June 11, 2009: St Simons Island, GA

The morning began with a start as Tom called out from the bow “Come quick, we have to pull the anchor”... As I hurried to throw on some clothes and check this out, Tom was on the bow trying to disengage from a 30 foot sailboat that had some how snagged our anchor line and was inches from our prow. Creatively, he decided to slide out our anchor weight which lowered our anchor rope so that they could get free. It was a startling beginning for the day but all turned out well. I think that the current took them by surprise as they pulled their anchor.

We continued north today to the Fredrica River and are now anchored just off Saint Simons Island, the second largest of the Georgia barrier islands. We took the Caribe to the Fredrica Marina dock later in the afternoon with our bikes. The extremely tall posts for the floating dock are an indicator of the 7 foot deep tide swings and gave extra capacity for high water as the dock rises.


Our ride was over 10 miles as we rode down to the village where the St. Simons Lighthouse stands near the beach. Built in 1872, the white brick lighthouse is 104 foot tall and still operates lighting the St Simons Sound. It has a two story keeper’s house at its base where there were two keepers and each one had one level as living space. We were there at the end of the day as the ranger carefully took down the American flag.

There was a beautiful visitor center on the water front overlooking the sound where we sat in white rocking chairs in the shade for a while. The huge oak trees there have survived for centuries, partially because the hurricane patterns of the Atlantic statistically come to shore north of here.

We passed the historical marker for the Retreat Plantation, begun in 1804 and one of the primary producers of long staple cotton in the early 1800’s. We also found one of the old plantation slave houses built of a material called tabby. It was a material that preceded concrete and was brought to the New World by the Spanish, but modified to use local materials. This mix used lime, ash, water, sand, and oyster shells and could be poured into molds for foundations, walls, floors and roofs and dried like concrete.


We had dinner tonight at a local place called the Crab Trap and were delighted with their delicious crab soup. Actually it was so cold in the restaurant that the hot soup tasted great in spite of the 110 degree heat index outside.