The Tribune

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

GODFREY Kelly has been around long enough to know a good thing when he sees it.

The four-time Olympic sailor is one of the few organisers of the Cat Island Regatta who is still alive to talk about the development of what is second only to the National Family Island Regatta in Georgetown, Exuma.

“Harold King was going over to Georgetown for a number of years sailing in his boat he called Palmdale,” Kelly told The Tribune last week as he reflected on the formation of the regatta. “The boat owners in Cat Island decided that they should start a regatta, but the question was who was going to organise it.”

That was 59 years ago when Kelly and his brother David and Peter Christie, who were all racing in the Snipe boats in Montagu Bay, decided to lend their expertise to a group of Cat Islanders, including Hubert King, who is being honoured this year posthumously, to form a committee to launch the regatta.

“We wanted it to be the number one regatta, but we became number two behind Exuma,” Kelly said. 

May 1956 saw the creation of the regatta, which has been moved to the Emancipation holiday weekend in the Bluff. To help christen the regatta, the committee was able to secure a total of 48 boats to compete, all of whom had one unique stipulation - they all had to be work boats from the various settlements out of Cat Island.

“They were the means of communication in Cat Island and the roads were very bad on the island, so the only way the residents got from one settlement to the other was often by boat. That was why we had so many boats to compete in that first regatta,” Kelly said. “They also used the boats for fishing, but the main form of transportation was by these same work boats.”

Kelly, who eventually got involved in politics and actually became the Member of Parliament for Cat Island for about a decade, said he remembers taking a baby cannon that was used in Montagu Bay for their racing competition to the regatta and it turned out that it provided a lot more excitement to the start and finish for the large crowd of spectators, who got to watch the competition on the foreshores.

“When the starting gun sounded, they pulled up their anchors, hoisted their sails as the races began,” Kelly said. “It was quite extraordinary to think that after all these years, we are now going into the 59th year that we still have the Cat Island Regatta.”

With the two commissioners on the island, Raymond Harcourt Culmer and James Campbell lending their support in so many ways, including providing trucks for those islanders who wanted to travel by land.

The rest, as they say, was history.

“We used to transport people from Nassau, who wanted to go to Cat Island to see the regatta,” said Kelly, who remembered chartering a plane to escort his wife and family to the 50th Golden celebrations back in 2006. “The crawfish season opens on August 1 and the regatta starts on August 1, so it’s a conflict for me now because I like to go crawfishing. But obviously when I was a member of the House of Assembly, I used to go all the time.”

Compared to what he likes to refer to as the “good old days,” Kelly said it shows how Bahamians want to race in the sail boats.

“It’s a homecoming time as well, so sailing is not just a regatta sport,” Kelly said. “There are so many regattas now that people look forward to going to them. It’s now a pretty big thing.”

But looking back at the genius of the regatta in Cat Island, Kelly said they just wanted to enjoy a time when the work boats came together to compete for bragging rights on the island. Nowadays, the regatta is opened up and boats come in from all over the Bahamas to compete, which adds to the excitement.

“It’s changed. These sloop sailing boats can make the Olympic class,” Kelly said. “It’s a whole new ball game in that respect. And I support you can’t just leave it up to the boats on the islands because there ain’t as many as they used to be when the regatta started. We don’t have that many people who are still sailing like they used to do in the old days. It’s a dying art on the islands right now.”

As one of the founders of the Cat Island Regatta, Kelly said he would like to see it continue on the trend that it’s going under the presidency of Pat ‘the Centreville Assassin Strachan. Kelly said he and his community have taken it to another level and they are making tremendous strides, not only with the racing, but the infrastructure of the facilities in and around the regatta site.

 “I’ve been involved a whole lot over the years, not so much on the organisational side, but I continue to support it, involved financially because these regattas cost a whole lot of money to put on,” Kelly said.

“It’s quite a contrast to what it was in the earlier days. In the beginning, I was able to help out a lot with the organisation of the regatta. But I don’t get in that anymore.”

Instead, Kelly went on to continue his own sailing at a higher level. He represented the Bahamas in four Olympic Games in the Dragon sailing class in 1960, ‘64, ‘68 and ‘72. As a matter of fact, in Tokyo, Japan in ‘64, Kelly became the first Bahamian in his class to win a race, the same year that Sir Durward ‘Sea Wolf’ Knowles went on to win the Olympic gold medal when he teamed up with the late Cecil Cooke in the Star Class.

Kelly, 86, is a lawyer by profession, but while he doesn’t actively practice, he still goes to his office and spends at least five hours every day because he doesn’t believe in going into retirement. He still has sailing on his mind and would not trade in his involvement in the formation of the Cat Island Regatta for anything in the world because he can now bask in the accomplishment that the island has made over the past 59 years.