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Sea Islands 300 : 22-The First Key

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Daufuskie Island Denied

Links to Chapters in the Series

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It’s flat calm when we shove off from Skidaway Island. Back home in the Chesapeake, watermen called this a “Slick Ca’m” – a slick calm. The front has blown itself out. Beautiful weather is behind it, but the sails will stay furled all day.

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We glide past the marine science center where I spent that summer digging in pluff mud, and enter a tangled patchwork of tidal rivers and marsh islands that scribble in the margins between ocean and land. We turn into Moon River, made famous in the song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. I once had a toddler from the Creek tribe hold my hand at dusk and walk me to the bluff along this river. There he pointed excitedly at the sky to show me the object of the only word he knew – “Moon” – which he repeated over and over until he was sure I understood. We wondered at it together, a full moon rising through a curtain of Spanish Moss from a silver tray of salt marsh, until dark fell and the dinner bell rang.

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Sea Islands 300 : 21-Mr. Toad on Skidaway Island

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Links to Chapters in the Series

I first came to Skidaway Island around 1972. Through a 6th grade science competition, I won a summer of studying oceanography here through University of Georgia. There’s still a marine science center, bigger now, but back then the rest of the island was wilderness. Now the whole island is settled, with six golf courses, several private marinas, and nine themed clubhouses, all surrounded by landscaped gated communities. Quite a change.

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Our little marina is the only public water access on an otherwise private island. There’s a tall observation tower with 360 degree views over the marshes, laundry, and showers. We make use of them all. There’s also a fleet of golf carts available to mariners, which are needed to get to the shopping area miles away at the north end of the island. We decide there’s enough time to take one and get supplies before dinner. I ask Doug if he wants to drive, to which he replies with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.

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Sea Islands 300 : 20-Heavenly Sail to Hell Gate

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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.

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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.

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Sea Islands 300 : 19-Dragging Anchor at St. Catherines Island

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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.

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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!” 

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Sea Islands 300 : 18-St. Simons Island Storms

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YOUR QUEST IS COMPLETE. ADVANCE TO LEVEL 4.

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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.

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Sea Islands 300 : 17-Jekyll Island Slave Ships and the Federal Reserve

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The Wanderer – Yacht turned slave ship. Oil painting by William Yorke circa 1870.

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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.

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Sea Islands 300 : 16-How to Speak Southern

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Lost in Translation on Jekyll Island, Georgia

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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?”

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