10 nautical miles
My dad got us underway around 7 am. The sail to Jekyll Island took 2 hours and we were docked at the island marina by 9 am. We sprayed off the boat, fueled up, and filled the water tanks. Then we picked out bikes to borrow from the marina.
There are paved biking/walking paths running all over the island. We biked through a quaint resort and stopped at a sweets shop. The shop had ice cream, so we got 2 waffle cones, one with peach and one with caramel turtle ice cream. Then we continued on the trail following the water.
When we got to the northern face of the island we biked out on the pier. From there, we had a good view of the Saint Simons Sound incident: a little over a year ago a brand new cargo ship carrying over 4,000 cars capsized in the channel. Thankfully, all of the crew members lived. They are currently cutting the ship into "slices" to get it out of the water. After inspecting the wreck from afar, we continued biking.
We deviated off the trail and rode on the beach. When we got around to the east side of the island, we had a tough upwind battle. The wind was blowing from the southeast at about 20 knots, so biking was slow-going! We were grateful when we found an exit leading to the main trail and could get out of the wind.
A little while later, we arrived at Beach Town and stopped for lunch at Tortuga Jack's. It was a fun setting and had a great view of the water. All of the dishes were delicious and we barely had any leftovers.
As we were riding back to the Marina, it started to lightly rain. We picked up the pace and got to the boat about 15 minutes before the worst of the storm. When we turned the instruments on the get ready to leave the dock, we found that a few of the systems had uncalibrated, meaning they couldn't give us any accurate data. We spent the next 15 minutes recalibrating the instruments in the channel. Our original plan had been to sail through the storm to Cumberland Island, but, with the 15 minutes we used to calibrate, we decided to anchor instead.
We did schoolwork while waiting for the storm to pass, but the end never came (at least not during the day). That night, we watched Forest Gump. I loved the movie!