We have been anchored in Port Howe, on the south end of Cat Island for a couple of nights now. We are staging to sail to Conception Island tomorrow. There have been some thunderstorms and heavy winds the past few days so we’ve been hiding from the weather. The cruising guide said the reef that we are anchored behind would block all the swells from the ocean but it lied. We’ve been rocking back and forth and up and down for days now and we haven’t enjoyed it much. It is a lot better tonight.

On our way here we attempted to fish again and we did actually catch what Bill said felt like a big fish. Unfortunately the line broke somehow before we could actually see him. Another lure is gone. Hopefully we will actually get a fish on board before we lose all our lures.

There are a number of boats anchored here but most of them belong to people who live on the island. When we got here there were two cruising boats that some young guys are on. The first boat was a single hander and he dinghyed over to say hello. He was very enthusiastic. He had been here for two weeks and he told us all about the things to do on land. The second boat has three young guys on it. They dinghyed over to say hello too but they gave us two large lobsters they had just caught. We decided to save them for Valentine’s Day, especially since it was way too rolly to cook anything that difficult until today anyhow. This morning, the first time it was safe to leave the boat since we got here, I made brownies and we brought some over to the guys to thank them for the lobster. They were very happy, they said they were sick of eating lobster and hadn’t had any brownies for a couple of months!

We also managed to check out the town of Port Howe today. It’s pretty much like the rest of Cat Island although there are some historic ruins here. It was the first time we’ve seen goats wandering around though. We thought it was funny the way the goat was standing on an old truck engine to get to the good stuff he wanted to eat, as you can see in the picture above. We did manage to find a little restaurant to have a Valentine’s lunch in and had a great conversation with the owner. On our way back to the boat an older man called to us from the open door of his house that we were walking by. He invited us to come in and talk to him. It was going pretty well, and was very interesting, until he turned the conversation into a religious confrontation. We felt kind of trapped there and were trying hard to get out without upsetting him. We’re going to have to remember that and not let another conversation make that turn. It wasn’t very pleasant.

Tomorrow we are hoping that the wind is good to sail further south and east. We are done with Cat Island – on to Conception!