Thursday Mar 21, 2023 Cat Island Day 1

We had cereal in our cottage and then met Hannah and Erick for coffee. We rented a car for the day to explore the 49 mile long island. The whole island has about 1800 people and everybody knows everybody. Maurice came late with the car and Erick had to give him a ride back to his place. Yvonne had to call three people to find a car to rent and this was back near the airport. Yvonne, her husband, her sister Margaret, and a woman named Beverly from Jamaica seem to run the place. Rollezz Resort has been in operation for 8 years and consists of 10 or so bungalows that all appear to be new. They sit right on a beautiful 6 mile long beach with nobody nearby. A couple from Scotland Deb met comes every year for three months!

First stop with the car is Como Hill, the Mt Everest of the Bahamas at 206 ft. above sea level. It’s the highest point in the Bahamas and it took all of 10 minutes to conquer. There’s a stone tower and out buildings called the Hermitage which look big from the base of the “mountain” but once you get there seems to be something you would expect elves to live in.

After the strenuous hike down the “mountain” we drove to Gilberts, the pretty good grocery store on the island. The whole island was abuzz since the mail boat came in this morning, which is their weekly delivery of everything. When the mail boat comes, there are lots of people driving around delivering and picking things up.

We stopped back at Rollezz to put groceries in the refrigerator and then drove to the southern end of the island. The car we rented had 270,000 km on the odometer and the roads here have nasty potholes everywhere. It’s a tiny Nissan “Dayz” with a GPS we never did figure out how to turn off, that barked out directions in Japanese. Erick did an admirable job weaving around the potholes and I checked the tires when we stopped to see if any were missing air. 

At the southern end of the island is an airstrip and a sport fishing marina called Hawk’s Nest where a few people were cleaning the daily catch. They were excited that they’d caught a 58 pound Mahi Mahi, which is just 2 pounds short of “tournament weight” whatever that means.

The big excitement was feeding the entrails to the sharks off the dock. 15 or 20 sharks were waiting and it was quite a show to see them throw the chum to the sharks. Yikes.

Then back to Rollezz through the northbound minefield of potholes. Hannah and Erick went back to the boat to clean up and we met back on shore for a nice dinner (grouper, steak, chicken along with peas and rice, salad, and delicious cabbage)and evening here at Rollezz. Hannah and Erick are getting up at 3am to move the boat to a marina in Eleuthera to be safe from the oncoming storm. We’ll see them back here in a few days. We bid them farewell as they took the dinghy back to Bonnie Lynn on another moonlit night.