“I wouldn’t touch that one with a ten foot pole,” people will say.  Nobody wants to talk about the shanty towns.  Fires have broken out several years in a row through the shanty towns further south on the island – each time these fires break out, these men, women and children, lose everything they own.

Having heard that we would be visiting Sandbank, one man said, “To learn how bad it stinks in there?”

Native Abaconians have particularly strong feelings about the squatter settlements.  “They could do better for themselves if they wanted to, you know,” an Abaco man explains while staring into the flat-bed of his pickup truck.  “They make about a thousand dollars a month, okay.  This is not bad money to live on in Abaco.  But they send eight hundred of it back to Haiti, and they live on the two hundred.”

The debate over illegal immigration gets fiercer in print and online, where Bahamians can discuss anonymously.  In many ways, it is the same debate you hear the world over, only on island scale. Anonymously, you can hear the reverberating hatreds and xenophobia the subject can create - they take our jobs, they act like they own the place. That sort of thing. Removed from all this, though, I can see that mostly everyone is most comfortable when nobody is talking about the Haitians. If those little kids who have no parents are invisible, we don't have to extend our humanity to them.

Some Haitians, who started out in these camps or as illegals, working on the nearby citrus farms, made their way from poverty to wealth.  You would think, guys like that, they could really help out their communities.  Get the kids to learn English, teach them some skills to help themselves.  But it never happened.  And that way, Sandbank stays perfectly invisible, even though it’s right there, on the side of the road that cuts through Abaco.

Treasure Cay itself is a development whose construction began in the 1950's, centered around a partially natural harbour for recreational boaters. A few nights ago, I had agreed to meet my family for dinner here, at the one restaurant in the development.

After ordering dinner, I excused myself and picked up my toddler son. "I'm going to take him to the harbour, and let him look at the fish."

We walked down the docks and crouched up against the cement wall. "Look, see that fish there? That's a striped grunt. See that, that's an upside-down jellyfish."

Seeing harbour fish is hardly like seeing them in the water, but I said, "sometimes, you have to just be patient and keep looking. You never know what might turn up in these waters."

Just a minute later, I could have been dreaming, an eight foot fish rambled through the water right under our noses. My boy was ecstatic. This was impossible. The fish was giant, much bigger than the sharks we see sometimes on the reefs, but certainly this was no shark.

My wife came out to find us. Yes, under ordinary circumstances, we would be back by now. I felt like I was telling a fish tale. "We just saw an eight foot fish!" I said.

And my boy said so too. "It was really big!"

Just then, seven more of these giant fish passed right under our noses, all of them in two or three feet of water. But what were they? Later that night, I looked up their field marks - giant scales, torpedo-shape, silvery sides, a long tail. Only one fish fit the description - tarpon. I told my boy, right then, that he better never forgot what he just saw.