Christmas on Epilogue

The Christmas Eve sky, smudged with reds, oranges and yellows of the setting sun, reflected like a looking glass on  Jekyll Creek. As night fell, two sailboats anchored across the shore were but charcoal specks with toothpick-like masts. 

We had pulled into the Jekyll Harbor Marina on Jekyll Island, Ga., early the afternoon of Christmas Eve after spending the previous night anchored in beautiful New Teakettle Creek, some 35 nautical miles back. 

The narrow, winding creek is lined on both sides with nothing but marsh grasses for miles around -- no houses or piers. Despite the shrill whistle often associated with its kitchen namesake, there was total silence from this Teakettle.  Only when a lone pelican and her buddy, a small white cattle egret, starting yammering to one another was the serenity broken. As the tide ebbed, the shoreline revealed a muddy, pockmarked swath filled with delectables for our shore bird duo.

We had begun our journey on the ICW at mile marker one in Norfolk; Jekyll Island was 685. We had started the entire, pre-ICW trip in Solomons, Md., on Nov. 27 with a week-long detour through Edenton, N.C., getting underway again on the ICW on Pearl Harbor Day.

Since we had such a late start in the season, we often have had the ICW to ourselves, especially early mornings when our only accompaniment were ducks and birds, half frozen by temperatures that dipped as low as 18 degrees.

But it was reasonably balmy and in the high 50s on Christmas Eve day. As we motored from Teakettle Creek toward Jekyll, we played Christmas music in the pilot house and I read aloud one of smy favorite poem, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas, along with a couple of short stories from “Carolina Christmas” by South Carolina author Archibald Rutledge (1883-1973), the first poet laureate of South Carolina. After tying up at Jekyll, we borrowed the marina’s loaner van and drove across the 480-foot high cable-stayed Sidney Lanier Bridge, the longest spanning bridge in Georgia. Part of the original bridge collapsed in 1972 when the ship “African Neptune” ship rammed it, sending some dozen vehicles into the river, killing 10 people.

We stopped for a late afternoon Christmas Eve lunch of raw and steamed oysters and crab soup at a working-man’s oyster bar. That evening on Epilogue, Philip downloaded Christmas music from iTunes to add to our repertoire of holiday music that was wearing thin; for dinner picked steamed snow crabs and drank hot buttered rum.

Although all the snow was back home, Santa found us in Jekyll with no trouble on Christmas Day. 

Jekyll has a rich history. At the turn of the century it was a private island, home to the Jekyll Island Club, an elite group of 100 wealthy Americans. This is where the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Fields, Pulitzers, Goodyears and Rockefellers spent only three months each spring. 

A castle-like hotel/clubhouse operated from 1888 to 1942.  Many of the members then built “cottages” in a village-like compound near the club. Each house was massive and had its own, distinctive style. There's also a "Faith Chapel" on the grounds with a Tiffany window. And as luck would have it, the Christmas morning service was Episcopalian. The priest was delightful, although the pianist (the antique organ apparently is unused) was comical because she kept hitting the wrong notes. Still, the packed sanctuary sang for joy in celebration of the birth of Jesus.

In the afternoon we took a quick bike ride, followed by drinks on the dock with the quasi-permanent boaters at the marina. For Christmas dinner, we ate at the Courtyard at Crane, a restaurant housed in what had been the Crane (plumbing supply) family cottage. Judy and Bill Chappell from Mifflinburg, Pa., who bought their 40-foot Island Packet in New Bern, N.C., joined us and we had a grand table in front of a toasty fire.

Our plans to leave on Dec. 26 were scuttled by the cold front that pummeled the East Coast. Temperatures by Christmas evening plummeted and both wind and waves picked up uncomfortably. 

We spent Sunday with the Chappells going through the island’s Georgia Sea Turtle Center where turtles are in rehab after being hit by cars or boats or losing limbs. It was fascinating to see child-size indoor swimming pools bobbing with hospitalized turtles ...ones that could fit into the palm of a hand to 1,000-pound loggerheads. We also saw a fresh water turtle, weighing no more than five pounds, being operated on. After being daubed with Betadine, a missing part of his shell was repacked with honeycomb (from a beehive), wax and superglue. A couple of the turtles - those hit by cars -- have spine injuries and will remain at the center. Most go back into the wild when able; the rest are sent to aquariums to live out lives that could span a century.

The four of us had dinner that night at the marina restaurant. Nice atmosphere with a good bar but lousy food, except for the steamed shrimp.

We hunkered down on Monday and in the early evening went back to the restaurant for beer and wings with Linda and Paul Truelove of Annapolis. They keep their boat at Jekyll part time. Paul teaches at the Annapolis School of Seamanship and is a Coast Guard licensed master at 100 gross tons. Linda also is a captain and they teach individual and couples boating classes. Maybe I can convince Philip to take the couples course - he sure doesn’t need it; I do.

But Linda’s claim to fame (as far as I was concerned) is that she is a chef for weeks at a time on a 97-foot yacht out of Fort Lauderdale. She’s a graduate of the Ritz Escoffier, the oldest cooking school in Paris. It must be difficult to cook for this yacht owner, though. A retired CEO of the country’s largest advertising firm, he doesn’t eat seafood, chicken or pork. 

It was 28 degrees on Tuesday, with ice on the deck and docks, as we left to begin week four of our Great Adventure. The Jekyll Island marina is past its prime but we can see why the same boaters come back year after year or simply stay there for months at a time: the people are great.

Randy, the dock master, and his wife, Diana Prentice, are on Strider, a sailboat. Turns out that Diana has worked on boating stories with Paul Clancy, my former Virginian-Pilot colleague. In a it’s-an-even-smaller-world category, Chef Linda’s ex-husband was Philip’s high school roommate at Episcopal, a boarding school in Virginia. We had not one, but two, wonderful gifts of cake during our stay: Diana’s rum cake that dripped with the nectar of the islands; and Linda’s lovely lemon poppyseed cake. 

We docked at Fernandina Beach marina on Amelia Island early Tuesday afternoon as temperatures began to inch their way back up. We had lunch at the Happy Tomato, a barbecue joint, and wandered around the waterfront. This is a town with oodles of restaurants, shops and a waterfront that’s been tastefully developed. 

On Wednesday morning, Roger the dockmaster chipped away ice at the water hookup, we pulled up the fenders, untied the lines and headed down the glassy-calm ICW toward St. Augustine. The forecast for New Year’s weekend: mid-70s. 

McClellanville, SC Dec 15 2010

Dec. 15. 2010

    This afternoon we pulled into the docks at Leland Oil Co. (calling it a marina is a stretch)in McClellanville, population 400, between Georgetown and Charleston. We were drawn by what our friend and fellow trawler owner Norman Mason and the various guidebooks described as a town “lost in time.” 
    We also had read that the T.W. Graham & Co. seafood restaurant was really special. Special because it’s the the only restaurant downtown serving more than sandwiches. And special because it has a Johnson & Wales-trained chef. It’s open for lunch from 11-3, with dinner on Thursday-Saturday. Today is Wednesday. It would be a close call whether we’d make it by 3.
    We have enough food on board to last us for months, but the lure of freshly caught seafood was irresistible. As we cruised along the waterway, I called the restaurant to check on its hours.
    “Yup, we close right at 3,” was the curt but cheerful response.
     We tied up at about 2:35 p.m. I asked Dwayne the Dockmaster if he thought we could make it to the restaurant before it closed.
    “You can tomorrow,” he said matter-of-factly.
    I looked at my watch: 2:45 p.m. I looked at Dwayne the Dockmaster.
    “Come on; I’ll take you in my truck,” said the 60-something with white curly hair and a white mustache.
    Philip and I climbed into his white Ford pick-up, which was parked next to the two-story marina building (woodworking on the ground level, an office and run-down closet-sized bath/shower upstairs). Next to the building is a live oak tree with a tire on a rope that had been made into a kid’s swing.
    He whisked us the few blocks to Pinckney Street to the restaurant.
    “When you come back, walk down to Oak, turn right, and take your second dirt road on the left” he said. Twice.
    “Are you from the boat?” the thin, bespectacled waitress asked loudly as we walked into the restaurant/makeshift museum/art gallery.    We nodded.
    She and the four remaining luncheon guests whooped and applauded.
    “We were betting whether you’d make it,” chirped waitress Jodie, a self-described “Cracker” and transplant from Ocala, Fla.
    “How about some shrimp and clam chowder to warm you up?” she asked before taking our order of fried oysters and grilled shrimp.
    “Cracker,” she continued, is a real term from the days when there were wild cattle in central Florida.     “Cracker?”
     “From the crack of the whip” the ranchers used, she said. “It’s true.”
    The cook, Jodie’s son Macon (Philip’s convinced Macon was conceived in Georgia),came over to see if we liked our lunch. He said he had trained under the owner, Pete Kornack, who we read married Claudia, a McClellanville girl.
    Jodie came back to our booth with a “to go box.”
“Here’s a traveling gift,” she said, grinning: a piece of cranberry and chocolate chip pie that had flopped and apparently couldn’t be served or sold pie-like. But it was still tasty, she said, especially if heated first and topped off with ice cream.
    Philip bought a T-shirt in the gifts’ corner of the restaurant near the kitchen. Paul Bunyon-sized sparkly white snowflakes dangled from the barren ribs of an old kayak hanging from the ceiling.
    “Connie,” said Jodie (we were on a first-name basis by now) “pick something from our drawing and you could win 10 percent off” anything. I obliged and dipped my hand into a plastic bucket: “One free beer” read my reward. We’d have to stay another day or cash it in on the return trip.
    Andrea, another employee, rang up our meal. She’s from Troutville, outside of Roanoke, Va., and married a local boy.
    We walked around the village, the scene of two movies because it really is a postcard from the past. In the latest flick, a new movie about aliens starring Kevin Costner, the Arts Council office was used as a police station. Jodie said the flick never made it to theaters but advised that we could still see it on video.
    Spanish moss hangs like skeins of dull gray yarn from nearly every branch of the live oak trees that line the main streets; most of the side streets are dirt roads. Idle shrimp boats line the waterfront, staying put because of this week’s cold and windy weather. Several abandoned homes, destroyed by Hurricane Hugo two decades ago, are nearly hidden by overgrowth. In the center of town is a park fronted by a live oak with a plaque proclaiming that the massive tree is 1,000 years old.
    Leland, Jodie had said, is the mayor. He owns the marina. He owns a  seafood company and God knows what else. She said she loved living over the marina where she could watch the shrimp boats come and go, but at some point she was ousted.
    We ducked into the unlocked St. James’ Santee Episcopal Church, whose 1706 parish is the second oldest in these parts, after Charleston. The current church was consecrated in 1890 and its framework is of “South Carolina longleaf pine and cypress, mortised and tenoned together. Its black cypress shingles, which cover the roof and exterior sidewalls, were shaped with handsaws,” according to the parish web site. Two large wreaths crafted from magnolia leaves, taken from the massive tree in the church’s back yard, decorated the double doors.
    Of course we had to buy fresh shrimp from the seafood market at the docks. Diana, a blonde with cornflower blue eyes that matched her long, heavy vinyl apron, said she was from Rhode Island and had been here for eight years. She hadn’t lost her New England accent, but her colleague -- a native to McClellanville -- said she was starting to pick up local phrases like (Diana demonstrated) “We good,” leaving out the verb.
    Tied up in back of Epilogue is a 55-foot or bigger dive boat from BVI - its owner (who made a pretty penny taking his flavored syrup company public and then selling the enterprise)works with people searching for sunken artifacts. Or as Dwayne the Dockmaster said, “He’s a treasure hunter.”
    There’s a 5-foot tidal change along the unlighted floating dock strewn with various size and color hoses where we are. To get back on board, we could leap off the rickety boards to the floating dock below or walk a ways and climb down one of two ladders, although the rungs on one are busted.
    It’s definitely a unique town. We like it so much here we’re staying a second night. And we might just have an opportunity to cash in the “free beer” coupon.