Cumberland Island, Georgia

To begin, it's not my fault it took me so long this time. No internet for the past week--no internet or TV at the island, and then the internet has been out at the marina since we got back, so I am hanging out at the library today to catch up on the internet stuff.

Our first real sailing excursion began early Monday morning Aug 6.  It took about 10 hours to get to Cumberland Island, GA.  Yes it was only around 51 miles, but when you are going 5-7 knots an hour, that is how it works out.  It went really well. The first several hours we had to motor because there wasn't enough wind but then it started to pick up and we pulled out the spinaker and got to sail a few hours before arriving to this great island. No one got sick although it was kind of hard to do school and stuff.  When you are swaying, it doens't really make reading and math and stuff very easy.  We will work on it.  Since it was a long day without a lot of other things to do we could just do small amounts of school work with lots of breaks.  Lots of naps happened too.  Paul and I were glad that the autopilot works well so even though we need to be out watching all the time, we don't have to steer the wheel constantly.

Lucy took a picture of us as we were putting up the spinaker. I am just finishing hoisting it with the winch and then Paul is taking the sail out from the sock and we are ready for the action.

So I might say this a lot, but since this is our first big excursion, I can really mean it. This island is our favorite yet!  It is so beautiful.  It has beautiful huge oak trees, lush plants, beautiful white sand dunes, and a big, nice, quiet beach. 

We really enjoyed walking around and exploring the island.  The only thing we didn't love were the mosuitoes and bugs. Whenever we were on the island we had to keep moving and waving our arms, even with lots of bug spray on. Luckily we didn't have that problem on the boat.  Since it is anchored, it keeps us away from the bugs.

This island was where the Carnegies lived and resorted in the early 1900's. We got to tour this home called the Plum Orchard Mansion. It was really cool. 

Another thing we love about this island is the wild horses and deer all over the place.  We walked by them all the time.  We also saw dolphins in the waterway where we were anchored several times during the week.

These are the ruins of Dungeness. This was the big main house of the Carnegies and it was burned down many years later.  The house must have been pretty cool because even the ruins were really pretty.

Of course we had to do a little frog catching. Super cute.

We decided to head back on Thursday because that day looked the best for winds and stuff.  Everyday for the past week or two we seem to get a thunderstorm in the afternoon so we can't really avoid those.  We knew we would be going against the wind whichever day because the winds have been south-southeast for the past couple of weeks. The day went well for the most part. We saw some dolphins and a cute big sea turtle floating out in the middle of nowhere.  When we were getting close to the inlet to come home a big thunderstorm came up really quickly.  It was bad timing because we were trying to watch for the channel markers and buoys and for other ships and the rain made our visibility pretty bad. There was lots of lightning that we didn't love either.  So it was a little stressful but we made it to the channel and the storm blew over fairly quickly.  The afternoon thunderstorms are nice to cool us off a lot lately but this past few days the lightning is really close and since we are in a boat, that can be scary at times. Overall, our first big trip was a success and we really enjoyed it.  Of course there were new boat problems: a leak in the hatch above Noah's bed, and our inverter that converts our  DC power to AC when we are not hooked up to the shore power stopped working while at the island.  There are new things to fix and work on every week.  Everyone says that is  how boats are, we hope that isn't really the case every week!