A fire hit The Abaco Club on Winding Bay on a Friday night in late July. Six weeks later, the club's golf course is still ranked among the best in the country, its main restaurant is still serving dinner with a view of the bay, and its newest amenity, a beach club that didn't even exist two years ago, never lost a day of service. That gap between what burned and what didn't is the most useful thing a Great Abaco resident can know heading into fall, because it tells you something the headline alone doesn't: an incident at one address on a 500-acre property is not the same thing as an incident on the island.
What The Fire Actually Took
The blaze broke out on a Friday evening at the private club's Winding Bay property, destroying the spa and fitness centre along with an adjacent generator building. A small flare-up resurfaced Saturday morning and was contained quickly, with firefighters staying on site through the cleanup. Volunteer fire departments from Marsh Harbour, Cherokee Sound, and Bahama Palm Shores responded alongside the club's own team, and their work kept the fire from spreading to nearby homes or other club facilities. No injuries were reported. Bahamas Power and Light inspected the electrical equipment serving the area and authorized restored service by Sunday. The cause remains under investigation, and while the club has declined to put a number on the damage, Tribune Business has reported that the cost could run into the millions.
That is a real loss, and it will take time to rebuild. But it is also a specific, bounded loss. Two buildings, in one corner of one property.
What Never Stopped
Everything else on the property kept running. The Cliff House, the club's main restaurant overlooking Winding Bay, never closed. The golf course, a Scottish-style links layout that has hosted a Korn Ferry Tour event, kept its tee times. And The Bay Club, the newer beach club built in the last two years with its own infinity pool, kids' pool, and adult-only Horizon Lounge, wasn't touched at all. That last detail matters more than it looks. The buildings that burned were part of the club's original construction going back over two decades. The building that opened most recently, the one representing the club's newest investment in the property, is on the opposite end of the layout, and it never lost a single operating day.
Here's the shape of it side by side:
| Affected by the July fire | Unaffected, still operating |
|---|---|
| Spa and fitness centre | The Cliff House restaurant |
| Adjacent generator building | The 18-hole golf course |
| Estimated damage in the millions (per Tribune Business) | The Bay Club, including its infinity pool and Horizon Lounge |
| Power restored by BPL the following Sunday | Employee and member safety, with no injuries reported |
If you heard secondhand that "the club burned down," the accurate version is narrower and less alarming: a fire destroyed two support buildings on a property where the dining room, the course, and the newest amenity kept operating without interruption.
Why One Settlement's Bad Week Doesn't Become The Island's
Great Abaco isn't a single address, and that's the part easy to miss if you only heard about the fire. Winding Bay is its own settlement on the southern end of Great Abaco. Marsh Harbour, the commercial hub roughly forty minutes north, runs on its own calendar entirely. Wally's, the pink colonial-style restaurant that's been serving Bahamian and international fare since 1986, kept its dinner service running the whole time. Snappas Bar and Grill relocated to a new spot at The Conch Inn earlier this year and didn't miss a beat either. Neither establishment has any connection to Winding Bay beyond sharing the same island.
Head out to Elbow Cay and you're in Hope Town, a settlement with its own harbor, its own colonial architecture, and its own rhythm that has nothing to do with what happens forty minutes south. And up at Green Turtle Cay, the island's own local story this season has nothing to do with a fire at all. A developer named Reginald Curry is pressing ahead with a proposed nine-villa clubhouse project at Gillam Bay after the local council rejected it, taking his case to Nassau for approval. A resident-led campaign called Save Gillam Bay has collected close to 3,400 verified petition signatures and roughly 200 handwritten signatures from people on the cay itself, arguing the site is one of the last undeveloped stretches of coastline left there. That's a genuinely separate story playing out on a different part of the island, with its own timeline and its own stakes, running in parallel to everything happening at Winding Bay.
This is the actual texture of the fall season on Great Abaco: several settlements, several storylines, none of them canceling each other out. The island just wrapped its nine-day Regattas In The Abacos in late June, a race series that moved boat by boat between Marsh Harbour, Hope Town, Great Guana Cay, and Green Turtle Cay, with an evening party at each stop. That event alone touched four settlements in nine days without any single club or property carrying the whole thing. If a fire had hit one of those stops during regatta week, the other three would have kept racing.
The Season Itself Is Running Quiet
There's a broader piece of context worth knowing if you're weighing how the rest of fall is likely to go. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's August update maintained its below-normal outlook for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, putting the odds at 75 percent for a below-normal season, 20 percent for near-normal, and just 5 percent for above-normal activity, with El Niño conditions expected to suppress storm development through the historical peak in September and October. As of that update, only two named storms, Arthur and Bertha, had formed all season, and neither reached hurricane strength. None of that is a guarantee, and NOAA is careful to note its seasonal outlook isn't a landfall forecast. But it does mean the rebuilding work at Winding Bay is happening during a season that, so far, has given the island room to work without added pressure.
Put the two threads together and you get a fuller picture than either one alone. A fire took out two buildings at one club in July. The rest of that club, the rest of Winding Bay, and every other settlement on Great Abaco kept running its own calendar without pause, through a hurricane season that has stayed unusually quiet. That's not a story about resilience in the abstract. It's a specific, checkable fact about how contained a single incident actually was against the size of the island it happened on.
If you're already living on Great Abaco or spending your season here, that's the version worth carrying into fall: know which buildings actually closed, know which restaurants and settlements never had anything to do with it, and read the rest of the calendar for what it actually is, not for what one headline made it sound like.
If you'd like a closer, ongoing read on what's actually happening across Great Abaco and the rest of the Family Islands, from Winding Bay to Green Turtle Cay, Chancellors KW Bahamas tracks it settlement by settlement. Schedule Your Concierge Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's next for your corner of the island.
