Harbus

Issue date: 2/25/08 Section: A&E

Media Credit: Sonya Lai The Quiet Pool at the Four Seasons

I am going to let you in on a secret, my secret. Life was too stressful at the Harvard Business School, so I took an extended weekend, hopped on the plane, detoured in Miami, landed a rickety small plane (sat in the back for the least noise), and six hours later, landed on my secret getaway: Great Exuma, Bahamas.

Along with Little Exuma, the island forms the southern tip of the Exumas, a collection of 365 cays over 120 miles. Unlike the popular Bahamas destinations, Nassau and Paradise Island, with their underage, obnoxious spring-breakers, Great Exuma is a calmer, less-developed paradise. According to the Washington Post, the island is one of the "10 most desirable international locations." While yachts frequent the island, cruise ships do not.

Even in high season, the island feels half-deserted because there too many cays and local beaches: it is so large that it is easy to carve out your own secret piece of heaven.

My secret piece of heaven is the sandbars, stretches of pure white sand in the middle of the harbor revealed during low tide. It is a gorgeous place: hidden sand dollars and starfishes abound, the whiteness of the sand almost blinding in the sunlight. The clear blue-green waters remind you that you are in the middle of the water, a water that increasingly rises until you realize your private island is being swallowed up. No matter how long you are there on the sandbars, it is not long enough. It soon disappears, sometimes reemerging as quickly as it goes, but even if appears close-by, the barrier between you and the sandbars is often too deep. It is a magical place: the sandbars come and go as they please, hardly-ever the same place as the day before.

One only finds the sandbars by chance; but one will have a very good chance if one charters a boat (at $450 for four hours or $750 for eight hours). My captain was Jerry Lewless. On his 26-feet-long Twin Vee Cat boat, Gloria, we visited the sandbars in between visits to the smaller Exuma islands. The itinerary was up to me. I declined snorkeling or fishing. Instead, I fed the eager fishes by the caves where the Pirate of the Caribbean movies were filmed, spied on the mansions on the private islands, called out for the ghost goat on a famously haunted and overgrown island, detoured to the outskirts of the Exumas, and then attempted to brave the rougher, unprotected ocean waters.

Continued...

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