Rudder Cay excitement — Cupcake Afloat

What do I start with?

The Nazis? The Castle? The bats? Or the goat?

I’ll start with the sharks.

Last week on our way to explore Darby island, we spotted our friends Andromeda spear fishing nearby. They saw two lemon sharks. Lemon sharks are sharky sharks. They kept fishing, we kept moving.

Now let’s get started.

There is an abandoned house called The Castle on Darby Island. Because, in our anchorage, there were lots of kid boats, the plan was to investigate The Castle with Piper and Andromeda. Other people had the same idea and there were two other kid boats, Mohini and Bliss tying up to the concrete spiky dock when we arrived. (A spiky dock is an iron shore dock. Iron shore is limestone that got melted away by acid in the rain and by the ocean and by the sand and by the wind.)

Nine kids and seven grownups trooped up to the castle. And on the way we spotted poisonwood, snake skins and a real live snake! (Poisonwood is like poison ivy except it is a tree that is common. So common that it is on most islands in the Bahamas. If you even stand under a poisonwood tree in the rain you get all itchy.)

The snakes were small constrictors. They just creeped me out so I walked away.

Quick history lesson everyone: The Castle was owned by a Nazi supporter in 1939 who would flash lights from his house and guide German submarines in and help them provision.

Apparently the cement was mixed with salt water so the rebar in it would rust and then the ceiling would collapse so there was a room with so much rubble you couldn’t go into it.

Knowing that, I felt like every ceiling was going to collapse. The place I felt the safest was on the balcony over the former grand entrance.

Something that was cool is that the windows were so big that you could climb out onto the above ground cistern. They needed a cistern to store their rainwater because there are no wells or streams on the island.

As you would imagine, the floor was hollow above the cistern, so that too felt like it would collapse.

After The Castle exploring we walked down to a cave that has bats. And with bats come bat poop (guano). So my rainbow crocs with a white bottom got brown poo on them.

Also, with bats and bat poop comes bat smelly. And it was smelly.

Side note: Darby Island is for sale for 39 million dollars! For poisonwood and ruins and constrictors and bat poop. I wouldn’t buy it.

As we were dingying away from expensive Darby, we saw a goat on a hill! Since the dads were about to go spearfishing we joked that someone should spear that goat. Then we could have goat hide life jackets.

When the dads went in the water at shark hour, Piper caught a lion fish. And Bliss caught a fish that I don’t know the name of. But it swam off of the spear, right towards Bliss’ dinghy. (With a 20 horse power outboard. The boat not the fish.)

The girls in the dinghy scooped up the fish and we all dinghied on our way.

That’s the safe place my parents chose for me to play.