We had drunk julep and walked off half of our “Modified American Meal Plan” on the beach and canoed the other off around the marshy tidal creeks.
We had done the Turtle Centre and the day trips to Cumberland Island and Okefenokee Swamp Park. We had ticked off Brunswick and picnicked in the Clam Creek picnic area.
So there was only one thing left – join the Shrimpin’ Cruise.
In 1916 a member wrote : “Jekyll exists today as an ingenious solution to the difficult problem of finding profound seclusion and congenial companionship in one and the same spot.”
Jekyll Island, the southern most of the Golden Isles joined by causeways from Georgia's Colonial coastline, was the favoured watering hole of the fortunate few. It was a former rice and cotton plantation where the haute monde hung and chilled out in the Gilded Era, the Jazz Age and throughout the Roaring Twenties.
In its heyday one sixth of the world’s wealthiest businessmen treated the seven mile long by a half mile wide barrier island as their second home. The super-rich overwintered amid the elegant grandeur of the Marshes of Glynn.
They called it, “the cat’s meow”.
Newspaper magnates rubbed shoulders with railroad barons. Timber men mixed with landlords and lard lords.
The banker JP Morgan arrived from New York in his yacht Corsair and the equally affluent William Vanderbilt arrived in Alva.
Other residents included the Crane family and David H King, designer of Madison Square Garden. The Carnegie family built Dungeness, their Scottish castle on nearby Cumberland Island. It burnt down in 1959.
So they wouldn’t miss the finer things in life they created their own oyster beds. They stocked the island with English pheasant and the king of Italy gave them wild boar to take pots at when they were bored with alligators.
Beneath the oaks and magnolia, they whizzed about in their miniature one-man “Red Bug” cars, ate 12-course dinners under gas-fired chandeliers, played golf on the 1898 “Oceanside Nine” and taxed themselves as little as possible. And they had 17 or so bathrooms to choose from in their 22-room cottages. Anything less than 80,000sq ft was considered quaint.
In 1888, they built themselves a members-only club – “Nothing gaudy , everything substantial”. It is now the Historic Landmark Jekyll Club Hotel. It became “a retreat for languid souls”.
You can visit some of the bijou winter homes of shakers and makers. Some are now shops. Rockefeller bought Indian Mound and, to keep up with the Pulitzers, fitted it with a six-man jacuzzi and a walk-in lift.The first transatlantic phone called was placed from Jekyll.
The hotel is still the epitome of gracious living. But the Golden Isles remain largely undiscovered by non-Americans keen to find a more stylish, elegant and less shoulder-peeling alternative to Florida.
My face certainly developed a good colour on board the Lady Jane.
If you put your head over a giant pan of boiling shrimp you quickly get a good tan.
Lady Jane is a special lady, the captain told us over the PA. She is the only shrimper on the east coast offering cruises. Marine biologists are part of the crew on your "calm water excursion" down St Simon's Sound and more than happy to teach you how to tell the difference between a bonnethead, amberjack and a blacklip, as well as showing you how to peel a prawn.
If you get it wrong the seagulls don’t seem to notice.
It’s all great fun. And you can’t move for people taking photos of each other smiling away and shaking their heads in disbelief, never imagining that they would ever get the opportunity to handle a real live prawn.
There are three other Golden Isles. Twelve miles from Brunswick and reached by the FJ Torras Causeway St Simon’s (Called The Island, population 13,000) has the remains of the Frederica early colonial fort where John Wesley and his brother Charles preached before founding the Methodist Church. The King and Prince Hotel, named not after royalty but because its original owners were tall and short, was built as “a seaside dance club”.
The island is the home of 2012 US Ryder Cup captain, Davis Love III.
Sea Island probably has the most expensive houses. It also has The Cloister, built in 1932 by Howard E Coffin, of the Hudson Motor Company. George Bush senior and his wife, Barbra, honeymooned there.
Little St Simon’s is only accessible by boat and offers The Lodge, for people interested in salt marshes, sandbars and sand dunes, cabbage palms, red cedars, piping plovers, wood storks, roseate spoonbills and nesting loggerhead turtles. It is the least commercial of the islands and perfect for those who can do without playing golf and like the sound of places with names such as Buttermilk Sound.
But Jekyll is the place. As it always has been. The island and its club haven’t changed much in 100 years. Because the local haven’t. They still look askance at anyone they suspect of not idling. See jekyllclub.com and goldenisles.com
