Saint Andrews Beach

I spent about 3 hours at the south end of Jekyll Island shooting the birds and the sunset. It was a glorious night, cool and comfortable, light breezes. I set up my tripod in the sand and took pictured of the birds first, as there was still reasonable but not perfect light.

Hundreds of scooters, terns, sandpipers, gulls and pelicans congregate at the south end rest and to spend the night. The terns and gulls put forth a cacophony of voices which rose and fell as I moved around. They seemed to be more or less collected by type, with the smaller birds like the sandpipers at the edges, and the larger terns and gulls in the middle. Like airplanes on an aircraft carrier, the terns lined up facing into the wind, while the sandpipers danced around looking for bugs in the sand, hopping in and out of the waves.

It would have been nice to have another couple hundred millimeters in my lens, but I had to make do with what I had, my 70-300 mm zoom lens. Autofocus kept trying to focus on the waves in the background, so I had to turn it off.

Later, as the sun started to dash into the treeline on the marsh across the bay, I switched to my 18-135 zoom to get a wider angle. The rusting shipreck buried in the sand provided a nice foreground for my composition, and occasionally a bird or three would wander into the frame. In the middle, a school of 4 or 5 dolphins gorged themselves on the abundant fish that mush have been schooling near the beach, and a dozen pelicans dive bombed their supper, too.

It seemed like forever for the sun to set, and I kept recomposing and shooting pictures, taking over 300 in all. What you see here are a few of the nicer ones.

The Art Festival - Third Place!

Third Place!

Yep, those are the famous Ciestoes hand knitted felted slippers made by my wonderful wife, placing third in the fiber arts competition at the Jekyll Island Arts Festival. The felted purses, left and right behind placed first and second. But this is a pretty good outing for a first entry in a juried art show. Of course, she's sold so many pairs while she's been here, we have overwhelming evidence that people like them. So it's no surprise that she won a ribbon.




Photo exhibits

Alas, I did not do so well in the photo competition. True, there were some excellent photos in the intermediate category, which is where I put myself. And I can't argue that the winners were wonderful pictures. But this outing got me started in showing my work in places other than my living room, and I learned a lot by doing it. Next time, I'll pay more attention to cropping and framing. These activities were rushed for this exhibit, and except for one, they didn't look as good as they could have. The net result is no ribbons for me.

Basket demo

Most of the arts on exhibit had demonstrations during the festival. The potters were making pots, the weavers were weaving, the spinners were spinning, and I walked around taking pictures. No, I wasn't demonstrating, just being myself.

Although Consuelo didn't have any baskets in the competition, her pine-needle basket class demonstrated their skills for the visitors at the festival. They got lots of interest and questions.

Busy, New and old Friends, Summer?

Turtle in the sun

The last month has been a busy one for both of us. Good busy, not bad busy. We've been happily doing things that we enjoy, finding friendship, and enjoying the turn toward warmth we've seen in the past few days.

We're still on Jekyll Island for another 2-1/2 weeks. This is the longest we've stayed in one place since we began our life on the road, not counting stays at our own property. It seems like we've only been here a week or two.

Allen Newland out of the sand

Consuelo is winding down her slipper knitting classes. I've lost track of how many students she's had, but I'm guessing a dozen or more. When she realized how long it typically took the average knitter to complete a pair of slippers (three weeks), she realized she would have to stop accepting students long before we leave here, in order to finish everything. Some were disappointed, but that just points to the continuing interest people in our community have in trying new things to satisfy their creative needs. A few knitters could not get through one pair. Others have ordered yarn for four or five pairs.

One of the Jekyll water towers

My project of fixing the wifi in the campground has been completely successful. Initially, I worked with the IT specialist on the island to load-balance the Cisco router. Once he gained confidence in my ability to troubleshoot and program the system, he turned it over to me to proceed. The main problem was not with the router, but rather with the configuration on the wifi access points. I've received many compliments for getting this running. The system is now up against the limited bandwidth of the DSL lines, instead of folks being unable to connect at all. Everybody gets a little bandwidth now, enough for email and limited web browsing. Typically 30-40 people are connected at any given time.

Consuelo and Mary Jo

The campground has turned from a retirement community to a family campground. The weather warmed into the 80s this week, just in time for school vacations, and all the little camp spaces that were empty all winter are now full of van campers, tents, and little RVs. The average age of a bike rider has dropped by 30 years.

I got to know one little boy who was camped behind our RV with his dad. Adam is 6, the precocious kind of kid who wants everything to be the biggest, fastest, smartest in his life. The three of us walked around the campground looking at the RVs, he showed me his Pokemon cards, and one day I came home and found his feet sticking out under our doorway. He had crawled under our motorhome to pet Thumper. When he came out, he looked like he had eaten a box of chocolate ice cream, with all the dirt on his face.

Ron Anderson ready to tee off

Consuelo and I both have entries in the Jekyll Island Arts Festival. She entered slippers in the fiber arts competition, and I entered 3 of my photos. She also knitted a dozen pairs of slippers to sell in the arts store associated with the festival.

I also produced a 5 minute DVD on Jekyll Island Winter, which a number of people have paid me for. I'm also working on 2010 Jekyll Calendars which have been requested by other campers.

As we wind things down, Consuelo is now sewing a dress for Amelia's birthday next week. I'm playing more golf.

All this activity has spawned a whole new collection of friends and acquaintances from all over the US and Canada. Some we'll probably track down in our travels. Others we'll look forward to seeing again back here on Jekyll in a couple years.

Art and Sharon Bonertz

A plus for us, we've had some old friends here in the park with us for a month each. Wayne and Mary Jo Lohrmann were here in February, and Art and Sharon Bonertz from Alberta arrived March 1st. They make us laugh, a rare and welcome commodity in the current state of financial affairs. In fact, we nearly got thrown out of the campground for laughing a few years ago. We're not quite so silly this time, but then again, we're camped farther away from the campground host!