On December 26, in 2004, my brother Hans and I decided to drive to Sandy Point, a seaside village on one of Abaco's two southern points. It is so far from anything that driving there is an afternoon on a paved road alongside wooded pine and thick mangroves.

The village is wooden houses, painted in pastel colors underneath palms and electric poles.

Two years of hurricanes have left Sandy Point weathered, but it is not the kind of place that is trying to impress outsiders anyway. Sandy Point is a fishing village - conch, lobster, grouper. It is mostly a black town, but there are whites too. Americans, mostly it seems: older folks in fishing hats.

We filled the van with fishing spears and snorkeling equipment and a stash of food, and some flashlights and a map of the island, and a birding guide. A tent and sleeping bags.

After we passed Marsh Harbour, Abaco's capital and the third largest city in the Bahamas, (famously containing Abaco’s only stoplight), all development begins to subside and Abaco becomes just a road darkened by the pines.

The pines narrow at times on either side and give way to still water thick with shrubs and odd trees. These are Abaco's vast mangrove systems. If they're on the left side of the road, they are probably part of one of many brackish lips protected from the Atlantic. If they're on our right side, they are most likely an inland part of Abaco's marls - a hundred miles of water covered in sandy shoals and dense mangrove thickets – a sort of wilderness that is not quite land, and not quite water.

We walk out into the mangroves barefoot, following a system of red mangrove trees covered in a variety of snails and insects. Hans crouches near the water and says, "I bet that in a minute, water is going to rush in here."

You're probably right, I am thinking. But what he means is literally one minute. This is shallow, flat, Bahamas water - imagine a beach so flat it's five miles wide - so when the Atlantic tide is rising, these mangroves are bound to inundate instantly.

And suddenly it happens, the water pours in like a hurricane surge in miniature, filling the rivulets and making a muddy backwater look like a gentle lake in a moment. Thinking back at that moment haunts me because in a few hours we will learn about the Boxer Day Tsunami in Indonesia.