Barbuda’s Codrington Lagoon: Fishing an Endangered Caribbean World

The flat-bottomed skiff moves through the channels of Codrington Lagoon before sunrise, the push-pole working the shallow bottom with a sound like a quiet conversation. Luther Beazer, 67, stands at the stern with the precision of a man who has polled these channels since he was eleven years old and knows their depth by feel. The lagoon is ten kilometers long and two wide, rimmed by mangroves on three sides and separated from the Caribbean by a thin barrier strip—the Palmetto Point bar—where frigatebirds by the hundreds roost in the black mangroves. The sky above them, and above the lagoon, and above everything on Barbuda this morning, is an extraordinary post-dawn pink.

Barbuda is the smaller and less visited of the two islands that constitute the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda—flatter, quieter, largely undeveloped, with a population that reached approximately 1,800 before Hurricane Irma passed directly over the island in September 2017 with sustained winds of 295 kilometers per hour. The storm destroyed or damaged nearly every building on the island. The government evacuated the entire population to Antigua. Two years later, perhaps half had returned. Luther had never left.

He refused evacuation, sheltering in the concrete cellar of a rum shop on Codrington’s main street while Irma dismantled the island above him. What he emerged to find was the subject of his morning conversation now, six years later, with the same matter-of-fact directness that seems to characterize the Barbudan relationship with extreme events: most of the village gone, the lagoon choked with debris and sedimentation from the storm surge, the mangrove barrier stripped. “The birds left,” he says. “That was the worst. The lagoon was quiet for months.”

The frigatebirds—magnificent frigatebirds, Fregata magnificens—had returned, slowly, over the following two years. The colony in Codrington Lagoon is now estimated at 5,000 breeding pairs, one of the largest in the western hemisphere. Watching them from Luther’s skiff in the pre-dawn, rising from the mangroves in their thousands as the light comes up, their hooked wings and forked tails silhouetted against the pink sky, is one of those accidental spectacles that no tour operator has yet managed to properly commodify, which is perhaps why it remains so affecting.

Luther’s primary fishing target in the lagoon is the spiny lobster—Panulirus argus—which shelters in the seagrass beds and coral rubble of the lagoon floor. He uses casitas: small wooden shelters that lobsters adopt as refuges, which fishermen can then raise and harvest. The technique is traditional throughout the Caribbean but practiced with particular skill on Barbuda, where generations of fishermen developed a nuanced understanding of lobster movement patterns through specific lagoon zones at specific tidal stages.

He shows you a casita: a simple frame of mangrove poles covered with palm thatch, about the size of a carry-on bag, resting on the seagrass bottom in four feet of water. He raises it with a hooked pole, slowly, and there are three lobsters in the shade beneath—antenna waving, tails coiled. He measures each with a gauge he carries on a string around his neck, returns the undersized one, bags the other two, and replaces the casita exactly as it was. The whole operation takes perhaps ninety seconds.

The lagoon has recovered, he says, but differently. The seagrass beds that were buried under storm surge sediment took three years to re-establish. The fish populations followed the grass. The lobster came back slower. And there are changes he can’t fully explain: some areas of the lagoon that were reliably productive before the storm have not returned, while other sections that were marginal have become the most productive sites. The storm rearranged the bottom. The fishermen have had to rearrange their knowledge.

By mid-morning, with six lobsters in the cooler and the lagoon warming enough to make the push-pole work demanding, Luther poles to a small sand spit in the lagoon’s center and anchors. From a cooler in the bow he produces breakfast: fried bakes—a Barbudan staple, rounds of fried dough—and salt fish sautéed with onion and tomato, wrapped in foil and still warm. He eats without ceremony, watching the frigatebirds circle overhead.

He speaks about the current state of Barbuda with the complicated honesty of someone who loves a place and is uncertain about its direction. The post-Irma period brought outside attention and, with it, development pressure that the island had previously resisted. A luxury resort controversial for its land tenure implications opened on the barrier bar. Property disputes that have been ongoing since the British colonial period intensified. The community is smaller and more fractured than before the storm. Luther is not hopeful in any facile sense, but he is present—which, on Barbuda, is itself a form of resistance.

The skiff poles back across the lagoon in the high morning light, the water now green and transparent over the seagrass, the mangroves alive with birdsong. At the Codrington landing, Luther unloads the lobsters and the cooler and the poles with the same efficiency he brings to everything. He will sell the catch at the market, then return to the lagoon in the afternoon to check a different set of casitas on the far side. He has been doing this for fifty-six years. He intends to continue.

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