We left Georgetown on Sunday and had a good, if bouncy, sail up to Rudder Cut Cay where we’re going to explore the Darby Castle. This is the first time in recent memory that we’ve actually ended up at the destination we planned (although for about an hour of this trip we decided on a closer anchorage because the weather was growing beyond the forecast). So that was a win!

3.15 – Sunday

After anchoring, we hopped in the dinghy to explore a cave and take some boat pics, but the dinghy would barely run. It needs to be a little choked to run and we can only plane, it won’t idle. So we didn’t get too far from the boat.

Fortunately, the fastest way to make new friends is to have dinghy problems, and when Kyle started troubleshooting the motor an awesome guy named Ian dinghied over and let Kyle hook up to his fuel hose / gas tank so that we could rule out a few components. It’s clearly a fuel problem, but we managed to rule out fuel, tank, hose, filter, and pump. We have barely any cell service here, but the word from our boat guy is that we need to clean the carb. We have no carb cleaner.

It’s a little ironic that all this is happening right after we left Georgetown, the land of plenty (plenty of boaters to help, plenty of supplies, plenty of internet). So we’ll have to head to Black Point to see if we can find some carb cleaner.

3.16 – Monday

This puts a little damper on our explorations. We can’t idle around and dinghy explore, but we can still plane around as long as we carefully time when we drop off plane because the motor will die and it’s hard to start back up. Should we even consider longer trips? We opted to take the risk to go see some ruins.

We dinghied over to towards Darby Island where we hear there’s a Nazi castle to explore.

We looked for a trail, but all we could find was a concrete dock with a no trespassing sign. Well, I guess we’ll be asking forgiveness on this one.

We hiked up the trail and about halfway up, we found the first one. Kyle was clotheslined by a length of twine that turned out to be a spider web, and above him, web spanning the trail, was a big golden orb weaver spider (banana spider)!

Now, we’ve run into these same fiends in SC so I had already done my research on them and aside from looking giant and terrifying, I also remembered that they have the same venom as black widow spiders, they just deliver a smaller dose of it. So it’s not going to kill you…but it’s not going to tickle either.

We ducked under the web and kept going, this time with Kyle waving a large stick in front of him. We saw two more spiders along the path, so now we haven’t even made it to the ruins and I already have the heebie jeebies. But! We made it to the castle and hopped inside to explore!

At this point I was jumpy enough that the board knocking against the house in the wind made me jump and then laugh nervously. Every single time it happened. Do we feel like we’re in a horror movie yet?

Darby Castle was originally a plantation owned by Sir Baxter. Allegedly, light signals and the concrete docks were used by German submarines that Baxter was aiding during WWII. Who knows if any of this is true, but it sounds more fun to say we explored a Nazi castle than an abandoned plantation.

There is still beautiful unfinished mahogany furniture up on the second floor, it would have been so much fun to take that home and finish it but we live on a boat and also, that’s stealing.

The views from the second floor balcony were incredible. Maybe you can see some white spots in the center of the photo, one of those is our boat!

We opted not to get too adventurous with our exploring the dilapidated building. In the US, if someone falls through a floor you can call an ambulance and they’ll help rescue and move you to the nearest hospital. If one of us fell through the floor here, best case scenario that person can still walk enough to make it down the trail into our barely running dinghy, at which point the nearest civilization is 3 hours away by catamaran and who knows how advanced the clinic is there. Most likely we’d need an airlift to Nassau. I know how bad this photo looks, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say we made smart choices while we were there!

If anyone else is looking to trespass, the castle is listed on BoatingHD as “green house” and on iNavX  it’s “green house ruins” and the map includes the trail. But for real, the ruins are guarded by venomous spiders, be very careful on the trail.

After we got our fill of the ruins, we started our trek back. We saw our first Bahamian snake, again, South Carolina prepared me enough to generally tell if snakes are venomous or not and this one looked harmless. I didn’t get a good photo. At this point we’ve become really jumpy about anything that moves. The next critter we ran into – Kyle almost accidentally kicked it! – is the biggest hermit crab I have ever seen. The shell was the size of a softball. It was crazy!

Then we got back to the spiders. The first two we passed by easily, but when we got to the terrifying web that spanned the trail, we found the orb weaver was erratically jumping around near the bottom of the web. Right where our heads had to duck underneath. We talked about using the stick to cut the web so it was no longer spanning the trail, but not only does that not feel right – we’re in her territory, we have no right to destroy her home – but also, what if we lost sight of the spider when she dropped to the ground near my bare toes?

We each ducked under the web very quickly, with one person keeping an eye on the spider. By then I was 100%, thoroughly creeped out, and even the bushes brushing my legs was enough to make me yelp. By the time we got to the end of the trail I felt like I had a hundred spiders in my hair. I have never been so happy to see the dinghy!

We headed home and ate some lunch. We need to wait for slack tide for our next excursion, which is a quick snorkel to see an underwater sculpture! The problem is that we don’t have an accurate way to predict the tide here, we pretty much have to watch until the boats in the anchorage are pointed into the wind instead of the current.

As is typical, I got antsy and we ended up going ahead of slack current, but it was slack enough that snorkeling wasn’t extra work.

We took some photos of the sculpture and then we’re both like “Now what?” There really wasn’t much else to see there. I hear there’s good snorkeling closer to the rock islands in the inlet, but with the way the dinghy is acting we’re being more conservative.

3.17 – Tuesday

We pulled up anchor this morning and moved about an hour over to Cave Cay. We took the “shallow water” passage and it must have been right around low tide because the depth sounder stayed between 5-7 ft the whole way through (we draw 4 foot). Kyle had his eyes glued to the depth sounder as I drove, when it dropped below 6 ft I kept reaching towards the throttle in indecision if I should slow down or not. We barreled through the whole area at full speed.

At Cave Cay we dropped anchor and took the dinghy into the bay with the cave. There were tons of turtles and large fish, but the water was so murky it was hard to make out.

The cave itself wasn’t too different from the one at our anchorage in Rudder Cut.

The bay was very calm though, if we had plans to stay here I would have gotten out the SUP and paddled around.

However, we’re pretty eager to have a dinghy in good working order, so we went back to the boat, pulled up the anchor, and had a really lovely, gentle sail to Black Point settlement on Great Guana Cay.