trying to escape. Ellen and Moss didn’t get to see it before it launched itself back in to the briny deep, but they heard that frightened fish flailing and pounding away on the fiberglas as it made good its escape. I don’t know what kind of fish we caught, but I do know where the expression “fish-belly white” comes from. This creature had a white belly and a greenish not-belly. Seemed like it could have been a flounder, but I know fewer kinds of fish than I do birds, plants, or constellations.

The second-most exciting part of the day was when we touched bottom making our way to the ICW from the inlet. We were in an area where Ellen estimates there were 91 channel markers. We were following the markers. We nevertheless caressed the bottom of the channel. Moss wanted to know the difference between touching bottom and running aground. Running aground involves more cursing and more time not moving.