Madoff Memorial

Marsh Harbor
NoLL

Yesterday Libby and I went our separate ways. Libby went off with Pat and other lady friends on an expedition in search of very special pine needles that are found here in the Bahamas. (More on that in a future blog)

Ray and I had a different kind of adventure. We set off to explore in Ray's dinghy. It was a perfect day for it, sunny, warm, light breezes and waves. We followed the "back route" to Marsh Harbor up through a very protected cove that it bordered on one side by a very thin isthmus of land. It seemed that as we went along, that we progressed from the high rent district to higher and highest. Certainly many of the houses were beaufiful, especially the last house which also had two Hinkley boats
tied up at their dock.

We kept going beyond to Matt Lowes Cay. Ray said that the cay was private, heavily posted, and uninhabited, with only a caretaker's house. That turned out to be false. We circled around the island and found a big breakwater, we circled the breakwater and entered the channel that it protected. What we found inside was a deep water canal blasted out of the limestone and lined with massive high steel and concrete walls. Lining the canal were slots and docks for boats. Big boats. Each slip
was about 30 feet wide. There were places for about 50 yachts and megayachts, each with a dock, a manicured lawn, but no house. We saw only two houses in there out of 50 places. We saw only one boat, and no people. It appeared that the whole development was abandoned half-finished.

Actually, there seems to be a long tradition of half-finished abandoned projects in the Bahamas. Perhaps this one was only the latest. My imagination can hardly imagine how much it must have cost just to build that canal and those walls. Millions. Tens of millions. All of it, or almost all of it, sitting idle and unused. Anyhow, if a surprise hurricane shows up here in the next couple of weeks (that would be a very big surprise indeed) I now now an excellent hurricane hole to take Tarwathie
to.

I don't know what the name of the development is, but I think Bernie Madoff Memorial Estates appropriate.

p.s. When Libby returned she said they saw a man walking around in the pine forest wearing a red tee shirt with big letters on it saying AIG. Aha, now we know where those guys are hiding.