We thought the prefrontal southwesterlies would make for a good sail to Cat Island, 30 miles to the northwest of our Conception anchorage. The plan was to head for the Hawk's Nest Creek Marina and Resort, which would be our first marina since Nassau and about our only option for a good place to ride out a front. A marina would be a nice treat, we decided, especially since it was a "resort". When our friends on Gratitude, who had caught up with us in Conception and would travel along with us to Cat, suggested going out to dinner at the marina restaurant, we quickly agreed, since our cruising guide had given it high marks. We still trolled lines, though, as we'd eaten or given away all the mahi-mahi and knew there were plenty more out there in the deep water between the islands.
You know the saying about the best laid plans? The first thing that happened was that the winds slacked off to almost nothing. We could see the dark clouds approaching, and sure enough, we got rained on -- not a deluge but a good wetting-down none the less -- and the wind clocked around right into the northwest. We tried to sail as much as we could in the right general direction, but the wind kept coming around in front of us and eventually we gave up and became a motorboat.
When we got close enough, Gratitude called the marina to make reservations for dinner, but it turned out that if nobody makes reservations by 2 pm, they close the restaurant and dismiss the staff. They'd had several late requests, though, so they had arranged to take interested marina guests over to another restaurant, and we gave them our order over the radio.
The fishing gave us no consolation, although we got one good strike. When hooked, mahi-mahi immediately jump out of the water, flashing their colors; instead, this fish dove and swam at us, directly under the boat. Britt wasn't quite sure what to do. While he was trying to move across to the other side of the boat, the line became too slack and the fish got off. At the marina, some people on a sportfish boat told us that from our description of its behavior, they thought we had hooked a tuna.
We arrived off the entrance to Hawk's Nest Creek in mid-afternoon. As we turned into the approach channel, the wind dropped to nothing. The marina basin was dredged out of a swamp. We knew the equation: no wind, plus swamp, equals no-see-ums. As soon as we had made fast to the dock, we dashed below and put screens on all the ports and hatches, and did not re-emerge until we'd put on long sleeves and long pants and slathered our exposed parts with bug dope. Of course by then we already had a few dozen bites each.
The newly-dredged marina had all the ambiance of an open-pit mine, but the prices belonged to the Ritz. The buck a foot per night didn't include water or power (and in fact they had not yet hooked up the power for the slips we had been assigned to), showers were $2.50, laundry (done by marina staff) was $12 a load, and "Sheila's Body Massage" was $50. Needless to say, we did not indulge in any of these pricy extras, although we did take the opportunity to dispose of our trash for free. The resort part of the marina was a half-mile walk or golf-cart ride away, where one could sit in air-conditioned comfort and drink $4.50 cocktails. There we waited for our ride to dinner.
The clubhouse looked out over The Bight, where we would have anchored if the forecast had been good. A sailboat bobbed gently at anchor, mocking us for paying $40 for a bug-infested swamp pit. There was no sign of the supposed front. Perhaps, we grumbled, the little storm we'd sailed through was it, and now all would be light winds, and we were stuck swatting at expensive no-see-ums instead of being anchored out in the bug-free zone.
Finally, a couple of beat-up old trucks materialized to take the marina guests to the Ocean View Restaurant. The view, of Cat Island's reef-strewn southern shore, was certainly nice, but of course our house has a perpetual ocean view. The food was unimpressive except for the pricy, spicy, and delicious conch chowder. We returned to the boats, the no-see-ums mercifully gone, and went to bed.
We were woken at about 1:00 in the morning by the incessant flashing and loud booms of an enormous and very close thunderstorm. The wind howled out of the northwest as the storm bore down on us, and we just had time to congratulate ourselves for the amazing prescience we'd shown in choosing to stay at the marina, when the rain came crashing down and we realized that the windows were all wide open. We jumped up and stumbled around closing everything up, working by the illumination of the lightning which was now pretty much continuous, but it was too late for Britt's computer, which got a good soaking. He spent the next few days trying to coax it back to life, but it looks like the hard disk is toast.
The next day we headed out to do some deep-water fishing in Exuma Sound before angling back to anchor in The Bight. We sailed some and motored too much, and caught exactly one barracuda and one small bar jack, both of which we released. Now that we are honed for mahi-mahi, they seem to have vanished.
We anchored just off the town of New Bight, and in the morning I went ashore to the first Batelco office I'd been inside in over two weeks. Finally, a chance to upload web pages and do email! Back at the boat we packed a lunch then joined Rosemary and Richard from Gratitude on a pilgrimage to The Hermitage.
When
Father Jerome, the architect-priest who built or rebuilt many
churches in the Bahamas, including several we'd
seen on Long Island, retired in 1939, he came back to Cat Island.
Here he built himself a mini-monastery, The Hermitage, atop the
highest point in the Bahamas, and lived there until his death.
The first part of the path from town followed an old dirt road. At
the road's end, the way steepened. Steps, chiseled out of the rock,
wound upward past stone (touched up with concrete) carvings showing
the stations of the cross. At the very top, with views of the
Atlantic to the east and Exuma Sound to the west, sits the Hermitage.
Modeled after a European Franciscan monastery, the buildings were
built by Father Jerome entirely out of native rock. There's a little
chapel, a bell tower, and a portico leading to a tiny cell still
furnished with a rude wooden bed.
We ate our picnic lunch and wandered the grounds, looking at the wildflowers and the fine architectural details of the buildings. Small frogs crouched in the meager shade of the portico, looking very much like the rocks around them. I climbed the wooden rungs inside the tower and clanged the bell a few times.
We descended by a back trail which was much less steep and less spectacular than the path by the stations of the cross. The ground beneath us was good dirt -- unusual in the limestone Bahamas -- and the vegetation around us was more diverse than we'd seen on other islands. According to our guidebooks, Cat Island is one of the Bahamas' main agricultural regions. We didn't see many signs of cultivation from the hilltop, though.
After
visiting the Hermitage, we poked through the ruins of the
pre-Loyalist Armbrister Plantation, then headed north. Along the main
road we saw plenty of more contemporary ruins; Cat Island was hit
hard by Hurricane Floyd last summer, and the rebuilding is proceeding
at the typical Bahamian pace. One long building, which we later found
out was the local sailing club, was roofless and nearly wall-less. A
few men worked to repair a house across the street.
We stopped to talk to an old woman sitting under a new-looking and very sturdy roofed pavilion. Her house had been damaged in Floyd, she said, but the commissioners wouldn't give her any materials for repair other than a few bags of roofing shingles. "I'm eighty-four. My husband dead these four years. Nobody to speak up for me. My boys all live in Nassau, all my children live in Nassau, nobody here to speak for me."
We had noticed the piles of lumber and other building materials in front of the administrative center that housed the police station, the commissioners' office, and the Batelco office. She told us that they had been donated by people in the United States, for rebuilding after the storm, but that they were being given out grudgingly, if at all.
Many houses were wrecked and abandoned, many roofs were missing shingles, many trees were downed. It was hard to tell which buildings had been damaged in September's hurricane and which were victim to the slower, more insidious Bahamian migration to the big city. It's not an accident that most of our conversations on these out islands are with older people. In one breath they tell us how happy they are to be where they are, how much nicer it is here than in Nassau, where nobody is safe from crime and drugs and gangs, and with the next breath they say, "All my children live in Nassau."
We were walking north because Rosemary and Richard needed groceries, and the New Bight store, "a mile or two up the road," is supposed to be the best on the island. We'd walked at least a mile and were beginning to get discouraged when a car pulled over and the driver insisted we get in. She laughed when we told her our destination, saying it was at least three miles from the administrative center where we'd left our dinghies, and she didn't leave the grocery store's parking lot until she'd commandeered someone else to drive us back.
Since we were there we bought a few things, including a pint of "ice cream" which turned out to be made from skim milk, butter, and a host of chemicals. It tasted just like that sounds, and we wished we'd read the ingredients before we bought it. Hooray for the FDA which won't let companies label glop like that "ice cream" in the US!
The main thing we really needed to stock up on was fish, as we were completely out. We caught a small barracuda on the way out of The Bight, which we grilled that night for a shared meal with Gratitude, but other than that, things had been looking grim. We'd even been reduced to opening a few cans. Fortunately, our trip from Bennett's Harbour on Cat Island to Little San Salvador, just over 21 miles away, gave us our best fishing day ever.
Between Cat Island and the off-soundings abyss of Exuma Sound is eight or so miles of 25-60 feet of water over deep coral heads. Although generally we avoid those black spots on the water which signify coral below, here we knew the heads were well below our keel, so we instead deliberately drove over them, trolling our fishing lines.
Britt was below most of the morning; he'd hooked up a temporary tube to fill our backup water tank from our watermaker, but a connection had come loose and he was mopping up the spill and re-affixing the tube. So it was up to me to reel in the fish, and boy, were there a lot of fish. As soon as I reeled in one line, our line on the other side of the boat would go off. Four barracuda (two managed to flop themselves off the hook, and we released the other two), a yellowtail snapper, and a blue runner. The latter two were firsts for us. Britt had often tried to spear yellowtails, but they're so spooky and quick that he could never get close. We also hooked something really big which jumped hard and broke the line.
Later that day, after we'd passed the drop-off and were in the deep water, a mahi-mahi struck hard. (The big fish always seem to strike on our lighter tackle. How do they know?) Britt reeled it in while I slowed the boat and steered; the fish kept darting off to the side, so I had to turn the boat to keep the line running free. This time when Britt gaffed it, he muscled it right into the dinghy, where it flopped around violently until we got enough vodka in its gills to subdue it. The dinghy contained the mess, so we didn't have the big clean-up job we had before. 42 inches, just a little bigger than our previous catch.
Little San Salvador is a private island, recently bought by Holland America cruise lines. I guess they bring their cruise ship passengers here to play on the beach so they don't have to be exposed to any icky Bahamian culture. Fortunately they don't restrict yachties from anchoring there (although one of our guidebooks said they do), because it's a pretty island and (more importantly) the only stop between Cat Island and Eleuthera. No cruise ships were there, so it was really quite nice. Despite our fridge-full of fish, Britt couldn't resist going spearfishing, and got a few margates and what we think was a permit.
We had a fish-tasting dinner with Gratitude, and gave them some fish as well in preparation for our sail from Little San Salvador to Rock Sound, Eleuthera, which would be mostly over deep water. We knew we'd catch plenty of fish! As it turned out, we were half right.
The wind was howling out of the east, mostly around 20 knots but occasionally as high as 27 or as low as 15, and we scooted along wing-and-wing at an amazing pace. Our average speed was over 6.5 knots; usually we were going more than 7, and our max speed recorded by the GPS was an astounding 13.3 knots. Our speed built when waves picked us up and carried us along, and then dropped abruptly as we slid off their backs.
What slowed us down were the fish. We hooked five big ones! Alas, we only landed a single mahi-mahi. Britt had a tuna almost to the boat when it dove underneath and got off; I was trying to heave to, to stop the boat, but the main was still held out with a preventer and we ended up going around in a circle, which allowed the fish to cross under the boat and break the line. Fishing under sail is tougher than under power. We landed the mahi by turning the engine on and hitting a gentle reverse to slow the boat, and by then we were on a beam reach so it was easier to handle the boat under sail and steer where we needed to steer to keep the fish under control. Two fish struck but shook off almost immediately, and a third -- something really really big -- ran the line clear off the reel. What lousy fisherpeople we are! At this rate, we'll be out of fishing line and lures by the time we get to the Abacos.
We heard on the radio in the morning that the US military had turned off Selective Availability, so GPSes are now accurate to 10-30 feet. We checked out our track at anchor, and were pleased to see just a teeny one as we swung back and forth. This means that the GPS can now be used as an effective anchor alarm.
However, we had a scare on the sail from Little San Salvador to Rock Sound when our GPS suddenly beeped and announced: POOR GPS COVERAGE. The satellites went out! At the time, we were just preparing to cross over from deep water into very shallow water, and needed to be sure to avoid rocks and reefs.
Fortunately, I'd just been checking the chart and GPS, and knew what our approximate position and desired course should be. We had been going a little wide of the route we'd entered that morning, and I'd just calculated that we needed to steer 030° to make the next waypoint, so it was easy to simply turn to 030° and look for hazards. Our next waypoint was near a very visible sandbar, and we knew our speed and how far we had to go, so dead reckoning and a bit of observation would tell us when we got to the right place. The receiver started re-acquiring after less than 10 minutes had passed, but it was a good wake-up call to remind us how much we rely on the GPS and how important it is to be able to navigate without it.