WORTH THE PADDLE
Georgia’s Sea Islands a worthy destination
“Do you like living out here, Iregene?”
Six of us were in a van riding from where we’d beached our kayaks to the hamlet of Hog Hammock, population 31, on Sapelo Island. Our driver lived there. His answer came as no surprise.
“Yes, I do,” said Iregene Grovner, 64. “Nobody bothers you out here. No need to lock your house. You can leave your keys in the vehicle. No crime. No police. No government.”
As we made our way down the one-lane road, its potholes hungry for gravel and the woods swampy and dark, I thought of the after-dinner campfire reading of the night before. We’d heard excerpts from “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” a book about the effort to provide land to the Sea Islands’ freed slaves during and after the Civil War.
Sapelo Island and Hog Hammock are among the last remnants of those communities. We were lucky to be there. Given the tides of history and the fragility of barrier islands, we’d arrived not a moment too soon.
We’d just finished the second day of a five-day, fournight kayak excursion exploring a half-dozen of the hundred Sea Islands that stretch from Cape Hatteras to the northern end of Florida. The bigger and better-known of them (such as Hilton Head and St. Simons Island) are connected to the mainland by bridge or causeway. Many others are uninhabited, sparsely settled or wildlife refuges reachable only by water. That’s how we had gotten to Sapelo.
The trip, in late November, was run by Upstream Alliance, an environmental education nonprofit in Annapolis. The two dozen paddlers included scientists, educators, photojournalists, board members, donors and a few people (including me) who had done volunteer work for the organization. One of the things Upstream Alliance does is promote public access to waterways, and one of the purposes of the trip was to see how much of that there was on this section of the 300-milelong Sea Islands chain.
A co-sponsor of the trip was conservationist Wendy Paulson, who with her husband, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, owns Little St. Simons Island, an “eco-resort” with seven miles of beach and 11,000 acres of undeveloped land. It was our destination; we’d been given permission to camp there.
“We’d like to develop a reservation camping program. This trip was a step in that direction,” she said when it was over.
Saltwater kayak touring requires meticulous planning, knowledge of tides and currents, and the ability to read the weather. Luckily, we were led by Don Baugh, Upstream Alliance’s head, who ran trips for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for 30 years.
We began at a public landing on Harris Neck, Ga., about an hour and 45 minutes north of Jacksonville, Fla. After loading the kayaks and three support skiffs, we headed down the Wahoo River for a half-day paddle to St. Catherines Island.
The Sea Islands aren’t like the rocky, forested knobs that dot the New England coast. They’re low, fragile accumulations of sand and marsh, bounded and bisected by creeks and inlets through which a prodigious volume of water flows each day. On the day we left, the tide rose and fell 6½ feet - three times the range of Chesapeake Bay, and close to that of southern Maine.
We covered 8½ miles in less than two hours, swept along by the outgoing tide and wind. The afternoon light turned the marsh gold. Wintering birds entertained us. Over the course of the trip we saw many species - ospreys, bald eagles, marsh hawks, great blue herons, ibises, egrets, Wilson’s plovers, a merlin, a wood stork, and numberless gulls and shore birds.
We arrived at the southern end of St. Catherines with just enough time to make camp.
In Georgia, it’s legal to camp on many islands below the average high tide point. Our trip was exquisitely timed to make the most of this. Our home for the night was a tongue of sand with river on one side and a tidal slough on the other. There wasn’t a sprig of grass in sight. Clearly, the place was often covered by water.
However, the moon was only half full, so the tides wouldn’t be extreme. Baugh was confident we’d stay dry, even if a number of us weren’t.
We found the wrack line where the last high tide had deposited debris and set up our tents along it. They looked like vertebrae sticking out of a buried carcass.
Before the sun set we had time to walk down the beach and see real carcasses.
Three pilot whales had beached and died two months earlier in a stranding that killed 21 animals in all. Their backbones were half-buried; the ribs protruded like stripped branches of washed-ashore trees. The heads had been carried off by biologists who did necropsies in search of a cause of the deaths. (It’s still undetermined.) Two months before the stranding, about 50 pilot whales had come ashore on St. Simons Island. Beachgoers, pulling them to deep water, saved all but three.
We returned to the campsite and, after dinner, sat around a fire and listened to a reading about the history of the islands. Then we went to sleep.
As it turned out, we stayed dry. Nevertheless, our good fortune was a warning. On the Sea Islands, residence is impermanent. People rent or occupy; nature owns and repossesses.
We were favored by a tail wind, slack tide and sunny weather as we crossed the mouth of Sapelo Sound the next morning and sneaked into a creek that meandered through the marsh behind Blackbeard Island.
The island is named after the pirate, who may have used it as a haven before his death in 1718. The more interesting fact is that Blackbeard Island was the site of the United States Marine-Hospital Service’s South Atlantic Quarantine Station from 1880 to 1910.
The outpost is long gone. As we came ashore, there was nothing to see except two mini-islands of rocks in the river.
The federal government bought the island in 1800 to harvest live oaks for Navy ships. However, after a yellow fever epidemic killed more than a thousand people in Savannah in 1876, it erected a complex of buildings to inspect ships arriving from tropical ports. Those with yellow fever aboard were fumigated, and the ill were hospitalized and isolated. Many troop ships returning from Cuba after the Spanish-American War stopped there first.
Not until 1901 were mosquitoes proved to be the transmitters of yellow fever. However, even before that, health authorities knew that dockworkers who removed ballast from fever-infected ships were at risk of getting the disease. Even crew members berthed over ballasted parts of the hold were at risk.
Today, we know that bilge water in ballast is a place where mosquitoes breed. For most of the South Atlantic Quarantine Station’s life, however, all that inspectors knew was that removing ballast from yellow-fever vessels was a good idea. That explained the rocks in the river
We had to wait for the tide to rise so we could get through a shallow cut near the south end of Blackbeard created by Hurricane Irma in 2017. After we paddled through it, we went ashore. We ate lunch on a triangular piece of beach and dune that had a few trees and its own raft of flotsam.
Say hello to Little Blackbeard, the newest Sea Island!
It seemed a good time to learn a little about the birth and death of such places. Luckily, among us was geologist James Renner, 58. He found a stick and drew in the sand as we finished our sandwiches.