Kingsley Plantation, Amelia Island, Fernandina Beach, Pumpkin Hill State Park

(Sea Island Cotton)

Remember how I mentioned that we were supposed to spend Labor Day weekend on the sailboat, sailing to Cumberland Island? Well, since that was not the safest option without a powerful engine (we have since obtained a 6 HP engine, hooray for Craigslist!) we decided to just get in the car and drive. I had read about the Kingsley Plantation a while ago when I was looking for interesting things to do in Jacksonville and since it was only about 30 minutes away, this seemed like a good start. (Tip for those who don't want to end up in somebody's crab shop in their front yard: don't type "Kingsley Plantation" into Google maps on your phone, instead, google it on the internet, and follow the link from there or else you'll end up buying crab from some backwoods shack.)

Kingsley Plantation is open every day from 9a-5p and there are limited tours of the plantation house, but even if you show up 25 minutes before they close, like we did, you'll still be able to see quite a bit before the park ranger makes you leave. Things like the crops that were grown by Zephaniah Kingsley and his slaves. If you go to this website you can read more about the history of the plantation and the Kingsley's. Interesting fact: Zephaniah's wife and children were his slaves until he "gave" them their freedom. It is sad to think of the lives that slaves had (especially the ones who worked turning indigo into blue dye, they had about a 5-7 year life expectancy) but it is important for us to learn from this period in history, so that we don't make similar mistakes in the future. Even if you have absolutely no interest in history, it is a pretty cool place to walk around and maybe have a picnic, the house sits right on the water and boaters pass by it constantly.




After you leave the Kingsley Plantation, it's about 20 minutes to the Amelia Island/Fernandina Beach area. It's a very beautiful and peaceful place to visit and reminded us both of New Smyrna Beach. There are shops and restaurants and, of course, a gorgeous beach with white sand. The drive from Jacksonville is one of the prettiest drives I have taken; you go from heavily wooded areas to rivers to ocean and I think the drive alone is worth the trip! If you bring a bottle of wine disguised in a water bottle (not that we'd ever suggest such a thing) you could enjoy a very romantic picnic or you could head to one of the local restaurants for a bite to eat and a drink. We went to the outside bar at Sliders, mostly for the view, and enjoyed a few drinks and an appetizer without breaking the bank.


I should probably mention that we came out to this area two days in a row. We wanted to stay overnight but we had a few obstacles: 1. Romeo, our dog and 2. There are no affordable places to stay if you wait until the last minute, during Labor Day weekend.
The second day we brought Romeo and a romantic picnic because dogs are allowed on the beach. It was so romantic in my mind, but Romeo wanted to make sure that no birds, dogs, humans or waves hurt us, so he spent the entire time lunging at any moving thing and barking at, well, just everything. This cut our romantic picnic short but we felt ripped off, so on our drive home, we followed the signs to Pumpkin Hill State Park.



We enjoyed a nice hike on a sandy trail for about 10 minutes before Ryan shouts "HOLY CRAP". This instills fear into my heart and I freeze. This instills Ryan's photographer instinct and he closes in on the following creature:


That, my friends, is a dusky pygmy rattlesnake (it's pretty hard to see in the picture). Once Ryan told me that, I decided that this wildlife sighting concluded our nature hike. We spent the rest of our visit on the safety on our car, listening to the wind blow through the trees, a rooster in the distance and....absolutely nothing else. It was pretty cool.

Please learn from our mistakes

(At least we got to see a beautiful sunset!)

August 29 was my sister's birthday! Happy belated birthday lil sis! Since her birthday fell on a Monday, she asked that we take her sailing on Sunday, August 28. Earlier that week, we thought we might have to cancel because of Hurricane Irene, but Miss Irene ended up going North instead and so the sailing was back on.

My sister and her boyfriend and two friends arrived around noon, so that we could get our sailboat out of the slip while the tide was still pretty high (At low tide, our boat sits in the silt on the bottom). We were planning on surprising my sister by sailing to Fort Caroline, an old fort just brimming over with history (My sister loves history)...but about 2 hours in, Ryan informs us that it would probably take us another 2 hours to reach Fort Caroline, putting us there at around 4-5 pm and not home until 8-9 or even 10 pm. (They had a 2.5 hour trip back to Orlando after the trip ended).....so we all decided that it'd probably be safer to turn around, so we'd be able to take our time getting back to the dock.

We turned around and sailed back towards the curve in the channel (Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that we were in a part of the river that is used by commercial freight boat things?) that we had just passed. Since the wind was blowing towards us, we had to turn to the left (tack) once we reached the far right side of the channel. As we turned to the left, to make the most of the wind, the current pulled us right back to where we had started. Awesome. Since we lost our propeller on the gas motor, we were using a trolling motor that ran off of a battery charged from our solar panel. This motor was so quiet and eco-friendly, we were in hippie heaven until we realized that it is good for maneuvering around our dock but not so much for going against strong currents. We tried changing to a bigger jib (sail that goes on the front of the boat, not the main sail) for more power and we were just about to make it around the corner when a GIANT freight boat (I have no idea what they're called, but they're the size of a cruise ship and blast an ear splitting horn at you if you happen to be in their way) came up and made it very clear, via ear splitting horn, that we needed to move and...lose all the ground we had just made.

This all went on for about 2 hours, with spurts of almost crashing into the rocks on the shore, cursing, one of the little cable thingies that keep the mast from crashing down and killing everyone came undone, more cursing and Brandy's famous "Sailing Induced Nervous Breakdown" (ex: I hate this boat!! We are selling it when we get home!!!) before a really nice couple pulled up in their motor boat and offered to tow us out of the current. They ended up towing us for a good hour to make sure we didn't get stuck again and brought us right up to where our dock is. Thank God for nice people!!

The moral of the story is this: test your boat in the safety of the river to learn all about the kinks and terrible things that can happen. Better to learn them in the river than in the ocean...which is what we were planning to do the following weekend. Thanks to this slight hiccup, we decided to postpone our first venture into the ocean, which could have been a real nightmare.

You know, as this entire day was happening I was thinking "I hope my sister and her friends are prepared to be riverpeople now because we may never leave the St. Johns" but I was also thinking this: "I can't wait to blog about this so other new sailors can avoid our mistakes!"....but now I'm starting to think that making mistakes and learning from them is all part of the sailing experience. We can't possibly plan for every bump in the road! So now, my philosophy is this: once you get your sailboat, do not bring people on it that do not have experience sailing OR if they don't have experience, they don't mind when you get stuck in the river for 2 hours, the propeller falls off, etc.