Exuma’s friendly way

GEORGE TOWN, Great Exuma, Bahamas — It takes about a week to become a local here on Exuma.

Our first night, we head to the manager’s cocktail reception at the pink limestone Club Peace & Plenty, which has housed island guests for half a century.

The following week, when we make our way to the waterfront, poolside Reef Bar expertly manned by Doc, we hear someone call out: “Hey, there’s Kathy and Fletcher.” We grin in reply.

We quickly discover that this small island has a rhythm that revolves around the resorts and restaurants.

There’s Friday night at P&P;, as it’s called. Also on Fridays, many head to Eddie Edgewater’s for ribs, followed by late night at the Two Turtles Inn bar.

Saturdays is karaoke at Palm Bay Beach Resort — unless it’s summer. Then Saturday nights are reserved for Junkanoo Festival at Fish Fry, an event site that’s a roadside collection of shacks serving up fresh conch salad, conch fritters, ice-cold Kalik (Bahamian beer), plenty of music and local culture.

Sundays, boaters and tourists alike line up for the pig roast at Stocking Island’s Chat ‘n’ Chill just across from Exuma’s main harbor. With its open-air bar, outdoor grill, volleyball beach and waterside conch-salad shack, the place feels destined to become a Jimmy Buffett song. More Kaliks await, along with the ribs, chicken, peas and rice and more. (Try the cinnamon-spiced carrots.)

Chat ‘n’ Chill is the brainchild of Kenneth “K.B.” Bowe, who recognized a trend: baby boomers ready to chuck the 9-to-5 for the boating life to see and discover the world.

As many as 600 boats winter here. Nearly all their inhabitants would discourage us from telling the rest of the world about Great Exuma and neighboring Little Exuma, a largely unknown Eden in a Caribbean becoming ever more developed.

“Exuma is the most beautiful place on this Earth, and the people need to come and see it,” Granville Ferguson tells us when we return our rental car. “The beaches are so beautiful; the people are nice.” With a full-time population of 3,500 in about 20 villages, Great Exuma remains gloriously undiscovered about 300 miles southeast of the Florida coast. The island is 47 miles long and about 4-1/2 miles across at its widest point.

It’s part of the Exumas, a chain of 365 unspoiled islands and cays (pronounced keys) that run more than 100 miles south from Nassau to the edge of the West Indies. Great Exuma is the largest.

Most of the locals, and especially the business people, seem to welcome recent development and accompanying jobs, especially the new Four Seasons Resort Great Exuma at Emerald Bay with its stunning grounds and exquisite accommodations, 18-hole Greg Norman golf course, tennis center, the adjacent Emerald Bay Casino and a 200-slip marina with shopping center to come.

Four Seasons’ next-door neighbor is the also elegant Grand Isle Resort & Spa, formerly Grand Isle Villas, with handsome decor inside and lush plantings outside, plus the tall, thatched Pallappa bar beside an infinity pool overlooking Emerald Bay Beach, shared with Four Seasons.

Just down the road past the main settlement of George Town sits another magnificent property, the impeccably styled February Point Resort Estates, touted by the Wall Street Journal as “one of the five hottest properties in the Caribbean.”

Island buzz continues over the promised 600 jobs at the $240-million Crab Cay, a 160-acre island in the middle of Elizabeth Harbour scheduled to house villa homes, a high-end hotel and another supermarina but delayed from its originally planned 2006 opening. There are rumors, too, of a large resort going in at Little Exuma to the south.

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