Clarence Town, Long Island – The home of two Father Jerome Churches

The strong winds calmed down so we continued our passage north.

Traveling between anchorages in the Bahamas has its own special challenges.  Most of the bays and anchorages here are very shallow with coral heads to navigate around or avoid.  We are a ‘deep’ draft boat with 2m under the water, which means we need to be careful.

To see the coral heads clearly it is best to arrive at a new anchorage when the sun is high overhead (afternoon) and there is no cloud cover.  The sun bounces off the top of the coral heads and it is much clearer to read their depth and position.

This means that we have to get up and going very early, for short passages, and have to do overnight sailing to arrive the next day on longer passages.

To be safe.

So we left Crooked Island early for Clarence Town, Long Island.

We were lucky to get into the harbour and anchored just before a squall (small, concentrated thunder-storm) hit us.  We tried to anchor closer to town, but came across a sand bar less than 2m deep blocking that area at low tide.

The harbour is shallow with numerous sandbanks and reefs, but surrounded by picturesque beaches to be explored by dingy or kayak.

As the humans would be kayaking me to one of these lovely beaches later, I left them to explore the town on their own.

Clarence Town is the capital of Long Island and famous for possessing, not one, but two churches designed by Father Jerome.

Father Jerome studied to be an architect and designed a beautiful ornate Anglican Church for the town of Clarence.

He then went off to Rome to study theology and converted to the Catholic religion.  He then felt obliged to build a Catholic in the same town.

He designed this church with the same twin spires, but much simpler, and you can see a strong ‘almost Greek’ influence.

But the ‘coolest’ thing about this church is that you can climb up one of the spires.

As you can see the spires are very narrow.

You can see from this photo, that the anchorage is a way outside of town.  It is a ‘bit’ of a dingy or kayak to shore.  In the SW winds we did not experience any of the roll reported by other cruisers.

You will not find ‘much’ in the rest of the town.  A police office, local marketing board (with only onions and papaya when we stopped there) and a grocery store that only sold dry goods, a few frozen things and eggs.

The locals told us there were more groceries available further out of town, but you would need a lift.  We met another couple who had easily hitch hiked around the island, including the famous Dean’s Blue Hole.  So that, or renting your own car, is an option.

Unfortunately we only had the afternoon to explore.  As usual the weather was our dictator, and if we wanted to visit the smaller outlining islands of Rum Cay and Conception Island, we needed to take advantage of the settled winds and leave the next morning.