Legend has it that the name “Cat Cay” came from pirates who thought the island was shaped like the cat line of a sailing vessel. It is shaped like a truncated “t” about two and a quarter miles across the top and a half-mile at its widest point.

It is located on the western edge of the four-meter-deep Bahama Bank which protects the island from heavy weather coming in from the east or southeast. Just to the west of Cat Cay the sea floor plunges into the Gulf Stream, where fisherman go for marlin, tuna and other pelagic big-game fish. Bimini, long a favorite location for serious anglers, Hemingway historians and island aficionados, lies about 10 miles to the north. Many have felt that Christopher Columbus eliminated the need for eulogy when he wrote of the Bahamas with flat finality:  " This land surpasses all others.”

The blue violet shadows of coral reefs, the rock outcroppings, the shifting sandbars of this tiny island hovering on the Grand Bahama Bank have not changed in hundreds of years. It is the enduring Caribbean romance of pirates attacking Spanish galleons en route to Cuba, the PT boats seeking shelter in WWII, a simple man

who looked after a lighthouse, and, later a portly millionaire from New York who would proclaim this island a paradise and start the private enclave that

is Cat Cay Today.  Whatever the era, the singular beauty and the captivating magic that tropical islands evoke have always framed the story of Cat Cay.