We came to Cat Island mostly because there is a cave here that Bill wanted to check out. The original plan was to anchor at New Bight, right next to a car rental place, and rent a car to see the island and get to the cave. We didn’t get off the boat and into town until Sunday when the Bahamas is basically closed. We checked out New Bight though, and climbed up to the highest point in the whole Bahamas and explored The Hermitage which is a miniature replica of a European Franciscan Monastery. That is probably the biggest tourist draw on the island. There is really not much else to see here.

The next morning we called the car rental company and found it would cost about $95 to rent a car for the day. Not worth it at all! Instead we decided to sail the boat up the Cat Island coast and anchor off the town where the cave was. The wind was really light so we decided just to rig our spinnaker sail and use only that. We have not used our spinnaker at all yet this trip. It worked out great. We were able to go four to five knots in only seven or eight knots of wind. We really enjoyed the sail!

When we got anchored off of Dumfries we dinghyed into town to check it out. We went to the store that our relatively new cruising guide told us to go to to find the man who could tell us about the cave. The woman at the store said that man had been dead since 1999! She sent us into the back yard to talk to her husband who might know something about it instead. He didn’t know much but he told us someone else we could talk to. We couldn’t find that person though. We figured we would come back in the morning and find him, or someone, who could direct us to the cave.

When we got back to the boat we realized that the refrigerator was broken. We have a big red display that tells us the temperature in both the refrigerator and freezer at all times. Bill had noticed the temperature was too high and we tried a couple of things to see what was happening. Finally we had to face the fact that the fan that moves the cold air into the refrigerator just wasn’t working. Thank goodness Bill can fix almost anything. It was frustrating and difficult but now it’s all working again! It was a broken wire in the freezer which I’m sure was my fault. I cram a lot of stuff in there!

This morning we took off to find Great Crown Cave. We didn’t have any luck finding anything about it on the Internet. We didn’t have a lot of luck finding anyone in Dumfries that really knew where it was. We finally found a woman who kind of gave us directions. Either she was wrong or we didn’t listen too well because it was not on the road we took. Finally we turned around and went up another road. And by road I mean a dirt road that you can tell is not really well travelled. We were getting discouraged when a car came by and they stopped and told us right where the cave was. We were on the right road. But…we missed the trail again. I am sure we walked a mile or two, or maybe three, more than we needed to. Finally we turned around and found the right trail. As it turns out it was a really nice cave. It had all the things we hope to find in a cave, we got dirty, did some crawling, and found lots of really interesting formations. We took lots of pictures! You can see Bill in the cave in the picture above. Follow this link for a photo gallery of more pictures of the cave.

I have finally also posted a photo gallery of pictures we have taken in the Bahamas. Follow this link to see our Bahamas pictures.