34. Cat Island

On Sunday March 16, we left George Town at 7:00 in the morning and sailed to New Bight on Cat Island. It was a great feeling to be sailing again after staying in the same place for three weeks. We had great companions and when we arrived at New Bight we had a pot luck dinner on Just Imagine, just one of many that we had.
Here Roman is trying to blow a conch. It is much more enjoyable to eat in good company and to combine our resources and knowledge. The six of us played a game of farkel which is a funny fast-moving dice game.

Cat Island is a different from the rest of the islands we had experienced.
There are lots of tall trees and lush vegetation. The homes are well looked after and painted with soft pastel colours. We walked everywhere and as everything is quite far apart, we walked a lot!

The highest point in the Bahamas is on Cat Island.
We hiked up the 206 feet to the Hermitage of Father Jerome. Father Jerome was first an Anglican priest and then a Catholic one.
He built many churches on Cat Island and lived the last years of his life in the Hermitage which has the Stations of the Cross as you climb higher and higher.

The hermitage was modelled after the chapels in Europe and was very Spartan. I believe that Father Jerome died in the late 1950’s in his eighties. He is well remembered in the islands.

My hip was fine going up and down the mountain (really a hill) but gave up on the two mile walk to the local grocery store. The people were very friendly and welcoming. On the way to the store, we stopped at a small building and talked with the people there. Several men were cleaning conch they had just caught. They not only showed us how to clean them but also told us about male and female conch.


The male has an appendage that he stretches to the female who opens up to receive the male. Sound familiar? These men had a great sense of humour as did everyone in our group. The conch has a pistol which is a thin straw like transparent tube about 8-10 inches long. Males who eat them are supposed to become more virile. The men were the grandsons of Marguerite who had 18 children and too many grand and great grandchildren to count, she told us. So maybe there was something about those pistols. All the men in our group tried them and they found them flavourless. Marguerite, at 80, still ran a restaurant and had come for these conch. She took a shopping bag full of conch with her. She offered to drive us to the grocery store but only I took her up on the offer while everyone else walked.

During our stay on Cat Island we found papaya trees, coconuts trees and some kind of fruit that looks like a large kiwi fruit. Roman showed us how to tell if a coconut or papaya was ripe. On the dock near where we had pulled our dinghies up on the sand, the guys used machetes to clean the coconuts, which we took on board.Vegetables and fruit and food, in general, are very expensive. Although there are no taxes in the Bahamas, anything that comes into the country is taxed at a hefty 30%, we were told. So that makes food much more expensive as most everything is imported in spite of the fact that there are places to grow things.

Our next stop was Little San Salvador which has been purchased by Holland America Cruise Line ads is a stop for the cruise ships. Here the beaches are well-groomed and everything is picture perfect, with deck chairs, umbrellas, cabanas and even paddle boats. Unfortunately the weather was far from perfect with winds and rain so we sang Happy Birthday to Robin over the VHF radio and decided to continue to Eleuthera Island the next day. Fortunately there were no cruise ships in the harbour and it was easy anchoring.