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 Bahamian residents of the island organized together 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. They fought in Bahamian courts, in the international press, and in the ocean itself, where marine scientists tracked exactly what the development did to the reef.

I covered that fight for ten years here on Notes from the Road. 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.

But the story is finished, and the mechanism that hurt this reef, a golf course built on porous ground next to coral reef and mangrove water is one that continues to play out around the world, and this is important because the Great Guana Cay blog is where locals often learn why they need to protect their reefs from golf and marina megadevelopments.