this story originally appeared in Yachting World in 2004

How many people, apart from Janti, can claim to have built an island? Janti is from Union Island and when I first met him, he had a bar in Ashton. It was too far from the yachts so he wasn’t getting enough business. He was part of the environmental team under the local tourist office, and part of his job was to try and get rid of the huge conch middens (mounds of empty conch shells, sometimes many feet high) that were littering the beach. He talked to the fishermen who stacked them there, but they showed no enthusiasm for removing them. Janti decided to kill two birds with one pile of conch shells and use them to build himself a bar on a dead and shallow part of Clifton’s outer protective reef.  Boatload by boatload he patiently transferred the conch shells using his own labor and his open boat. After months of work, the beach looked much better and Janti had an island. He gave it a little capping of cement, to hold the shells together, built a bar and Janti’s Happy Island, the newest in the Caribbean, was born. Every night dinghies pull up to sample Janti’s tasty and inexpensive rum punch, some stay for a meal of barbecued lobster out on the reef.

since 05