Half Moon Bay, Little San Salvador Island

This morning we decided to quickly explore ashore at New Bight before continuing northward. The guidebooks mentioned a hermitage on Mt. Alverna, the highest peak in the Bahamas (all of 206 feet), so we set out to take a look. The Hermitage was built by Father Jerome, a priest who early in life was an architect and an Anglican minister before converting to Catholicism. He built churches on several islands but the Hermitage, constructed in 1940, is considered his crowning achievement. As we rounded a bend in the road we could see it atop the hill. It was an imposing stone structure, like a castle fortress on a mountain. We hiked up the stairs carved into the rock to the summit, where we had the whole place to ourselves. Father Jerome modeled it on monasteries he'd seen in Europe, so it had a bell tower/turret, a chapel with cathedral-style windows, a small kitchen, even a cloisters leading to his simple dormitory where he lived out the last 16 years of his life in solitude and reflection. It seemed a very holy place, but I could not help irreverently noting that although it had loomed large from a distance, the whole thing was actually built to a very small scale so that even I had to duck very low to get through the doorways and my head nearly touched the ceilings. Square-footage-wise the interior was smaller than my house back home (1100 sq ft). We thought that the reason for the small scale was to put it in proportion to "Mt. Alverna" so that it didn't dwarf the hill and look silly. I was reminded of the castle Camelot from the movie Monty Python & the Holy Grail...to quote Patsy: "It's only a model". Regardless of size it was extremely well-constructed and, for the Bahamas, very well-preserved. We remarked that in the US this place would have been a tourist trap with gift shop, tour guides, a hefty admission charge, and you wouldn't be allowed to TOUCH anything. But here in the Bahamas you are free to wander around, kneel at the single pew in the chapel, sit on the hard wooden cot in the bedroom, whatever. Amazing.

Since that was pretty much the only thing we wanted to see, we headed back to the boat and got under way as we had 40 miles to cover between Cat and Little San Salvador. It was a beautiful day for sailing so we did something we had never done -- we hoisted the sails at anchor and sailed out of the anchorage! It was a proud moment (but for those of you worrywarts we kept the engines on just in case to avoid any collisions with the other anchored boats). We had great sailing the entire day with the wind behind us which is the most comfortable point of sail -- you aren't bashing into any waves, instead they push you along and you just surf down the front of them. Kevin again put out three lines and this time solidly hooked a 2.5 foot barracuda. When he hauled it aboard it scared the hell out of me, thrashing around with its huge, sharp, pointy, nasty teeth. We decided to let it go. Problem was, it was solidly hooked and we had trouble freeing it (while still avoiding the huge, sharp, pointy, nasty teeth). So we gave it a shot of vodka. No, seriously, we did. It's supposed to stun the fish, which it did, and Kevin was able to finesse the hook out and toss it back. We are hoping not to catch too many more of those...we want to eat the fish, not be eaten.

Where we are:
Lat: 24 34.644' N
Long: 75 57.264' W