Life on Chub Cay and Sustainable Tourism
April 10
My days at Chub Cay were filled with engaging people and places to explore. Nobody lives there permanently; everything here is about tourism that collectively supports about 50% of the Bahamian economy. The resort itself was interesting because it is well maintained despite the far away island location. There was wild Bahamas to explore just a dinghy ride or walk up the island. There were few people, but it was an entertaining mix of boaters, a few resort guests who flew to the island, and the local Bahamians who staffed the resort and facilities.
Chub Cay is a privately owned island. Longtime staff and boat visitors explained that the resort and marina were run-down until a few years ago. A new owner, George Bishop (an American), invested heavily in the island’s make-over that took off in 2022. I suppose that is doable when you are ranked #1,028 on the global billionaires list. An astonishing aside – who knew there were >2,500 billionaires out there. Most staff seemed content with their employment and felt well provided for, although Mr. Bishop is not afraid of local bad press. I would have enjoyed meeting him, but he wasn’t on the island because I didn’t sense the boss of bosses was about.
Everywhere I roam, I ask these odd questions for a visitor: where do you get water, where are your waste streams, and how do you get energy? The resort has invested heavily to be eco-friendly, and the staff readily chatted about my questions. There is an advanced freshwater production system that is a reverse osmosis processing of sea water. A new solar energy system supplies about 90% of the power demands, and the remainder comes from diesel generators. There is an impressive garden supplying the island with veggies, fruit, and plants for landscaping. It uses ‘grey water’ which is a by-product from processing wastewater. That can be a tricky practice because managing wastewater is a challenging process. I’d asked for a tour of facilities, but my request was meandering up the chain of command on island time when my island days were cut short. I couldn’t find the wastewater outfall, but one always exists – a quest from among my quirky traits. And, I did wash my island veggies a bit more while being cognisant of WW’s water tank sloughing microplastics into my water.
Solid waste management is a worldwide challenge, especially in remote locations. While answers about this waste stream were vague, waste was being burned (the smoke and smell were about) which according to locals was the standard operating procedure in the Bahamas. Another aside to explore later - landfills that burn waste depend heavily on plastic garbage because it is a petroleum product and therefore ignites and burns effectively. Of course, burning plastic and the other things we toss out generates a plethora of nastiness released into our air and water. Overall though, the resort was working hard to be a textbook example of how to reduce the impact of tourism in a remote environment. Here is a good review of the Chub Cay facilities.
The marina was less eco-friendly, like most that I have visited since leaving the Great Lakes. Outside of the Great Lakes, managing wastewater and boat fueling in marinas is best described as an annoyance unnecessarily forced upon marina owners by radical, environmental extremists. By law, every boat with a head has a holding tank for your poop that must be pumped out at the dock where it is transferred to a wastewater management facility. Most marinas offer this service including Chub Cay. While there can be minor spills overboard, you hope that disappearing slurry is going to a proper wastewater treatment operation. Many boats can also macerate and discharge that waste overboard if the boat is >3 miles offshore in the sea, also the law. At the fuel dock, the boat crew fuels the boat whereas in the Great Lakes and most of Canada, trained crews who are overtly conscious of fuel spills operate the pumps. One fuel dock manager explained their unwillingness to pump fuel arises from the liability of a fuel spill, which requires reporting as per the law of both our lands. If that sounds like financial security superseding environmental security, you would be correct about this recurring theme of my expedition.
The actual fueling also threatens human health and that is why there are rules to protect interior spaces from fumes (shutting all windows and doors of living spaces) and disembarking everyone to avoid fumes and potential fire hazards in Canada. It gets tricker because many boats including WW don’t have a fuel gauge at their fueling station. Safe fueling is learning to listen and understand when your boat tank is near full while diligently controlling fuel flow with tricky nozzles (often aged) over periods of 30+ minutes. WW has a relatively tiny fuel tank at 180 gal, so my 30-minute pump time is ‘quick’. Every fueling also puts your head directly over the fuel intake with its diesel fumes, while holding absorbent pads on the nozzle and tank vent that opens through the hull, to stop as best you can, fuel overfill or air locks gurgling fuel out the vent. Even my awareness, experience, and diligence can’t protect the water from minor fuel spills. These fuel management fails, i.e., lack of trained staff and inadequate environmental protection onboard, has a cumulative impact on the environment. I muse openly about this with simple illustrations that are received with blank looks from many boaters: there are 12M registered recreational boaters in the USA equating to approximately 50 fill-ups per year x 250 ml of fuel spilled = 150M litres of unaccounted fuel spilled into our waterways each year by recreational boaters (alone), or 75 Olympic-sized pools or the entirety of their beloved football team’s outdoor stadium. Pumping fuel is neither easy nor perfect and mostly neglected by the boating industry and fraternity.
This story gets scarier because our boat exhaust that is discharged into the water, or l’eaux d’égout - a watery perfume of disgust, includes a few nasty chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, ethylbenzene, and 1,3-butadiene. The names are scary enough, but you can google them if you have the stomach to learn more, e.g., benzene. In an enclosed marina environment, there are perpetual engine operations. Chub Cay marina has 100+ boats with at least two main engines moving them in and out, warming up at dock, and sometimes running to generate AC power (e.g., charging batteries, air conditioning, making ice). Additionally, there are onboard engines running heaters and generators, and the tender boats have 1-3 outboard motors. Earlier I warned about sharks in marinas (because of fish waste dumped overboard), but a more significant hazard may be our exposure to deadly air and water quality, to say nothing of the impacts on the aquatic environment. WW and I are contributing to these environmental and human health insults, and it is my hope that these personal experiences help establish genuine connections to the boating fraternity as I work to build awareness and calls to action therein and beyond.
“Allen is easily distracted.” – A quote from my grade school report card I’m told; so, let’s get back to Chub Cay. It is billed as the "Billfish Capital of The Bahamas", which explains the throngs of sport fishers cycling through the marina. The very deep Tongue of the Ocean encloses on itself and abuts the Great Bahama Bank which concentrates the continuously cruising, small pelagic fish and squid and the big pelagic, ocean predators that chase them. Chub Cay Club boasts several records for marlins (Family Istiophoridae, e.g., Blue Marlin), swordfish (Family Xiphias), and tuna/mackerel (Family Scombridae, e.g., the Wahoo – a great name, and Yellowfin Tuna). Bonefish and shallow reef snappers are plentiful, but these were a side attraction to the main event. While most billfish and Bonefish are released after capture, there was regular catching and keeping of the snappers, tunas/mackerel, and dorado. Every big boat had a freezer and ice making machine. These fishers were a close-knit and guarded fraternity, but some captains were more attuned to seafaring life, listening attentively and offering advice when I described my situation.
The luxury yachters were rare sightings. The crews were mostly young, beautiful people who kept to themselves; maybe they were secretly filming a new reality show? The captains I met were either young or old, nothing in between. My surprised look was somewhat embarrassing when I openly mistook a young captain for crew. The old crotchy captain sitting with us at the Nauti Rooster was only interested in complaining about boat owner incompetencies and how young the captains had become, but he had been on the water a long time. I’m not sure which version of captain was at the helm later that week when a departing luxury yacht got skewered by one of those channel marking pilings I mentioned in a previous blog. That boat got rescued and quickly shepherded into the marina where pumps and a patch job kept it afloat.
A marina slip is the place where you tie your boat to the dock and these can be bought. At Chub Cay the price is about $500,000 USD – this is pretty good compared to prices in South Florida. WW’s Slip 401 was rented from an owner for $20-30 USD / night – you pay >$100 USD / night on the mainland. I also received bills for $30 USD / night, a resort fee, and $5 USD / night for plugging in WW. The electricity was metered, but I don’t know what the big boats with their fridges, freezers, computers, water and ice makers, televisions, air conditioning, and fancy lights were paying. The island’s solar power bank produces 7.5MW of power which is 90% of the resort’s daily need, and I suspect much of that supplies the boats plugged in at the dock. Every slip also has a freshwater water supply, but there was no charge for water that boats took on every day, e.g., for consumption (also getting treated onboard or filtered) or wash-downs after salty excursions. Given the effort and expense of freshwater creation on the island, I was surprised that water was freely dispersed, then not surprised by the lavish, daily wash downs on big boats. We seem content to ignore these real costs of living even though our neglect today is accumulating the debits we or our children will eventually pay. “Nothing in life is free” – true that.
The crews on smaller sailboats and cruisers in the marina were much easier to connect with because we shared the love of seafaring adventures. The two cruisers from Quebec were wisely travelling as a pair because there is safety in numbers on the water. I’ll learn about their home waterways when we connect on the St. Lawrence River later this summer. Another couple and their teenage boys were visiting from Florida for a weekend of fishing – that’s about 225NM away. They offered me some fresh caught Spanish mackerel (Scomberomorus brasiliensis). The sailboat Savannah docked beside WW for a few days. Captains Jamie and Grayson, 2.5-year-old Hoffman, infant twins – Landon and Charlotte, plus Blue the dalmatian, were on a 5-year adventure sailing the cays, Florida, the east coast, and wherever following winds and fine weather took them. They had to land in Florida for the arrival of the twins, but after 3 months at an Airbnb, they were back on the water. How cool and impressive is that for life at sea!
There are about 50 local Bahamians working on the island. True to their national reputation, they were cheerful, good-natured island folk. They seemed content with their jobs, pay cheques, and overall treatment by their employer. Their residences were respectable-looking cabins and motel-like rooms they described as mostly adequate. They had a cafeteria and not to be forgotten, their Nauti Rooster Bar and Grill. The only unhappy person I met was the “policeman”. I was wandering down an off-site beach one afternoon swimming and fishing when he emerged from the palms 50 m behind me, closing fast on foot and shouting. There was a marina boat’s tender ahead of me anchored close to shore with folks enjoying the sun and sand. As we converged on their picnic area, the policeman was livid that it was illegal to anchor within 200’ of the beach, he would charge them $10,000 for landing there, and so on. Big phew from me as I walked away to continue legally fishing and skinny dipping. Later at the Nauti Rooster the locals cackled at the policeman’s desire to police.
Mike took us out after bonefish and conch one morning. He hailed from Andros, had been at Chub Cay for about 12 years, and he had been fishing by all means for every species since he was 13 years old. At Rum Cay, we stood in the shallows on the rising tide as 2-3 schools of 100+ feeding Bonefish repeatedly circled and split around us. He complimented my flyfishing, but when there is a horde of hungry fish swimming over your fly, the probability is high that one unwitting individual will grab it. And, only one of the prowling sharks had to be pushed away with the tip of my fishing pole. Also active were a pair of Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) that Mike had known to nest here for many years. When Mike wasn’t guiding visitors, he operated big machinery on the island – everyone had multiple jobs. He knew the ins-and-outs of island operations and its people, and he was instrumental in getting WW into the marina. He also directed us with our bag of conch meat to Chef Phillip who created a full, cracked conch dinner one night. Mike always appeared when I had a question about the boat or island, always ready to help, and I am truly grateful.
The other staff I met were equally friendly and professional. Brian and I are easy-going, friendly Canadian boys and it didn’t take long for the staff to figure out we were not their typical clientele, e.g., we are generous tippers. Nathalie at the front desk was always ‘fixing’ something for us. The older Remedy was going strong when we stopped by for a restaurant breakfast one morning. Big Brian worked the bars, loved NASCAR racing, and singing country karaoke. He inspired my “Bahama Weaver”: ½ orange juice, ½ pineapple juice, ½ coconut rum. Just about everyone had a relative or ex-wife in Canada – “no, I wouldn’t likely know your cousin in Calgary”.
The Nauti Rooster yielded great stories and some culture lessons. I learned about the Bahamian aphrodisiac or Viagra, a.k.a., the conch’s pistol of its digestive tract. I met Randy the mechanic’s wife tending bar who explained that Randy was just visiting that one Sunday – a big sorry and tip followed. One fellow was explaining that Bahamian men fancied having a wife and a “sweetheart” on the side, to which the woman next me quickly parried with “one man for romance and one for finance”. The banter was playful, like this exchange across my bow at the bar: established, male staff person - “I’d treat ya real nice as my sweetheart”; targeted young, new-to-the-island female - “you gotta wife ‘X’ so no thanks, I like being single”; and the omniscience-esque rebut - “Ya gonna need a man eventually, I’ll take care of ya.”
The last of my adventures on Chub Cay involved Theodore. One day at the dock, I noticed one of his/her three air cells had deflated. I pumped it up a few times (done by foot) to no avail. I put him/her up on the dock and scoured the tubes with soapy water searching for a leak to fix; dinghy and PVC maintenance are more skills added to my resumé. Then a second cell lost its air. When I couldn’t find the leaks, I called Mike. With four eyes focused on a quest for bubbles, we discovered that her seams tucked in along the floor were failing. I tried a test repair with Shoe-Goo - an absolute must have on a boat – without success which forced an application of the hard-core, 5200 sealant; there are multiple types of sealants in every boat locker. I am very sad to report that while my patching held her together a while longer, her age and new, fun life in the hot southern sun degraded all her seals and the glued, boat mounting davit-clamps. Stay tuned for an introduction to Theodore II.
You may be wondering about my aforementioned tow back to the mainland – that’s coming up next.
Allen
Lighthouse Point, FL
