January 28, 2021
(Note that this is an older post that I have just now made public.)
We arrived at New Bight, near the southern end of Cat Island on Sunday. We had planned to spend a couple of days here and then move north to Alligator Point for the impending storm.
Elie and Sofia are anchored here as well and so we decided to stay throughout the storm. That storm is starting its advance as I type, with 15 knot winds from the west pushing water into the bay and making home free bounce like a bouncy castle at a kids party.
The good news is that the west winds are expected to swing around and come out of the North by early evening and we have very good protection from the North and East, so the bumpiness should decline over the next few hours. The bad news is that the 15 knot winds that are causing the bumpiness will migrate to 25-30 knot winds when their full effect begins around dinner time.
Cat Island, at least this bay, doesn’t really have much to offer for the boater. Possibly the biggest draw here is the the hermitage at Mount Alvernia. Mount Alvernia is the highest point in all of The Bahamas and a hermitage for a Catholic Priest who was a trained architect. The photos below suggest the island itself doesn’t have a lot to work with if one is going to live off the land.
Of course I am being a little bit funny/sarcastic since the island is one of the few were we saw signs of gardening. Originally a slave plantation, there is some soil to scrape out fresh produce and we have seen signs of gourds, tomatoes and corn in this little village. Sofia (whose book I mentioned in a prior post) is a native Bahamian and tells us that The Bahamas was the first place that slaves were freed because they simply couldn’t make the plantations work. This island has the ruins of such plantations although I didn’t take pictures.
I have ridden to the south end of the island, and the roads are pretty good, but there are few vistas to enjoy and the island is essentially shut down. What’s worse is that they have no dinghy dock and no decent place for a dinghy to land. I did tie the dinghy up on the one man made promontory, where it was significantly damaged by the rocks as waves and tides shifted. Oh, well, now I have another project and will clearly be doing some glass work and painting when I get back to someplace where I can do that well.
After four days here, we will move on Friday, a bit further up the coast to see more of the island, before we turn west and head to (perhaps) little San Salvador and then the south end of Eleuthra.
Here are two small examples of Flora and Fauna from the island. The first is a local butterfly (there are lots of these) doing its job near the garden. The second is some sort of burrowing hornet or wasp or something that landed near my feet. Probably harmless, but certainly scary looking (for scale it was about an inch long).
