Yes, that sounds great, but I didn’t know that big. The thing was that I was responsible for rebuilding a minesweeper into a passenger ship. The ship would transport 153 tourists daily to a small island east of the Dominican Republic’s southern coast, there, the tourists would swim, drink, dance and roast both pork chops and bodies.. The owner of the minesweeper who was a Greek businessman, had hired me as responsible for his project to make Isla Saona a tourist destination. The work was done in parallel with the minesweeper being rebuilt so it was hard working days.
The plan was to fabricate all parts as rain cover / sun protection, benches and a bar in La Romana with the help of local labor. The parts would then be transported to the island by a speedboat and be assembled together on Isla Saona. It sounds pretty straightforward, you might think. The problem, however, was that Isla Saona was a nature reserve where it was absolute prohibition to do some constructions.
To build a tourist resort there it was not even on the map, but the Greek were sure it would resolve in some way. So I started designing and building the parts for the bar, which consisted of a mahogany bar desk with a front covered withsplit bamboo tubes. The roof was lined with a special type of palm leaf which formed a very waterproof roof.
The parts for the bar were so heavy and unwieldy that they were transported out in advance on a larger ship and that transport ended a little bad for one of the crew. I was away and did not see it, but someone had neglected when one of the heavier parts would be loaded into a dinghy for further transport to the beach. It loosened and crashed over a person who was in the dinghy and was about to receive the parts. He happily managed life but broke a leg. The dinghy broke but the part to my bar managed the bang.
The following day, I arrive with my family in a speedboat to assemble the bar on the island. After I been working about 20 minutes with assembling the bar I heard the sound of an vessel engine and looked towards the beach.There comes a patrol boat uprising on the beach and off jumps 3 armed marines. They walk with determined steps up to me with their arms rattling. When they arrive at me one of them, I suppose it was the commander, told me that this is a nature reserve and that I absolutely not could build anything here. I have to take my things and leave the island right away.
Well then I think, now I have been shitting in the blue cabinet. I harken a little and apologize most humbly for having infringed on the reserve. I then declare that the intention is definitely not to build anything permanent on the island. This is a kit for a bar and I have taken it here solely to test so that everything is there with the day you mount it in any place in the bush where it is far to tools if something goes wrong. As a kind of general test, I was joking.. This seemed to calm them somewhat. They stayed and watched curiously when bit by bit finally there was a complete bar on the beach. I was approved with praise and the opinion was that it was a very intelligent construction.
Of course, they had not seen the most intelligent yet. In the almost 40 degree heat, like me, they had sweated literally with liquid and unlike me, they were pretty well dressed if you say so. So the joy and gratitude became overwhelming when they were invited as the first guests of the bar to drink just as much cold beer from my cooler as they could only cope with. Yes they even agreed to a couple of real Cuba Libre as well.
He was right my boss the Greek. Everything is going to be solved at last and I now understood why he suggested me to bring a well stocked cooler with beer, rum and Coca-Cola, didn’t he want me to go to work? In any case, I continued to have well-armed guests in the bar while I built up the rest of benches and grills, rain covers and more.
Rain / sun protection was probably the object that permanently permeated it all. It was 12 meters long and 5 meters wide and consisted of prefabricated parts that I mounted in place. To prevent it from blowing away, the pipes were fitted with concrete lumps at the end which were buried deep in the sand. When I transported this design to the island, I also had electric generator, grinder, drill and other tools that could be needed. Once on the island it turned out that I forgot to bring a spirit level. Shit happens! Here I will build a monster roof on an island far out in the Caribbean sea and don’t even have a spirit level.
The situation resolved very elegantly. Where the shelter was to be built, I had free view from both the long and short sides towards the ocean. It was just climbing up a bit in a palm and aiming at the horizon. It was the largest spirit level I ever used and everything became perfect.
So it began. Boatload after boatload day after day came, ate, bathed and enjoyed. It was an instant success and eventually more operators arrived in Saona and the tourist paradise was a fact. It is not without my feeling a certain pride when I google on the Saona and know that I was involved in getting the authorities to exclude this place in the national park to build the first structure for tourists on the island. A search on Saona today yields over 3 million hits and on youtube you will find thousands of tourist films from the island. I have a lifetime VIP free ticket to the island and I will use it to the maximum when I travel there in a few weeks. Just off the island is a very fine coral reef at just a snorkelling depth that I long to visit with my underwater camera. (Pictures coming).
Here is a photo showing some of the speedboats that are ready to take tourists to the island. (8 years ago) It is also possible to buy ticket on larger boats, (in class with the Caribbean Star which has unfortunately been scrapped a long time ago), with bar and toilets etc. but they take much longer to reach Isla Saona. The boats depart from Bayahibe, a small picturesque community near La Romana.
Thus, a new tourist paradise was created with the help of Urban Hahne from distant Sweden 1994.
Here is a link to one of the thousands of videos available about the tourist paradise of Isla Saona.
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