Well then they need to crack down on illegal vacation rentals. A person staying at a hotel or Bahamian owned rental property could get a kayak and do the exact same thing. Or rent themselves a flats boat and fish all day. Is the goal to restrict all access to the flat for fishing except through a guide?

So they are including fishing in these rentals? And who is guiding these people to fish? Are they locals or are foreign guides coming down? Because basically what you said is that people are renting out their second homes down here, which is something that can be dealt with by the Hotels Act. If foreign guides are coming down then they are working illegally can be dealt with by immigration.

If someone rents out their house, it isn't a lodge, it's a vacation rental, and if they are using local guides anyway then those people already fall within what is allowed in this proposed legislation.

There seems to be so much hysteria from both sides of this debate and little to no information on who and what will actually be affected.

Just chalk this whole thing up to another failure by the government. The list is so long now that you can't see the top from the bottom.

That's the amount they are telling us they are taking out of the treasury. When it's all said and done we'll find out they actually took twice that and spend only a quarter of it on the actual celebration. And then a few people will make some noise and everyone else will just bury their heads in the sand.

I'm not sure you can get more blatant with some sort of corruption. The guy claim to be running a web shop that has almost a million dollar in cash just sitting in it and doesn't know that it is actually an illegal gambling establishment. Just like that it all goes away and he gets his money back. This is a damn joke. Does no one here care about the Bahamas or are they all just in it for themselves. Buy them lunch and you can break any law you want. They don't care, they got lunch.

Can anyone actually point out a foreign fishing lodge? All lodges that currently operate and have foreign interests do so with either a Foreign Direct Investment exemption, or they are partnered with a Bahamian and running it as a Bahamian company (which is fully legal). The status for those lodges is considered Bahamian and so they will continue to operate as usual. If they don't have one of those and have foreign principle then they are already operating illegally. You can just come here and set up a business as a foreigner without following the rules. They should be shut down if they haven't followed all of the current rules. It's not even necessary to put it in the new law because it is currently that way.

According to how the legislation is currently written, you would only need a guide to fish from a boat if you are not Bahamian. Walking the flats would be fine, but you would need to get a permit to do so.

Also, no the $600 isn't set in stone, but rates for a day for a guide with a boat range from $500-$800. I'm not sure how many guides there are that would just join on your boat or if they even have a rate for it right now because it's not very common.

What a joke! Corruption has been uncovered by an audit done by the exact people put in place to discover this sort of thing, and now they are spending tax payers money to buy another report from a private firm to say they did no wrong. Can they not see how bad this looks? Are they so willfully blind as to think they can just steal in broad daylight? Are we, the people so willfully blind as to let this happen?

Of course they are only able workers with customer service experience. Try hiring a qualified accountant for less the $42,000 a year. At that payscale they will never have the competent employees in place to run actual audits.

It was a good news bad news thing. Yesterday he said the good news is coming, today he says the bad news is he lied.