Goodbye Island

I am wrapping up the last song on my sailing influenced CD, The ICW Blues. The song is called Goodbye Island and is a sort of protest song about a development in the Exuma Islands of The Bahamas.

The island is called Crab Cay (Cay is the Bahamian equivalent of Key and is pronounced Key). Crab Cay is within huge Elizabeth Harbor near George Town, a favorite spot for us and other cruisers. Between Crab Cay and the "mainland" of Great Exuma, there is a well protected smaller harbor known as Redshanks. Redshanks is a hurricane hole with good holding and not much fetch. It can accomodate 20 or so cruising boats, several more if they have a shallow draft. Crab Cay has been uninhabited for a long time, but there the are ruins of a plantation left from the days when Royalists left Virginia and Carolina and moved everything they owned including their slaves to the Bahamas (immortalized in a book called Winds of the Carolinas). Interestingly, the slaves took the last name of the plantation owners when they were freed, hence many of the folks in George Town today share names like Rolle. They also have rights to "generation land", former plantations.

So now Crab Cay has been purchased by a US developer who is a member of the family that is the largest pork distributor in the US. The island is being developed for the super rich and includes a marina with slips for 100' + yachts and lots that are for sale for several million dollars.

Crab Cay

While I recognize that tempus fugits and developers develop, the aggravating thing about this one is that the developers have pressured the Bahamian government into giving them the rights to the water several hundred feet from land effectively eliminating the right of boaters to anchor in Redshanks. Normally, a landowner only has rights to the land down to the high tide line. They have also built a low bridge from Crab Cay to Great Exuma which prevents most boats from taking the shortest route to town..

The Bahamas are littered with failed developments and this one could well join the rest of them, especially when recession rears its ugly head. The trend of the Bahamians to kowtow to the wants of developers is unsettling however.

Goodbye Island is a lament to this situation. Money talks!