Blackbeard Island: Carrie, Sandy, Percy, Amadou, George, Scotty, and Diana

By Joe Cunningham

This is a small book with some thirty photographs, some beautiful, some grim. The book especially remembers and memorializes two Aiken, SC, law enforcement officers who were shot to death while doing their duty. The two died, a decade ago, from bullets to their heads. Their abrupt, unexpected deaths (and other like deaths) have placed the temper of police and policing on a short fuse. 

A second theme is to analyze the post-mortems on George Floyd, to see what evidence they offer for his cause of death. There is little concrete evidence in these post-mortems for an officer-inflicted cause of death. The postmortems reveal potential causes of death, all non-traumatic, such as established heart disease, and ingested Fentanyl and other drugs. George Floyd’s specific cause of death, while easy to speculate upon, is not so easy to assign. It is written that philosophy is the tool one uses to debunk myth, to demystify myth to arrive at a better truth. Here is some philosophy. 

A third theme examines how we raise our children. The book addresses the mal effects the phenomena known as Adverse Childhood Events have on the developing child. These events are known to harm children both emotionally and physically. The mechanism of injury from such abuse is being studied and is thought by some investigators to be the inhibition of brain growth, particularly in the filling in of specific zones of gray matter.

Blackbeard Island is an island of low sand and maritime forest. Accessible only by boat, it is a federal wildlife refuge on the mid-Georgia coast. Its acreage is a third of Manhattan’s; its permanent population is zero. Larger, harder Manhattan has close to two million residents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977264220

Joe Cunningham

Joe Cunningham lives in Aiken, South Carolina.

Book preview

Blackbeard

I BEGAN TAKING my boat, Tenacious, to Blackbeard Island to find the dune lying between the ocean and creek, to anchor near it in the creek and walk to the beach. The creek to the dune is an estuary called Blackbeard Creek. The creek’s inland mouth is on Sapelo Sound, and its ocean mouth is the Cabretta Inlet on the Atlantic Ocean. The creek separates Sapelo Island from Blackbeard Island, although some of Blackbeard’s refuge land, mostly marshland, is on the Sapelo side of the creek.

I took the Tenacious into Sapelo Sound and then to the entrance to Blackbeard Creek. The creek’s entrance is marked on Blackbeard’s northwest corner by a green ICW marker and a pile of underwater rocks. The creek then winds down to the heart of Blackbeard Island where, between Blackbeard and Sapelo, a dock, a good anchorage, and the ranger station lie. The island has no permanent human inhabitants. There are seasonal rangers who do island work, and alligators, pigs, deer, armadillos, snakes, birds, dung beetles, moles, dolphins, and no-see-ums. The island is a national wildlife refuge of five thousand acres.

The green waterway marker eleven marks the entrance to Blackbeard Creek from Sapelo Sound; the view here is to the southwest. The birds in the water are standing on a pile of underwater rocks dumped on the sound’s bottom more than a century ago. The bird on the marker looks back at the tug Tenacious. The water here is fifteen to twenty feet deep; the tidal range is six to nine feet The rocks can be a foot or two above water at low tide. Parts of Sapelo Sound and the Intracoastal Waterway are in the background.

Before setting out for Blackbeard, I looked for a launch ramp to access Sapelo Sound. The best was on the Barbour River. Ten miles of water separate the ramp from the Blackbeard dune. That’s about two hours of motoring in the boat. A boat navigating to Blackbeard, with any serious draft at all, should proceed on a rising tide. Low country water is opaque beyond a foot or two, owing to the suspended solids generally referred to as sediments. These are sand, silt, clay particles, and tiny pieces of car and truck tires which have been washed into the water from bridges and roads. The bottom is the same color as the sediment, which is a bleak gray-yellow. The water is more opaque in the summer and is clearer in the winter. The bottom is visible only when one’s boat is resting on it. The Tenacious grounds out when its sounder says two feet. Groundings are usually nothing more than a soft arrest, in the low country, and, except for wasting time, are harmless if you shut your engine off in time so that your seawater intake port (now on the bottom) doesn’t suck mud and sand into your engine’s cooling system and block its function.

The Barbour River ramp is located on Harris Neck. The Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge on the mainland is a separate refuge from the Blackbeard Island refuge; they would be about six miles apart as the crow flies. Harris Neck contains a WWII airfield whose abandoned landing strips are arranged in an equilateral triangle. The refuge has been closed to the public for several years now, but on my first visit to the area, the gate to the refuge and its unused airfield was open.

The roads from Aiken to Harris Neck are of two lanes through the small towns of Georgia and South Carolina. They are rough, narrow, and in places have no shoulders but are part of the overall adventure of the thing. All lead to the I-95, which is the route to mid-Georgia. On July 23, 2017, I came down the road to the Harris Neck refuge. This was east of the interstate. I was poorly prepared. I had no proper charts of Blackbeard Creek. I’d stopped at several Walmarts in Savannah, all of which claimed to sell charts, but none did.

By mistake I turned in to the gate for Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge and, soon lost, by accident, found and rode an airfield landing strip. The going was easy on the strip, like driving on an interstate, but without the traffic. Actually, it was like driving on a wide, weedy, fissured airstrip flanked by dense, low country forest. The last airplanes this runway had seen were WWII coastal reconnaissance craft. I found my way out after leaving the airstrip and turning the rig around with great difficulty on a narrow refuge road. On my way out, I had to drive past the rangers’ compound with its judgmental inside eyes. This country does have a lot to be proud of: settled the war, tried to make friends with everybody. But the launch ramp I sought wasn’t in the Harris Neck Refuge. The refuge gate has not been open to the public for the years since. The Tenacious with her inglorious incursion and her tour of the fissured strip was the refuge’s last visitor.

I left the Harris Neck Refuge, turned left, and found the gate to the Barbour River ramp on nearby Sunfish Road. A half mile down the road, the ramp’s lot has a dozen lined spaces for trucks and trailers. One car was parked in the lot. Its occupants were two young men fishing from the ramp’s dock. The Barbour River, fifty yards wide here, flows with an outgoing tide to Sapelo Sound. I launched both boats, the Tenacious and the nine-foot plastic dinghy. The guys on the dock quit fishing for a moment to help me warp the Tenacious over to the dock using a long line.

I tucked the dinghy alongside the Tenacious and motored on. Blackbeard lay beyond the wide inland basin called Sapelo Sound. Halfway to the sound, the dinghy ducked its nose and filled with water. I anchored off Barbour Island, bailed the dinghy, and motored on. The air was hot. The wind was light. I wasn’t towing the dinghy right.

The rock pile at Marker Eleven at low tide at the entrance to Blackbeard Creek. Leave the rocks to the right when entering Blackbeard Creek. The picture does not reveal the day’s sultry heat.

The river is wide and deep at Barbour Island, where I bailed the dinghy, averaging in depth about fifteen feet. It would be a great waterway anchorage if it were more accessible from the sound. It has protection, moderate current, and a good bottom to anchor in. The problem is the shallow Barbour River bar into Sapelo Sound. Leaving the river for the sound (and vice versa) requires that one stay fifty to one hundred yards off Barbour Island on a course toward waterway marker number 138. A broad, sandy shoal lies to the right (south) when coming out of the Barbour River. Once into the deep water of the sound, it’s a right turn to Blackbeard Island.

The entrance to Blackbeard Creek lies between the green marker 11 and a sandy beach on the northwest of Blackbeard. I crept up to the entrance of the creek’s channel, an unseen narrow thread of seven feet of water at low tide. Past the marker and the rocks, I stopped and anchored in three feet of water. I could see the anchor, a Danforth, settle like an underwater ghost on the tan and muddy bottom.

The air was hot, hazy. The white sandy beach was on the left and a mud bank covered with thin water lay on the right. I had choices: go slowly into the creek and find the unmarked channel, or anchor for the night, or return to the sound and home. Stopped, I poured a gallon of reserve diesel fuel into the tank and checked the engine oil and coolant. I did the always-needed tidy-up. The dinghy dawdled at the end of its rope. As we sat at anchor, a three-dimensional picture emerged: if I motored toward the beach, I might find the deeper water of the creek. The shoal was right. The deeper water seemed left. I pulled the anchor aboard and motored toward the island in three feet of water, then four feet, to five feet, and so forth. The deeper water of the channel was closer to the island. I turned left where Blackbeard Creek separates from McCloy Creek and there found ten feet of water. I accelerated from three to six knots and swamped the dinghy again. Down anchor, bail dinghy, this time tying the dinghy’s chin tight and over the stern rail of the Tenacious. And there it’s been towed ever since.

The entrance channel to Blackbeard Island.

The shallowest part of the creek comes where a pond-like body of water of several acres has an entrance and two exits. I entered the shallow pond and turned right. Wrong choice. In a hundred yards of going, I came to a place glorious with sun, pines, palmettos, and creekside grass where birds chirped, and the sunlight cast its intricate shadows but a tree had fallen into the creek and its branches above and below the water, where the tree reclined its weight on the bottom, stopped my progress. I turned and retreated to the pond and took the exit to the left. The water continued at three to four feet deep. After one hundred yards of shallow motoring, a large creek flowed in from the left. The water under the boat then went from three to twenty feet in a boat length.

The pond so navigated is the highest land connection between Sapelo and Blackbeard, and it bears the shallowest water. The creek’s tides meet at and separate from the pond and because of this meeting, there is no serious tidal current to scour the pond’s bottom.

The ranger station and dock are located just ahead at Nelson’s Bluff. The water opposite the dock is ten feet deep. A sign says that this dock is not your home. Load or unload if you wish but be brief. Do not dock here. Underwater cables lie on the bottom of the anchorage and can snag your anchor. Do be careful.

I anchored in nine feet of water and dinghied to the dock. The only tourist accommodation at the ranger station is a visitor notification board with island maps printed in humidity-limp brochures. The maps show the island’s main-attraction walking trails. One can walk a nine-mile loop north to Sapelo Sound and back. The South Beach Trail looked to be an easy walk to the beach. I took that trail, wide, sandy, flanked by forest. A cart parked near the beach was loaded with beachcomber junk. Two young ranger women motored by on an ATV. We waved. Two women worked near the more modern ranger’s house. We waved. There are two houses; the one occupied, the newer one, is air-conditioned. The older house, wooden, stick-built, nice porch, is not occupied.

The South Beach Trail connects the ranger station to Blackbeard’s Atlantic beach.

Back on board, anchor up, I motored toward the ocean inlet. The boat was slowed by the incoming tide, missed shallows, and errant direction. I arrived unharmed at the dune. It had turned red in the afternoon sun. It was, from my perspective in the creek, fissured, soft, and vertical. While setting two anchors in the current, I could hear the muffled crash of ocean surf from over the dune.

I was fifty yards from shore, the current was swift, the dune was vertical, the dinghy was hard to row. It needed another person seated in its stern to raise its bow for better balance. It was a one-person dinghy that was balanced for a rower and a passenger. The wind blew at fifteen miles per hour. With this accumulation of negatives, I let the dinghy drift backward, set the boarding ladder, and let out a line to which was tethered an inflated two-gallon fender. These were good precautions against falling overboard, but bad preparations for going ashore. I’d stay aboard. I’d come this far to fail.

The dune in the late afternoon sun. Clouds float just above the grasses on the dune.

The sun set. I took pictures. Dinner was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’d given up alcohol five years before. Drinking wasn’t doing me any good. I couldn’t think of anything good that had happened to me when I was drinking except for thinking that I was dancing better. I thought my nose was becoming rhinophymatous. My joke was that when I quit work, I’d start drinking again. That hasn’t happened. I’d made these boating preparations entirely sober. I would miss walking the dune. Sleep was impossible. A hot wind of eighty degrees or more blew through the cabin. The air would have been hotter with the hatches closed. The current ran at three knots. The tide reversed. The anchors held. The wind blew. There was nothing within a hundred yards that didn’t shake, rattle, or roll. Dawn faded the Milky Way, slowed the breeze, but maintained the heat. During the night the skyglow from Brunswick and the Golden Isles domed faintly on the southwest horizon.

I gathered the floating line, the dinghy, the ladder, the anchors, and motored toward Nelson’s Bluff. Dark pines passed by on the right. The diesel thumped. Exhaust water plopped into the creek.

Past Nelson’s Bluff, the deep water meanders of the creek to Sapelo Sound were easily negotiated. Beyond the middle of the sound, near a sounding of four feet at the Barbour River bar, my son Jim called on the cell phone. Full daylight. His mother and I had been divorced for twelve years. I can’t recall what we talked about, but the call marked the return of cell phone coverage, which I was about to need. Just past Barbour Island with its houses and docks on the water, I mistakenly wandered up the Island