Photo: Marine on the Cumberland I. boardwalk

The weather has warmed up somewhat in the past few days in time for us to leave Florida and make our only stop in Georgia, this time at Cumberland Island, a spectacular nature reserve with a white sand beach that goes on for miles in addition to a population of wild horses, a significant turtle nesting area, and the ruins of a Carnegie mansion built in the early 1900s. We spent several hours walking through the dunes and checking out the museum, and Marine was particularly interested to hear the park warden discuss the turtle breeding areas. It is still too early for the turtles to come ashore and lay their eggs, but we were astonished to learn that only one in ten thousand turtles lives to full maturity, and that the chief predator of the young turtles is the ghost crab; it apparently nips the hatchlings during their dash to the ocean from their nests, and that nip will do enough damage to be eventually fatal.

We spent last night at Fernandina Beach, a pleasant little town on the south side of St. Mary's Inlet, through which we will exit later today and sail overnight to Charleston, VA. We have been mindful of our requirement to average 38nm/day in order to reach home by the end of May, so there has been little dilly-dallying en route. We spent a night at St. Augustine, with an expedition ashore for the sole purpose of securing more jars of Key Lime Mango Chutney at the Key Lime Store. The stuff is so good we rapidly consumed two jars of it the first time we passed through back in December, and Judy was determined to get some more!

Our passage to Charleston should take 20 hours, and will save us the equivalent of four or five days of ICW motoring; we are particularly keen to avoid as much of Georgia as possible, given that four of our six groundings took place in that state, where shoaling is a significant problem.

As an aside, diesel prices here are around $3.95/gallon(US), a bit of a relief from the $6.25/gal. prices we saw in the Abacos....