April showers bring May flowers, as the saying goes. But what in the world does June monsoons bring? Maybe July pontoons.Two years ago we couldn’t buy a rain cloud even if we had the massive cash vaults of Big Oil. Nary a drop of the oxygen-and-two-hydrogen combo could be found. When we did receive a few droplets from the skies above, we found it necessary to capture the treasure in a bucket and photograph it for posterity.This year, however, has been quite a different story. It has been the difference between casting actors for the desert-set 1987 movie “Ishtar” to selecting the leads for the liquefied 1995 flick of “Waterworld.” One if by land, two if by sea, these two lousy films will make you seasick.Please do not take my rain comments to mean I want to or we should boycott precipitation. No, absolutely not, but even local farmers would agree spreading the deluge of the last three weeks over a couple months would alleviate the need for scuba gear to tend to their crops.And, trust me, Screven County has not been the lone locale to get rain. Dark clouds have been in abundance – including at my weekend destination along our Georgia’s great coastline.The Georgia Press Association held its annual awards banquet Friday evening on Jekyll Island and I promise you that you did not have to travel to the edges of the island to see water. From above, it came in sheets, pails, troughs, tubs, pools, saunas, coolers, and jugs. It came from the north, south, east and west.The song “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” could have been renamed “Raindrops Keep Filling the Earth Up To My Head.”Luckily, I stand about 6-foot tall, but my wife and four children on the trip with me came lip to liquid with the rainfall.Despite the weather forecasts that projected enough water to fill an Olympic-sized pool, we used the “we’re here so let’s go philosophy” and decided to ride the ferry to the land of wildlife and tranquility known as Cumberland Island, Georgia’s largest and southernmost barrier island.For those who have never been to the 18 miles of Cumberland, it is an island with a complex ecological system of interdependent animal communities. It has a saltwater marsh, a maritime forest and beach where wildlife like raccoons, Great horned owls, Peregrine falcons and a hundred wild horses live in a serene testament to the beauty of nature.Pour in an ocean’s worth of water from series after series of rain clouds and the only wildlife we came close to was mosquitoes. All due respect to mosquitoes, I got enough of those winged warriors on a camping trip in the woods in April.Walk down the island’s river trail, it rained. Head to the beach, it rained. Go to the bathroom and the rain awaited you when you returned from until the shelter.We could have opted instead to stay in the motel room, flip on the Nature Channel and pretend that the baboons we were watching were native to islands of the southeastern United States.“Kids, just squint your eyes and that primate looks just like a Ghost Crab. I promise,” I could have strongly conveyed to my children. “Look … it is an armadillo, not like the ones back home dead thanks to the tread of a Goodyear tire.” Inside the room certainly would have been drier. The four kids’ 28-page Junior Ranger Programs from the National Park Service were still damp days after the island excursion.Now we could have weenied out and just watched the minutes slowly tick by under a grove of trees for the ferry to return to the island to pick us and the other Cumberland visitors up for a trip back to St. Mary’s, but that’s not how we operate.Sometimes you have to man up, woman up and child up.“This is no longer a vacation,” spewed Chevy Chase’s character “Clark Griswald” in the 1983 movie “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” “It’s a quest. It’s a quest for fun. I’m gonna have fun and you’re gonna have fun.” Mr. Griswald, I concur.We were soggy, real soggy, but we didn’t let the weather get us down.As we were leaving, we turned our eyes back toward the island to get a final glimpse. As should be expected, the sun had just come out and so did two of the wild horses, giving us evidence animals actually do exist on the island.As my two daughters, wrapped in not-so-dry towels, fell asleep on my shoulders, I watched a seagull follow our boat for 45 minutes back to the dock. I figured that bird just might be about all the wildlife I would witness on this trip. I was so wrong and I was thankful to be so wrong.That evening we went to Jekyll Island with our fingers crossed. We were in hopes of seeing something amazing.And we did.Our family watched a Loggerhead sea turtle lay her eggs on the beach, cover the leathery shells of her future children, and then slip and crawl her way back into the water. Most people, we were told by the island’s turtle center leaders, do not get to see such an event on their first time out. Our group leader Dougie, who ironically has family who lives in Cooperville, was on her first-ever trip to the turtle beach experience as an instructor.Since the turtle we watched was new to the beach, she was tagged by researchers to keep track of her moments in the vast waters. Believing the mother turtle needed a name, my girls choose “Sara.” That name suited center staff members just fine since -- again an ironic clause -- a beloved veteran co-worker by that same name had recently gotten married and moved to Chicago.Now a “Sara” will remain a part of the center for years to come, at least in the eyes of my daughters. Some Loggerheads live to almost 200 years old.What a great night! The Nature Channel could never beat this.After a pleasant slumber, we – as promised to our children -- went back to the same area of the Jekyll beach where “Sara” highlighted our trip.We took photographs of the imprints of “Sara” in the sand, and then --not surprisingly -- it rained. 

Enoch Autry is the publisher-editor of the Sylvania Telephone.