Brigitte Bardot used to skinny dip here. Right on this beach. Or maybe the one next to it. No one is quite sure. No one can remember.

Bardot used to come to Great Harbour Cay when the island was the Next Great Destination in All the World when this tiny island in the Berry Islands chain of the Bahamas was booming, a magnet for Cary Grant and Paul Newman, when the Tamboo Club was jumping.

Half a century later, Great Harbour Cay is something very different. It is also precisely as it was. The sparkling beaches are empty, the Tamboo Club is a decaying building and the 18-hole championship golf course is half covered in weeds, with nature clawing back this little speck of sand, on the northern side of the Berries, where we stayed for the first few days, anchored right off the beach, outside of the Great Harbour Cay.

Unlike Bimini, the Berries only has a population of 600 people and few businesses, perfect for just exploring. We dinghied and explored a sunken DC-3 plane ditched by a drug lord on its way to Miami 40 years ago. It was an eerie site seeing a giant piece of metal rusting under the seabed. Next, we checked out an in-the-water blue hole, an underground sink hole that went from 6 feet to 1000 feet deep, quiet impressive seeing water color changes from light green to deepest blue in a matter of seconds.

We took time to explored the southern half of the island, walked about town, and saw kids playing basketball. I couldn’t help by inviting myself into a quick game with them. Boy was I out of shape! Afterwards we went to Brown’s cafe for some food and cold drinks. This is a place where you meet and talk with the locals and get to understand their way of life. Everyone in the tavern greeted us and welcome us to their island and one gentleman even offered to give us a ride back to our dinghy dock.

Our last day we went to the marina to buy fresh water, made from sea water by using reversed osmosis technology, a process used in most places of the Bahamas. We walked by the old Tamboo Club and the golf courses. We hiked over to the Atlantic Ocean side of the island to see the impossibly clear waters and walked the endless beaches and tried to climb up a few coconut trees 🌴 but ended up sprang my ankle when the leaf that I grabbed onto came off the tree left me sitting on my rear end. We limbed back to our boat and I swore never to watch another YouTube video that made coconut tree climbing looked so easy.

Next day we left Great Harbour Cay and we were glad that it never became that great international hotspot that it once tried to be. It was never meant to be that. It was meant just to be Great Harbour Cay.