Hawksbill Cay

January 11.

Don’t you love a surprise? Like, when you are dinking along a coastline looking at the endless limestone overhangs, stopping at one beach after another to find only sand, palm trees, and rocks, but no trails inland. Just pushing a little further in the dinghy around the next bend, past the next beach, the next limestone cliff, thinking about calling it a day and turning back, when all of a sudden you round that last corner and the landscape completely changes. The dark hard jagged limestone and the constraining boundary of the tree line give way to a bright wave of warm expanse. This was our Hawksbill Cay experience.

We had stopped at Hawksbill last spring and had visited the loyalist ruins and found the trail leading across the salt pond to the beach. Not wanting to repeat steps taken so recently we decided to just row Fever up the coast to look at some small caves and see what else we could find.

The very north end of the cay held our big surprise, a flowing shallow sand bar, dry at low water. A breadth of beauty that would have been awash a few hours later on a rising tide, the luminous sand stretched out in waves cut with streams of bright blue water all the way to Shroud Cay in the north. A wonderful surprise for what was shaping up to be an eventless journey.