Hawksbill Cay

6/7-9/2021

After leaving Black Point we started back north to the Exuma Land and Sea Park. We spent one night in Warderick Wells, and then moved to Hawksbill Cay, an island we haven’t visited yet. There are lots of megayachts in the Bahamas this year because of the virus closures in Europe and elsewhere, and thankfully there are only a couple of them anchored at this island. We’re getting a little tired of seeing them.

We first anchored on the south side of the island. There are some beautiful beaches here, and Sinbad had lots of fun running and digging on them.

We decided to go for a hike through the island to find an old housing site noted in the park literature. We found some nice trails (see below) and got to the Exuma Gulf side of the island where we had a great view, but had no luck finding the old site.

The park offers mooring balls in most of these anchorages, and when we arrived here we tried to pick up the pendant on one. Unfortunately the boat hook was lost overboard, we thought never to be seen again. A couple days later we searched for it in the dinghy, and sure enough we found it in 15 feet of water. Marilou was able to pick it up with another deck tool, so we were back in business. It wasn’t so much the cost of replacing it, but we would be without it for the rest of our trip.

After a couple days we decided to move to a different anchorage to search for the Russell ruins mentioned above. In 1785 the Russell family who were loyal to the British King were relocated here from America and given a land grant to farm sisal on the island. They built houses using local rocks, wood harvested from the trees present at the time, and a cement made from cooking sea shells. After landing on a different beach from our previous hike we followed a trail up a hill and found the ruins. The family abandoned the site in about 1830, and the ruins were rediscovered in the last 20 years or so.

The houses and storage buildings no longer have rooves, but some of the walls are still standing. It’s surprising how small the structures were, but they likely spent most of their time working outdoors. The photos below show some of the walls we found while walking around the site.

We also found the oven used to cook the cement and an adjacent pile of conch shells, shown below. The oven is in the shape of a beehive. Pretty surprising these shells are about 200 years old.

We also found several cisterns cut into the rock to store water, and a long wall of rocks piled up. I really can’t imagine the purpose of the long wall, but maybe they were working on a much larger structure.