October 2005 – Rod & Lisa Wolfe

Bryan Mann visits Brunswick – Brunswick Stewbalie and the B-52’s

Bryan Mann visits Brunswick – Brunswick Stewbalie and the B-52’s
On October 14th we got our first visitor from Boise! Bryan was in Orlando and he drove up to spent the weekend with us on Lucky Peek. We had a great time and enjoyed showing Bryan the local sites in downtown Brunswick. That particular weekend happened to be the annual Brunswick Rockin’ Stewbalie at the Mary Ross Park next to our marina, so the town was abuzz with Brunswick Stew anticipation! While we didn’t take the opportunity to taste any stew at the cook-off on Saturday, we did get a chance, as we stumbled through the park in the wee hours of Saturday, to stir an 85 gallon pot of stew that was being prepared for the competition.

After stirring the stew we surveyed the view that the B-52’s were going to have from the stage in just 16 hours. On Saturday night we were very close to the front of that stage as the B-52’s entertained the crowd. In fact, the second song they sang was “Private Idaho”!!!

On Sunday we unhooked Lucky Peek from the dock for the first time since arriving in Brunwick and took her and Bryan out for a sail on the Atlantic. It was a beautiful day with a nice 10 knot breeze. Although we didn’t catch any fish we did see a few dolphins leaping out of the water around us. So cool.

Oh, and there always a few boat projects to work on….

The Golden Isles of Georgia – St. Simon Island and Jeckyll Island

While Brunswick is not what I would describe as a destination city, it is situated next to the Golden Isles that include St. Simon and Jeckyll which attract their share of tourists seeking beautiful beaches and expansive golf courses. St. Simon is the bigger of the two islands but Jeckyll has a more interesting past and, in our opinion, was more beautiful with the old oak trees that canopy the roadways and drip Spanish moss from their expansive limbs. While that is a common sight around Georgia, it was especially cool on the small two-lane roads that circle the island. Jeckyll was once privately owned by a group of America’s wealthiest. Families such as the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Pulitzers, and a few others that had a few bucks to spare bought the island and formed their prestigious private Jeckyll Island club in 1886, limiting access on the island to only their elite members. Story has it that they didn’t even allow the President of the United States to visit because he wasn’t a member. Jeckyll is now owned by the state of Georgia (purchased in 1947) and further development is restricted to preserve it’s natural state.

Tropical Storm Tammy

The first week of October was thunderous and very wet due to Tropical Storm Tammy passing just south of us. We received somewhere around 16 inches of rain in 6 days and we had a couple of restless nights on the leading edge of the storm with the thunder shaking the boat and the lightening getting a little too close for comfort. There were many areas of Brunswick that experienced flooding that week, and we were not immune to the wet living conditions either. After discovering a soggy rug and a soaked settee cushion, we deduced that some areas of the boat were not water tight. We have added “rebed chain plates” to our list of projects. Fortunately that’s not a complex project and it’s one that needs to be done as a normal part of boat maintenance. Guess it was time for ours to be maintained.