Great Guana Cay & Bakers Bay Club

In 2004, a tiny fishing settlement called Great Guana Cay, in the Bahamas' Abaco chain, learned that a California golf developer had struck a deal with the Bahamian government to build an 18-hole golf course, a marina, and roughly 450 homes on the island's northern end — directly beside one of the healthiest reefs left in the Caribbean. The islanders organized as the Save Guana Cay Reef Association, led by a local divemaster named Troy Albury, and spent years fighting Discovery Land Company's Bakers Bay Golf & Ocean Club in Bahamian courts, in the international press, and in the water itself, where marine scientists tracked exactly what the development did to the reef.

I covered that fight for ten years, on and off, as a travel writer who happened to be there when it started. The pages below are what's left standing from that decade of reporting, reorganized here and, in places, rewritten with what's been learned since. The development was built. The reef has been under sustained stress ever since, and in 2019 Hurricane Dorian devastated the island itself — a blow it took years to recover from. Troy Albury put it to me plainly afterward: our worst fears all came true.

None of that means the story is finished, or that it only ever mattered here. The mechanism that hurt this reef — a golf course built on porous ground next to water that can't absorb the runoff — is the same one that shows up wherever development meets a reef anywhere in the world, which is part of why this fight still gets cited in places nowhere near the Bahamas. Start with the science and the legal record below, or follow the narrative account of how it actually felt to live through.