David’s Voyage Blog

Publish Date: Monday, March 2, 2009
I’m behind on my blog entries, which is partly due to the fact that we’ve been busy, and partly due to the fact that we haven’t had great Internet connectivity. Of course, neither of those is a good excuse, but I’m trying to rationalize.  🙂  This blog is my lame attempt to catch up, so it’s a little longer than normal.

We’ve covered some significant territory during the last couple of weeks. After dropping our friend Bobby O in Nassau, we decided to go see parts of the Bahamas that we hadn’t been to yet, which offered some opportunities to get additional cruising experience. After all, our time here in the Bahamas is really our shake down cruise for the boat, and our chance to get as much experience as possible before heading off to more distant ports.

Our first stop was Spanish Wells (en route to Harbour Island). Spanish Wells is a unique fishing community at the northern tip of Eleuthera. Most of the residents are direct decendents of the original settlers of Eleuthera, who were known as The Eleutheran Adventurers. Everybody in Spanish Wells is friendly, and it has good facilities for cruising visitors (e.g., bank, grocery store, marine supplies), but it doesn’t have much else of interest for me (e.g., snorkeling, hiking, restaurants, historical sites).  It’s mainly a good staging point to traverse The Devil’s Backbone to Harbour Island.

The Devil’s Backbone is a notorious stretch of dangerous coastline on the northeast tip of Eleuthera. It has scattered shallow coral heads, sand shoals, breaking seas, and as a result, numerous shipwrecks. Most first-time cruisers hire a local pilot in Spanish Wells to guide them through The Devil’s Backbone to Harbour Island, which we did. We hired a wonderful pilot named Jock (call sign “Bandit”), and I would recommend him to other cruisers who pass through this area. (See Ayla’s From the Pilothouse episode on The Devil’s Backbone.)

Harbour Island is a beautiful resort community on the northeast coast of Eleuthera. There are several nice marinas, hotels, restaurants, and shops. The harbour is well-protected, and the anchorage is huge. We were the only boat anchored during our time there, which we found a bit puzzling given its attractive features. I suppose it’s not on the way to anywhere, and it’s a bit of a production to get here (having to stage in Spanish Wells and hire a pilot). Also, Harbour Island is definitely more of a “resort community” than a “cruising community”. In other words, you’re more likely to see people in polo shirts and sun dresses than t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops.  🙂

Our next stop was down the west coast of Eleuthera in a small settlement called Rock Sound. This is a neat, friendly, well-protected place to visit. They have a wonderful grocery store and a pretty complete hardware store. The anchorage had good holding, and plenty of room to spread out. We happened to be in Rock Sound on Sunday evening during the Academy Awards broadcast, so we went ashore to a bar/restaurant hoping to catch a few minutes of the show. We ended up staying way past closing time, and watched the entire broadcast with the owners of the establishment — another example of Bahamian hospitality.

We then cruised to Cape Eleuthera, which is at the extreme southwest tip of the island. There is a unique school at Cape Eleuthera called The Island School, which is a semester-abroad boarding school for (mostly U.S.) high-school students. The Island School also founded a middle school for the local Bahamian community, called Deep Creek Middle School, and Ayla gave her Save our Seas presentation to the students at Deep Creek Middle School. Both The Island School and Deep Creek Middle School were impressive institutions.

We then departed Eleuthera and headed further south, visiting the lightly populated and seldom visited Cat Island. We went to an area called The Bight at the south end of the island. There is a beautiful historical site called The Hermitage at the top of the tallest hill in the Bahamas (it’s only 206 feet). The Hermitage is the retirement home and church of a well-known Bahamian priest and architect, Father Jerome. The cruise to Cat Island and the hike from the coast up to The Hermitage was well worth the effort:  it is a beautiful home and chapel, built entirely of stone, and it has withstood hurricane after hurricane for almost a hundred years.

Finally, we cruised from Cat Island across the Exuma Sound, returning to one of our favorite anchorages in the Exumas:  Big Majors near Staniel Cay. We have just a couple weeks left in our Bahamian adventure, after which we’ll return to Florida to do some work on the boat and provision for the next leg of our adventure.