Miles Traveled 10.8
Total Miles Traveled 3160
Day 224
This is our last Florida sunrise, we have been in the
state of Florida for 5 months and 5 days and today we continue our adventure north
to Cumberland Island, Georgia.
Cumberland Island is owned and operated by the national
park service and is only accessible by boat. The island features beaches, dunes, marshes,
and freshwater lakes. One of the main
attractions of the island is the wild horses that roam freely around the
island. The horses are feral horses
meaning a free-roaming horse of domesticated ancestry. Popular myth holds that the horses arrived on
the island sometime in the 16th century with the arrival of the
Spanish conquistadors.
We walked a three
and a half mile loop on the southern end of the island. The trails were wide, with a main drive running
down the center. Along the western edge
of the island there are large areas of salt marshes. The center of the island is a dense maritime
forest with gnarled live oak trees covered with Spanish moss.
Looking for treasures…..
No gold coins today.
The Dungeness Ruins are also located on the island, in
1783 Nathaniel Greene, who earned fame as one of George Washington’s most
successful officers purchased nearly 11,000 acres on Cumberland Island. In 1803, Greene’s widow, built a large home
and called it Dungeness. The mansion
burned to the ground mid-century. In
1881, Thomas Carnegie, brother of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and his wife
built another mansion named Dungeness on the foundation of the Greene
estate. Carnegie didn’t live to see the
completion of the mansion, which stood until 1945, when it also burned.
The eastern side of the island is the beach that
stretches over 17 miles.
Our anchorage is across from the Kings Bay Naval Station,
where the Navy’s Trident nuclear missile submarines are stationed. We didn’t see a submarine today, but this is
the naval complex.
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