As the plane approached Freeport International Airport, I glanced out the window at the clear skies stretching across the horizon and the azure waters shimmering in the distance. The picturesque June weather was a far cry from the catastrophic conditions wrought by Hurricane Dorian four years earlier, in 2019, when the storm’s eyewall pounded Grand Bahama Island for 40 hellish hours. Soon, the rebuilt terminals came into view as the plane touched down on the airport’s only runway. Dorian had submerged this tarmac under six feet of water and turned it into a debris field. Looking at it now, you’d never know.
Robert Neher, the owner of East End Lodge, picked up me and my wife, Laura. After an oceanside lunch at Banana Bay, the three of us headed east along Grand Bahama Highway, a two-lane road spanning the center of the 96-mile-wide island. A native of West Palm Beach, Florida, Neher, who is 58, began visiting Freeport in his teens with family and friends, and over the course of the 40-plus years between then and now, he’s seen Grand Bahama wade through a number of phases as political leadership shifted and the tourism economy ebbed and flowed.
“When I first started coming over in the early ’80s, Freeport was famous for its casinos,” says Neher, dressed in an East End Lodge fishing shirt,
