Twenty years ago, the Pelican Range of islands looked to the average tourist like the perfect place to pull up a boat, find a nice shady spot under a palm tree and catch a bad case of malaria or dengue fever. To a Belizean, it looked like swampland of opportunity whose window could shut at any moment.
Most of the islands in the Pelican Range were owned by the government, which means they were part of the public domain, just out there to provide habitat for the fish and fodder for the land crabs. And Lincoln Westby knew a little about being a land crab—dig in, make some improvements on the initial design of your home and everything within view becomes your oyster.
Back then, a Belizean could lease an island from the government, and Westby had his eye on a little six acre mosquito breeding ground on Northeast Cay where the water stretched azure to the horizon and the noseeums tested your sanity. A place where you next meal was at the end of a handline or pole spear, and a man with a fly rod could walk the shores and laugh his way to his dreams.
Westby and his common law wife Pearline leased a small parcel on the island—a combination of dry land, mangroves and the world’s greatest sand spur population. It was Their dream to own an island, a place where friends and family could gather, where they could run a world class fishing lodge that would bring anglers from around the globe to chase permit, the holy grail of fly fishing. Northeast Cay had all that, along with moon tides that flooded the land mass and turned it into a beautiful oasis of salt marsh.
The problem was simple: everything about the location was perfect except the fact that the island turned into a sandbar on high tide. Lincoln and his wife saw the island in their dreams on low tide, and then watched it sink daily on high tide. Lacking dry land to build on, barely enough income to provide the next meal and no Fannie Mae to turn to, they did what everyone else would do—fill bags of sand and haul them by boat to Northeast Cay and build an island by hand.
Every day Lincoln would fill five or six bag with sand, put them into his boat, spend half the night handlining for snapper and other reef fish, then head for the island to grow the land mass, sleep until dawn, then head back to the mainland to sell the fish at market. He’d visit the island several times each day in the floating sandbox he called his boat. Many nights he’d camp on the island or sleep in his boat if it was a moon tide, but gradually, the sand began to accumulate and a spit of dry land turned into a mound, which eventually morphed into a beach and finally a real island.
Much of the sand came from Sand Bores on the flats as well as the mainland. How much sand did Lincoln and his wife bring out to the island, enough that when a hurricane hit the island in 1995 it turned a hill into a beach. At least five or six bags a trip for six months (Lincoln estimates about 10,000 bags of sand), the kind of stuff that you see someone doing and laugh, knowing in a hundred million years times eternity it will never be enough sand to fill a marsh and create an island from mangrove wetlands. Enough that everyone called them “crazy,” and by the late 90’s changed that moniker to “visionary.”
Eventually, there was enough land that shade became an necessity, so Lincoln planted cocoanut palms and other trees. Then came a building–a real house on what was once the mosquito capital of Central America and now a place to lie in a soft bed and listen to the waves lapping along the shore. As the improvements continued, Lincoln and Pearline were able to purchase the land from the government, and have slowly bought section after section and now own most of the island.
He and his wife named the lodge-type dwelling Blue Horizon, after the view from the porch, and Lincoln shifted his fishing efforts from commercial reef fish to sportfishing permit, tarpon and snook, eventually becoming the most knowledgeable permit guide in the area. With help from friend Will Bauer, Blue Horizon Lodge is now four cottages, a main house and cook shack, and a short walk from waving tails and the holy grail.
Blue Horizon Cay is not fancy, but it is cozy, clean and one of the best places to find yourself in a hammock, Belikin beer in hand and casting shoulder sore. It’s a place that shouldn’t be there, couldn’t and never would be inhabitable, but now regularly visits the dreams of anglers around the world, while Lincoln and Pearline rock away on the porch watching the sun set daily behind a blue horizon.
