Qualla: Chub Cay

Chub Cay: Introduction

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The blue hole on Chub Cay drops thousands of feet into the earth, and at the bottom - or at least as far down as anyone has looked - there are cars. And bathtubs. And other objects that have no business being in a saltwater abyss on a private island in the Bahamas. Nobody explains how they got there. The blue hole is accessible by golf cart, which tells you something about the scale of Chub Cay: an island small enough to navigate without a car, remote enough to require a plane or a boat, and strange enough that its most notable geological feature doubles as an underwater junkyard where you can catch snapper.

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Chub Cay: Wreckers, Emancipation, and the Fish Bowl

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Berry Islands exist because of shipwrecks. Bahamian wreckers - salvagers who made their living recovering cargo from ships that crashed on the reefs - were the first to settle the chain, drawn by the treacherous shallow waters that kept breaking hulls and scattering goods. Th...

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Chub Cay: The Tongue and the Trench

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What makes Chub Cay remarkable for fishing is not what sits above the waterline but what drops away beneath it. The island perches near the edge of the Tongue of the Ocean, a deep underwater trench that plunges to over 6,000 feet and runs between Andros Island and the Exuma Cays....

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Chub Cay: Peacocks, Iguanas, and a Peculiar Settler

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Chub Cay's wildlife reads like the inventory of a very specific collector. Iguanas bask on coral rock and hide in palm tree canopies, herbivorous and harmless despite their size. Lizards dart across the narrow dirt roads that wind through the island's east side, where open brush ...

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Chub Cay: Oil Money and Island Renovation

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In November 2013, George Bishop bought Chub Cay. Bishop had founded GeoSouthern Energy in 1981 and built it into a significant player in south Texas oil and gas. When GeoSouthern sold its fields to Devon Energy for $6 billion in 2013, it ranked as one of the largest payoffs of th...

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Chub Cay: Forty-Six People and a Blue Hole

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Chub Cay is one of two islands in the Berry chain that has a blue hole - the other is on Hoffman Cay, accessible only by boat. Blue holes are vertical caverns in the seabed, their saltwater columns dropping to depths that make accurate measurement difficult. From above, they appe...

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