The Old Days
Mo and I first visited Mangrove Cay in 1982, two friends John and Doris Dolak had a vacation home on Mangrove Cay that they shared with two other friends and were kind enough to introduce us to the island. It was love at first sight, we immediately feel in love with everything about the island, the people, the peace and tranquility, the beautiful greenish blue water, the many friends we made both Bahamian and visitors from all over the world.
Things have changed over the last twenty six years, fortunately those changes were made to the infrastructure of the island as well as improvements in the standard of living for the typical Mangrove Cay resident. The beauty, the wonderful people, the small community atmosphere remain unchanged. We now have an airport with a 7,000 foot lighted runway with twice daily flights to Nassau the capital of the Bahamas, we have excellent utilities, including electricity, water, telephone service, as well as high speed DSL internet service, cellular telephone service with world wide access, a gasoline station, shops where you can buy most of the food items you need, two freight boats deliver goods from Nassau weekly to the shops, restaurants, and hotels on the island, the freight boats also bring items people on the island order from Nassau.
Things were a lot different when we first came to the island, no electricity, we had a generator we ran twice a day to charge batteries for lights at night, to heat hot water to take showers, and to run the washing machine to wash clothes. There was a radio telephone at the telephone office up the island that provided telephone access to the outside world. If someone needed to contact you they would call the telephone office and David would ride his bike to your house and give you a message from the person that called, you would then have to go to the telephone office to call the person back. We used CB radios for communications between homes, each home had its own unique name, our friends home was Turtle Cove, each night at 8:00 PM all the foreign visitors on the island would get together on their CB radios to talk about the events of the day. In those days we had a 2,000 foot unlighted runway, to get to and from the island you had to take a Bahamas Air flight that did not run on a regular basis or charter a short takeoff and landing aircraft. You got your drinking water from a cistern that collected rain water, we had a small battery powered pump connected to a faucet on the kitchen sink to get drinking water. We had a small brackish well that provided water for showers, you were limited to amount of time you could shower because of the limited capacity of the well. We had to bring most of the food we needed for our visit with us as the food items available on the island were very limited. A freight boat arrived about once a month with supplies for the island. Reverend King sold gasoline for your car and boat and diesel for your generator, the gas and diesel fuel came in 55 gallon drums on a barge, the 55 gallon drums were dumped off the barge and then floated to shore. Reverend King would deliver the gas or diesel to you in 55 gallon drums or you could drive up to his place with your own 55 gallon or smaller drum and have him fill it for you. Needless to say one of the major problems with the fuel was the water picked up when the 55 gallon drums were floated ashore.
One might say why would anyone have wanted to go to Mangrove Cay back in 1982, even with all the problems we encountered we loved it, and as we foreign visitors say if it was easy everybody would be there and the island would have lost a lot of its beauty and charm.