Cat Island (part 2) 2009

Spent 2 hours in Hawks Nest Marina attempting to put pictures on the blog. No band width. Unless we get a really great connection, we won’t be sending pictures until we return to the states!

Cat Island was enchanting. In New Bight we rented cars with Harold & Val on La Buena Vita and again with Bob & Megan on Destination and drove the island literally from one end to the other twice.

We saw more Loyalist ruins than anywhere else in the Bahamas. With some reading we discovered that this was because, when someone died his house was left standing so that his spirit had a place to reside, and a new one was built on the property using a few parts of the old house. This is a part of their religion, Obeah, which they won’t talk about. Many believe that the spirits of the dead still walk Cat Island. We walked an old graveyard overlooking the ocean where a tea set marked a grave instead of flowers.

We explore three delightful old plantations, each unique in its own way. The one that interested us was a home which still had window frames the wood was tongue and grove and was pegged instead of nailed. We also visited one, the Bourbon plantation, which had had a distillery of some sort attached to it. We really enjoy looking at the construction and envisioning what was, and trying to figure out how anyone could survive in this harsh, though beautiful, environment.

We walked up to the Hermitage, the final resting place of Father Jerome, a famous architect as well an Anglican minister and a Catholic priest. From this miniature Church which he built by hand, the hermit, as he chose to be in his later years, could view both the Atlantic and Exuma Sound.

Just before we moved on to Little San Salvador, we anchored in an enchanting bay with a whimsical resort, Fernandez Bay. The snorkeling was wonderful. From there our next hop up the island chain took us to Eleuthera, which is where we currently exploring.

We are now in Eleuthera waiting for the low to clear so wee can begin to head east.