In the Bahamas, Cat Island offers spectacular diving and solitude for miles
SOMETIMES, a shift in perspective makes all the difference. I am 100 feet deep in a Bahamian sea, finning along a reef wall that plunges like a waterfall of colour into the blue depths below. Jacks, parrotfish and dugongs glide through a jungle of corals and sponges - green, yellow, purple, red - that sprout from the reef. A school of Bermuda chub passes overhead, silhouetted in the refracted sunlight. And here, at the nadir of this dive, my mood is improving by the second.
I’m a half-mile offshore of Cat Island a crooked scythe of limestone 130 miles and a galaxy away from the cruise ports, casinos and bulging resorts of Nassau and Freeport. Cat is one of the Out Islands of the Bahamas, an assortment of wispy islets strewn like twigs across the tropical Atlantic Ocean.
I had arrived the prior night on a 33-seat prop plane from Nassau, exhausted and irritable from sleep deprivation and a roster of vain stresses. A prearranged ride took me down an unremarkable ribbon of cracked asphalt, through scrubby brush and very few signs of life, save for an open liquor store and a closed bar. Staring out the window at the unremarkable wall of green, all I could think was “Huh”.
But soon my driver, following a hand-painted wooden sign, turned down a dirt road to the Greenwood Beach Resort and I caught the first whispers of Cat Island’s allure.
“Beaches, caves, 300-year- old plantations, diving, fishing, you name it,” Donihue Waters says in a Tennessee drawl. “This island’s 50 miles long! You could spend a month here and not run out of things to do.” Waters, a repeat visitor who flies his own plane here from his home in Savannah, Georgia, with his wife Angie and Kaia, their Alaskan Klee Kai, is holding court at the Greenwood’s bar. The other guests - couples from Toronto, Berlin and Houston - mill about as a safari of guitar clutching neighbours, mostly expats with vacation homes in tiny developments nearby, wanders in for a weekly open mic night.
I don’t have a month. In fact, I barely have a long weekend and now my agenda - scuba dive, relax and repeat - suddenly sounds feeble.
No matter. I step behind the concrete- and-limestone bar to grab a Bahamian Kalik beer, dutifully recording the hit in the honour- system ledger, and head out onto the veranda to watch a tangerine moon rise over the ocean.
The Greenwood, built in the 1970s, could use an update, but it has a kitschy charm, with buoys dangling from trees, oldschool chaise longues ringing a small pool and maritime relics adorning the walls of a tile floored room used for dining, drinking, socializing and making music.
Even better, with WiFi only in that common area and no TVs on the property, guests quickly bond with each other, the three resident dogs - Luis, Nolly and Guinness - and the Greenwood’s irrepressible French managers, 34-year- old Pauline Vaz Branco and her partner, Antoine Barbier, 33.
Within minutes of arriving, I’m in a tete- a-tete with Pauline, trying to persuade her that I’m a competent diver despite the seven years that have passed since my last scuba experience. Dubious, Pauline raises an eyebrow, opens a shed packed with diving and kitesurfing gear and lays out a scuba tank, regulator and buoyancy control vest, pieces that must be assembled perfectly if one hopes to survive underwater. “OK, we are going diving,” she says. “Show me what to do.”
The next morning, under a sunny 75- degree sky, Pauline, Antoine, the Houstonites - Clement and Caroline, who are also French - and I load our gear into a black 2005 Dodge pickup for a short drive to the boat. Like many of the Out Islands, Cat Island is a diver’s fantasy, with almost no competition for dozens of dive sites along a reef-laced windward coast and not another viable speck of land to the east until Africa.
We wade our gear out to the boat, a 26-foot Mako, weigh anchor and motor off to the dive site. The only divers are Pauline, Caroline and myself. We drop to 40 feet and start following the descending contours of the reef. Like many divers, I bide too much time scanning for megafauna, but Pauline knows that the soul of the reef, as in much of life, lies in the details. She uses a flashlight to point out small fascinations I never would’ve seen on my own -a polka- dot flamingo tongue snail, poised like a rare gemstone on a stem of coral; an arrow crab, all but completely camouflaged in a sea plume; a translucent shrimp tucked into a rocky nook.
Back aboard, Antoine steers the Mako to avoid coral heads lurking inches below the surface. The Bahamas’ shallow sand banks give these waters their mesmerizing hue, an effect that led Spanish explorers to dub these islands baja mar ( low seas). But contrary to the familiar discovery fable, the Spanish weren’t the first ones here.