PRESS RELEASE
ALICE TOWN, BIMINI, THE BAHAMAS—AUGUST 15, 2013— Though television’s annual “Shark Week” may have ended, it’s shark week every week at the docks of the historic Bimini Big Game Club Resort and Marina.
The 51-room Big Game Club, www.biggameclubbimini, host to numerous sportfishing tournaments over the past half century, continues to promote its at-the-dock relationship to bulls, tigers and lemon sharks with the opening of the outdoor Shark Bar, a quaint Tiki-hut type watering hole adjacent to the resort’s popular shark encounter, Bimini Bull Run.
General Manager Michael Weber said the Shark Bar will eventually offer a closed circuit camera allowing patrons to view nearby underwater scenes, especially when swimmers are in the specially designed cage system attached directly to the docks at The Big Game Club Marina.
“We have enjoyed considerable success since we opened the Bimini Bull Run shark encounter around the first of the year,” said Weber. “Now with the Shark Bar in place and plans for cameras, we can truly make this an interactive experience.”
The Bimini Bull Run is a first for the global shark diving industry, providing divers and non-divers with an up-close and personal adrenaline packed thrill of shark encounters from the safety of specially designed cage systems attached directly to the docks at The Big Game Club Marina. The system employs a unique “Hooka’ air system, allowing non-certified divers to experience the opportunity in addition to those certified divers who would prefer to SCUBA. Bimini Bull Run, after being closed for two months during shark mating season, is expected to re-open in September.
The Bahamas, a collection of 700 islands sweeping across 240,000 square miles of territorial waters, is one of the world’s premier shark-watching destinations for divers, reeling in $800 million over the past 20 years for the Bahamian national economy. Sharks in the Bahamas are big business and certainly worth more alive than dead. Globally, sharks are under attack with estimates of up to 90 million harvested annually commercially for their fins, considered a delicacy in certain areas of the world.
Weber pointed out that though the resort still offers big game sport fishing opportunities in the nearby waters, dead sharks are not welcome on its docks. The resort, according to Weber, is a Shark-Free Marina Member.
The Shark-Free Marinas initiative helps fund regional shark research and the ability to introduce the world of sharks in their own environment and in a manner that is safe both for the sharks and humans
About Bimini
From the Lucayan Indian word meaning “two islands”, North and South Bimini along with its smaller cays, is part of the Bahamas.
For generations of angling and diving enthusiasts, Bimini—less than 48 miles east of South Florida— has been and remains the gateway to the Bahamas, a portal to adventure and experience perched at the edge of a sheer underwater cliff and the eastern edge of the mighty and mythical Gulfstream.
Legendary angler and western novelist Zane Grey and his captain, Tommy Gifford, recluse billionaire Howard Hughes and retailing genius turned scientist/naturalist Michael Lerner heard the call of Bimini.
Ernest Hemingway was an early apostle to the Bimini experience in the 1930s, where he drank, brawled and wrote his way through several fishing seasons, traveling back and forth between home in Key West and his beloved “Island in the Stream”. His creative workshop was the Compleat Angler and his characterizations came from a world populated by giant blue marlin, bluefin tuna and schools of sharks almost too large to count. With his literary acclaim and sporting prowess, Hemingway, together with countless other kindred spirits, established Bimini as the Big Game Fishing Capital of the World—home today to some 50 world record catches and counting.