Hellos & Goodbyes--
George Town to Cat Island and Heading Back Home:


We said our last goodbye to George Town on Monday morning, April 8 as planned, but we enjoyed our last 3 days until then! While there, we said hello to Wayne and Betty from Bright Ayes in person for the first time since Long Island as their guests for a delicious dinner and game night aboard Bright Ayes; Wayne and Betty taught us Turkish Rummy and we shared the game "Spot It" and the card form of "Pictionary" (Spot It was a hit, but Wayne was not fond of Pictionary).



We spent more time with Cheers and Mezzaluna here and there giving a round of goodbye hugs Sunday on Volleyball Beach after taking in another weekly history lecture and lunch there that afternoon. I was glad to be on Volleyball beach one last time so I could say my goodbyes to A.J. at "his" conch salad bar while looking forward to saying hello again next year!



That Sunday actually met my criteria for a perfect one! We woke up that day to a sunny, temperate, spring morning and enjoyed a relaxing time in the cockpit before Mark dinghied me over to Peace and Plenty's dock in Lake Victoria. From there it's just a short walk up the street to beautiful St Andrew's Anglican Church, circa 1804, sitting atop the hill above Lake Victoria (Mark had to miss church to babysit Timmy as our little boat dog had suffered his limit of being left alone in a cage since he had to stay on Nancy Lu the night before while we went to Bright Ayes; besides, Mark had to sit at Peace and Plenty that morning to post my previous blog). St. Andrew's service totally made up for missing Easter Sunday!



It was a treat to sing with the congregation looking around at the faces and out the windows at Elizabeth Harbour in the distance below on one side and Lake Victoria on the other. The sermon was given by Father Ethan Ferguson, a young priest whose first name alone gave me warm feelings towards him. This 11:00 service was his 4th one that morning. He travels to all of the churches in his parish each Sunday. His sermon was focused on a personal relationship with Christ and the peace He gives. It reminded me of another great sermon I heard given by our dear friend Kenny a couple of years ago featuring "doubting" Thomas.



Tears welled up several times throughout the service especially at the end as we sang with gusto "He Lives, He Lives" as the clergy and acolytes processed to the back of the church and we finished the hymn accompanied by the stately organ and festive tambourine. Those two instruments are a perfect metaphor for that sophisticated yet moving service!



I couldn't wait to say hello to Father Ethan and tell him how much I enjoyed the service and about Kenny and how he would have loved visiting the church to experience an actual worship service rather than just see it's beautiful interior as we did when he was here a few weeks ago. It was still bright and cool as I walked down the street to Peace and Plenty humming as I went to meet Mark and Timmy while taking in the bright flowers planted around little shops and glimpses between the buildings of the soothing blue of Elizabeth Harbour. We dinghied straight from there over to Volleyball Beach to meet Cheers and Mezzaluna. The only thing missing was a Sunday afternoon nap!

We got up early the next morning and set sail for Cat Island, the place to which I've been looking forward to going back since we've been in The Bahamas this year! The night before, we got a call on the VHF from Mezzaluna letting us know that they had changed their plans, and decided to head over there with us--a pleasant surprise making our goodbyes to them the day before unnecessary!



We had a fairly bumpy motor-sail over, but we were finally able to say, "HELLO, MAHI MAHI!!! Yes, we CAUGHT A FISH!!! The whole process was much more violent than I care for, but it was exciting! Next time, we will use a method other than bashing the poor thing on the head with a baseball bat to kill it. We had bought some strong rum and poured it in a spray bottle that we had at the ready along with our new gaff (the purchase of which was the purpose of our first hitch hiking expedition that I wrote about in my last blog entry). We had heard that if you squirt a stream into a fish's gills after you have it hooked on your gaff that it puts it to sleep. That was my job, and I was VERY generous with the rum! It worked somewhat, but I still had to close my eyes for the head bashing. There was blood everywhere! Nancy Lu was heeled way over to port, and at one point during the head bashing stage, the fish flopped and slid over to the edge of the boat and almost went over the toe rail. We couldn't let all this violence be for naught!! Mark scrambled to hold it in place with the end of the bat, pinning it to the deck, and I squirted like CRAZY! After Mr. Mahi Mahi finally gave up his life, I followed the example of Pi (we saw the movie, "The Life of Pi" in West Palm Beach before we sailed for The Bahamas) and said a prayer of thanksgiving as I looked into his eye, which I could swear looked sad. To add to the drama of the situation, Mahi Mahi change colors as they die from bright blue to a greenish yellow--I'm telling you, this fishing business is not for the faint of heart!



Mark filleted it on the deck and I took over and cut it up and took off the skin. Whew! Mark reset the lines and I got busy spraying down the decks with our deck wash hose that hooks up to a sea water pump and hoped for no more bites!



When all was done, we had enough fish for about 3 meals.



That evening, we called Mezzaluna on the VHF to say hello again and invite them to a nice Mahi dinner! I froze the rest and would like to share it with my parents when we pass through El Dorado on the way home if I can figure out how to keep it frozen and it works out for us to stop by their house.

We spent our first full day on Cat Island and that evening with Mezzaluna.



I had fun introducing them to Mount Alvernia, Father Jerome's hermitage atop the highest point in The Bahamas, which I find so fascinating.



We packed a lunch and ate it in the room where Father Jerome slept according to the biography of his life that I'm in the process of reading for the second time.



After spending a nice time at The Hermitage, we walked down the hill and sat and visited some more on the corner where I saw locals doing the same the next two afternoons after my daily "pilgrimages" to The Hermitage. That evening, we said goodbye to Katie and Jeff after they treated us to dinner aboard Mezzaluna. They left before dawn the next morning headed south.



We spent four more days at Cat Island, three of them at New Bight in the shadow of The Hermitage and New Bight Service Station.



New Bight Service Station is almost as important to Mark as The Hermitage is to me.



Each day, when I trekked up the hill, Mark sat at the gas station and had a soda and used free internet, sometimes visiting with the friendly owner. Last year, Mark and Claire used internet there to work on housing for her freshman year at Baylor. This year, Mark chatted with Claire via imessage and used the internet to transfer money to pay a special fee she has as a music major.




We sailed about seven miles to spend our last day on Cat Island at Fernandez Bay where we enjoyed swimming and hanging out before we said goodbye to my favorite island.



Now, we're island hopping north, sailing everyday and spending every night anchored on our way to cross the gulfstream back to Florida where we will leave Nancy Lu for a month. From West Palm Beach, we'll rent a car and drive to Brunswick where we'll pick up our Suburban and drive home. We'll spend about a month at home, visiting family and getting Claire from Baylor. Goodbye Bahamas; hello Home! After our time on dry land, we'll say hello to Nancy Lu again and take her up the east coast for the summer with Claire as crew--just like old times!!





*CAUTION* SAPPINESS AHEAD:



When I'm on Cat Island, I enjoy taking solitary walks up to the hermitage that Father John Hawes built for himself in 1940. You can read more about the hermitage in my blog entitled "Cat Island" from last year.




The place, even the walk up to it, evokes emotion in me. As I walked up to the hermitage the last time this year without my camera to distract me, I contemplated the reason for my affinity for this place, and once again experienced the emotion that wells up even more deeply than before. The following is an indulgent composition that I began writing in a little notebook that I took up to the hermitage on my last visit there. Don't feel like you have to read this, but I figured since I have a blog, I might as well humor myself by writing something personal even though this is not really that kind of blog. I stuck in some pictures that I took the day before my last visit. They say they're worth more than a thousand words.....Anyway, here are my words...



As I begin my walk up this country road (that's what I'd call it if it were back home in Arkansas) on my way up to the portal that leads to the steep uphill trail that ends at The Hermitage, I get the sense that I'm going back in time.



The first structure that I pass is the ruin of a great house built by a British Loyalist who tried to make a go of it here either during or after the American Revolution, but it's not the sense of that time that I feel. I consider that I might be imagining what life was like in the 1940s when Father Jerome built The Hermitage, but that's not it either.




My thoughts could be carrying me to the romance of medieval times since the sight at the summit in the distance reminds me of an illustration come-to-life of a castle on a hill from the pages of a fairy tale volume which was part of the dark blue and off-white hard cover book collection (I can't remember the title, not childcraft) that was one of the several book collections whose pages I loved to pore over as a little girl. I'm so glad Mama bought those volumes for me (not to mention a library of children's record albums) from door to door salesmen back then! If I were at my home in Texas, I'd go pull one of those books off the bookshelf where I still have them to remind myself of the title.

With the remembrance of the fairy tale volume, I realize that it is my own happy childhood to which I am transported as I walk up this sun-drenched road. This seems strange to me since my childhood was spent in a small town neighborhood in the American South--south Arkansas in the early 1960s, not cloistered in a hermitage in The Bahamas!



Most things here on Cat Island are foreign to my childhood such as the indescribable blue of The Bahamas ocean, sailboats, sea birds and the maritime lifestyle, but there is something familiar...To be sure, Cat Island, Bahamas was shaped by slavery in a big way; most of the people I see here are descendants of slaves. My life wasn't touched by slavery nearly so directly, but sadly, some of the accepted attitudes to which I was exposed (not actively taught) in El Dorado in the 60s and 70s were a result of the left over effects of Jim Crow Laws. This is not what I'm consciously thinking about as I walk, but I'm taken back to a time when these subconscious perspectives were part of the atmosphere.

At this time, on these daily walks up to Father Jerome's hermitage, it is not these kinds of philosophical musings that stir emotions in me, though. What takes me back to my childhood and strikes such a chord in me are more tangible, personal things--things that I see, hear and touch.



I look around the inside of the ruin, and there growing profusely in the corner are these sturdy spikey green variegated leaved plants that my mother had potted in our home. They also grow wildly on the side of the rode. I think a lot of moms in the 60s and 70s had this plant potted and sitting on a windowsill somewhere in their homes. It seems like I remember that part of their appeal was that you could hardly kill it! Like the books, I don't remember the name, but I immediately think of Mama and her teased up hair, pretty legs, our matching moo moos, the easel she set up in the carport for me to paint, going with her during the week to "help" her get ready for her Sunday School class (well, I fed the guppies in the fish tank), the smell of hairspray and cigarette smoke mingled together at La Petite Beauty Shop where she often took me along with her, and a thousand other things. The tears well up.



Walking on, a little further up on the side of the road, amongst the banana trees (not something I associate with my childhood), climbing a dead tree, are purple Morning Glories. I haven't seen these flowers since I don't know when. Immediately, I'm taken back to our little front porch where these flowers climbed up and exploded in bloom on the iron posts with curlicues. I remember in the summertime, the relief I would feel to the itching of the mosquito bites on the backs of my legs when I sat down on the sun-heated bricks that made up the floor of the porch. Right now, the heat that I feel on my shoulders from the bright sun takes me back to those hot childhood summertimes.

I hear mockingbirds singing! That's not a sound I hear sailing on Nancy Lu, and it is a sound that I didn't realize I've missed until I just heard it. This makes the childhood memories of that same song even more poignant.



The next sight that bowls me over with a feeling of kinship to this place and at the same time hauls me right back to my childhood are the vegetable gardens planted haphazardly in plots on both sides of the rode. There are 3 or 4 of them.



There's an old man tending one as I walk by. Pappaw! That's it! Of all the happy things about my childhood, most of all, Cat Island and The Hermitage stirs in my heart and mind the memories of my Pappaw, my great grandfather. I was his first great grandchild. I'm told that his personality had greatly mellowed by the time I came along. I felt so special and important going across the street from his house to work with him in his summer garden that the neighbors let him cultivate behind their house. It was an adventure even though it was so close to home. The corn grew so high! Pappaw and Mammaw's house was only 5 minutes away from mine, but going over there as I did multiple times a week was like going back in time even back then! I'm starting to understand my love for this place in The Bahamas more and more clearly!

Like Father Jerome, Pappaw was a creative, ingenious, quirky, revered (by more than just me), playful, powerful presence, and a man of God.




The wonder that I feel as I explore the hermitage with all its nooks and crannies and hand wrought primitive beauty is akin to the wonder that I felt just visiting Pappaw's and Mammaw's house. They had things that we didn't have at our house like an attic fan, a clamp on a high wooden worktable in the back yard that Pappaw would let me crank while he oiled it with a can that made a neat sound as he pressed the bottom of it to make the oil spurt out the spout, a tool sharpener with foot peddles that turned a big granite wheel that spit sparks in the dank, dark garage, which was Pappaw's domain. There was a boat motor clamped to a big oil barrel in there, too! If I remember correctly, sometimes he would run the motor--wonder! There was an ornate organ in the living room that cousin Chee-Chee would play when she came with her family for Thanksgiving, a secretary (piece of furniture) with old pictures and thank you notes stuck in the decorative wood trim behind the glass doors. I remember Mammaw writing her thank you notes and such sitting at that desk. There was a Jenny Lind bed that I could do flips over the foot of, a trapeze that Pappaw made for me out of an inner tube and hung from a tree limb in the back yard. He would sit in a chair beside it and watch me do tricks. There was a sandbox that he made from a big old tire in the side yard; Pappaw sat with me while I played in there. I could never forget the swing that he made for me out of rope and a board that he attached to the ceiling of their big front porch. He would sit in a chair in front of that swing and push me by my flexed feet at the end of my straight legs as he sang "Swing Low Sweet Chariot"--love and wonder! There was a giant wisteria tree in the front yard that Mammaw would serve Pappaw and me homemade lemonade and peanut butter crackers under, an ice cream maker that I sat on top of to hold it still while someone else cranked (not Pappaw; his arm and leg on one side didn't work that well after a stroke that he had before I was born). I remember how he would cross his good leg over his bad one and I would ride it as he swung it up and down like a horse while he held my hands and recited a little ditty: "Ride a little horsey down to town; watch out little horsey; don't fall down!" In Mammaw's and Pappaw's house was a cast iron tub, a garage apartment where I think I was told my Uncle Tippy lived at one time. There were old yellowed shades drawn over the windows in what must have been the bedroom through which the afternoon sun cast a yellow light. The room was full of a bunch of interesting junk to look through when I was allowed to go up there with Pappaw. There was a toilet up there with a wooden seat and another cast iron tub where Pappaw made and jarred pickles that I loved so much--wonder! I had no idea at the time that other family members worried about the unsanitariness of this! Thank goodness that Mama let me eat them. She loved Pappaw like I did; she was his first grandchild.

The most wonder-full thing to remember as I think about, Pappaw's house, Pappaw himself and my childhood is the great gift I was given by God through my great grandfather's love for me. Pappaw's special love for me of which I was so confident taught me an important lesson about God's love for me. As I so loved Pappaw simply because he first loved me with a love that I sensed was not based on how I behaved (good or bad) or on what I could give to him--I just knew that he loved me, his great grand daughter. So also do I love the God of Pappaw and Father Jerome and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob because He first loved me -certainly not because of how I behave (good or bad) or for what I can give Him. He just loves me, His daughter through Christ. I think I was better able to accept that the God of the universe could have a special love for me because I had experienced such great unconditional love from a man that I so greatly revered. I thank God for my Pappaw and Mammaw and Mama and Daddy that He so graciously gave to me to nurture and love me.

I'm also so thankful for my walks up that quiet, deserted road on Cat Island up to the hermitage that caused me to be flooded with remembrances of my happy childhood with which I was blessed!

As always, you can see a lot more pics in the gallery especially of the Hermitage.