treasure island; David Flint-Wood reveals how his life changed forever when he discovered a quirky Bahamian isle.(Harbour Island)

Byline: David Flint-wood

Twenty years ago, I first came to Harbour Island in an open boat from Nassau with friends. The passage took us about two and a half hours, and as we rounded the Devil's Backbone from Spanish Wells and entered the cut into the bay, almost all my childhood fantasies were realized. Brought up in England on stories of the tropics by my father and uncle-both of whom had run away to sea at the beginning of World War II-and further fed at school by the adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, I was now chasing dolphins across gin-clear water and skirting sandbars to tie up at the dock of a settlement largely made up of clapboard ...