Cumberland Island Report

In an attempt to shake off the profound sadness resultant from the death of my teacher ( see post below) I’ll describe the beautiful weekend we had on Cumberland. We keep some bees on the Island, in good years making honey for the spectacular Greyfield Inn. This year was no good year, either on the mainland or the barrier islands for honey, blueberries, peaches, corn or most other agricultural enterprises. In the dearth of nectar some or our colonies on Cumberland succumbed, to starvation or varroa mites or hive beetles but I went through the survivors, helped them out as best I could and got them ready for the spring that will soon be upon us.

This is the best of times to be on Cumberland, cool, clear, free of pestiferous insects, generous of sun and balmy airs. We had a fine hike on Friday morning, along a trail new to us, through mature longleaf forest and old live oak. 10 kilometers of beauty full of butterflies, spanish moss and big trees. I did some fishing in the afternoon. The sea was soft and still with fish swirling and jumping and small pods of dolphins feeding back and forth in the river. I caught one speckle trout and one redfish and sent them both back to eat more shrimp and get bigger. The air was so still that one could hear the exhalations of the dolphins in the channel as they hurried back below to hunt.

In the evening we went to Lane’s Landing where there’s a cabin we hope to stay in soon. There we experienced a sunset of transcendent beauty and imagined bringing friends there for another such. From the immense marshes to the west rails and herons squawked and chattered and stately wood storks roosted in the trees. As it got dark we went to Plum Orchard, the restored Carnegie mansion, now a Park Service facility, to use their dock for some early evening fishing. I hooked a pair of beautiful sea trout and sent them back to get bigger.

At sunrise we drove up to Stafford Beach, where we were engaged, six years ago, and had a good beach walk, poking in the spindrift for curiosities. Cuban rum bottles, many florescent light tubes and the remains of a dolphin, clearly butchered for meat. Who eats dolphins? It couldn’t have been killed more than forty miles away and I puzzled over it though Ellen pronounced it ’stinky’ and insisted we move on. I’m not talking about dolphin fish ( dorado, mahi-mahi ), a noble fish for the table, this was a bottle nosed dolphin, like Flipper, a mammal and not generally thought of as food. Perhaps it was by-catch for a commercial shrimper. We watched the shrimpers towing their enormous nets offshore, defined for our eyes by the cloud of birds diving into them, and saw plenty of dolphins inside the trawl.

Grateful to our generous hosts we were back in Fernandina by 4:30. It was as fine a weekend as one could have.

Update:  I really should always ask Stacia first.  All dolphins found dead are necropsied, the skulls saved along with some crucial parts and the remains sent back into the sea.  What I found was a relic of research, not harvesting for meat.  Wrong again.