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.
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