Underwater caverns quite an attraction on Grand Bahama

Hadley Forbes, 75, owns H. Forbes Charter Services, which specializes in bus tours on Grand Bahama, about 56 miles east of Florida, in the Bahamas. He has lived in the Bahamas since 1946, and is originally from Turks and Caicos, several British-controlled islands southeast of the Bahamas.

Q. Grand Bahama is roughly 530 square miles. How long does a bus tour typically take?

A. We do several tours; some are one hour, some two, some five hours. There’s a variety. The most popular is the national park tour; after that is the combination tour that takes you to the residential area and the botanical gardens. We do the cave tour for cruise ships.

Q. Cave tours? Grand Bahama is barely above sea level.

A. Yes, one of the world’s largest underwater caverns is at Gold Rock Beach. That’s where Lucayan National Park is. It has been advertised around the world after being discovered in 1982.

It’s open to the ground by a 10-by-15-foot opening. A man discovered it after we had the logging stopped on the island. You can’t say no one had seen it before, but you would’ve had to walk through the pine barrens when the island was populated by larger timber. In 1942 when the lumber mills started up, they cut the pine up and discovered a whole lot of things here. They discovered artifacts from the Lucayan Indians. They found shipwrecks with gold and silver on them.

Q. And the cave is responsible for the national park tour?

A. Yes. We take at least 70,000 to 80,000 people a year there to take pictures. You can’t dive into it from the opening, but you can get down closer by a staircase and some people dive from there. I wouldn’t do that though because it has a strong current and you might get sucked under. But people do go into the cave.

It’s a large cavern. It goes for miles and miles underground.

Q. Of all the places on the island where you take people, what’s the activity they find is unexpectedly great?

A. Mostly when they go into villages and meet people. People here are very knowledgeable about their surroundings and history and geography. Which village you visit depends on your tour. To the east you have settlements like High Rock, Rocky Creek and all the way up to Pelican Point and McClean’s Town. In the center of the the island, you go through the modern residential area of Freeport and around the harbor. Then there’s around the Perfume Factory. Then move on to the Garden of the Groves – a botanical garden with flowers and trees and things like that.

Q. Are most people on the island native to Grand Bahama?

A. No. The largest population comes from Turks and Caicos. They mostly live in the Eight Mile Rock area, the largest constituency on Grand Bahamas.

Q. There are several dozen islands in the Bahamas archipelago. By how they speak, can you tell which island they’re from?

A. The way you speak depends on which island you came from, but you’d have to be listening vigilantly to know if someone is from, say, Spanish Well (on St. George’s Cay, off the tip of Eleuthera).

Most people speak alike. Grand Bahama is one of the most modern islands in the Bahamian chain; it’s populated by people from every island in the chain, and then some. In the early days of Grand Bahama, Turks and Caicos people were here first. That was around 1926, when the population of Grand Bahama was only 300 or 400 people and they lived in pockets like Pelican Point, High Rock and Old Freetown. You wouldn’t find any more people until you got to a place now called Barbary Beach, three or four hours away. Then nobody for another eight or nine miles until you got to Mather Town; there were a couple people there. Then down to Smith’s Point; a couple people lived there who were natives.

Q. What’s your favorite place on the tours?

A. My favorite place to take people is Smith’s Point, a township right on the ocean. They have a fish fry there on Wednesday nights. The village is very much into its culture – Wednesdays are a family get-together and it’s a big, big thing on the island. This is in five restaurants, and one family owns all of them.

The fish fry is popular and then there’s the bonfire – also a native ritual from ancient times. When they’d harvest crops in the field they would go to the beach and start a big fire and dance around it to give thanks for the crops just received. Today we still do that.

Q. Is the bonfire seasonal?

A. No. Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday and every other Friday throughout the year. They do this on Taino Beach.

This story was originally published January 22, 2016 at 11:05 AM with the headline "Underwater caverns quite an attraction on Grand Bahama."