By DENISE MAYCOCK
Tribune Freeport Reporter
dmaycock@tribunemedia.net
THE Miss Grand Bahama Beauty Pageant organisation is extending an open invitation to young women on the island to compete in this year’s pageant.
MGB President Glen Davis said they want to ensure that many of the communities in Grand Bahama are represented.
Pageant scouts have been identified and are scouting for potential contestants from West End, Eight Mile Rock and East End. Eligible candidates should be between 16 and 25. The theme for the pageant is “Celebrating 28 Years of Beauty on Grand Bahama.” The organisation will honour past beauty queens from 1970 to the present.
The MGB organization said it is dedicated to grooming young women of Grand Bahama into purpose-driven, community-minded, beautiful young ladies. “We would like to see a Miss Eight Mile Rock, Miss West End Grand Bahama, and Miss East End Grand Bahama competing on the same stage for the coveted title of Miss Grand Bahama,” Davis said.
“We look forward to working with all parts of Grand Bahama to help make this year’s event bigger and better so we are encouraging every community of Grand Bahama to get involved.”
The dates for screenings in the various communities will be announced on the organisation’s Facebook page at MissGBahama.
“The ideal contestant for Miss Grand Bahama is a person who will successfully fulfil the requirements set forth and will wear the crown with dignity, respect and will be an excellent ambassador for the Bahamas,” Davis said.
“That person must possess beauty/good physical form; intelligence; effective communication skills; a great attitude; a motivated spirit; be ready to work as part of a team; excellent speaking ability as well as listening ability and be overflowing with confidence.”
The former beauty queens who will be honoured are Patrice Degregory, 1970; Lolita Armbrister, 1978; Lisa Bartlett, 1981; Pamela Parker, 1983; Tasha Ramirez, 1988; Vanessa Ferguson, 1988; Bernadette Lightbourne, 1993; Donna Gray, 1996; Brittney Lightbourne, 2007; Nathalee Brown, 2007; Kerel Pinder, 2008; Nikie Severe, 2009; Tempestt Bullard, 2010; Keriann Stuart, 2011; Kristie Farah, 2012; Shequera King, 2013; and the reigning Miss Grand Bahama, Lashanda Wildgoose.
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242orgetslu 9 years, 11 months ago
Across the inky-blue Gulf Stream from Florida, near the sheer edge of the Great Bahama Bank, a new island is emerging from the sea. Although it bears the appealing name Ocean Cay, this new island is not, and never will be, a palm-fringed paradise of the sort the Bahamian government promotes in travel ads. No brace of love doves would ever choose Ocean Cay for a honeymoon; no beauty in a brief bikini would waste her sweetness on such desert air. Of all the 3,000 islands and islets and cays in the Bahamas, Ocean Cay is the least lovely. It is a flat, roughly rectangular island which, when completed, will be 200 acres and will resemble a barren swatch of the Sahara. Ocean Cay does not need allure. It is being dredged up from the seabed by the Dillingham Corporation of Hawaii for an explicit purpose that will surely repel more tourists than it will attract. In simplest terms, Ocean Cay is a big sandpile on which the Dillingham Corporation will pile more sand that it will subsequently sell on the U.S. mainland. The sand that Dillingham is dredging is a specific form of calcium carbonate called aragonite, which is used primarily in the manufacture of cement and as a soil neutralizer. For the past 5,000 years or so, with the flood of the tide, waters from the deep have moved over the Bahamian shallows, usually warming them in the process so that some of the calcium carbonate in solution precipitated out. As a consequence, today along edges of the Great Bahama Bank there are broad drifts, long bars and curving barchans of pure aragonite. Limestone, the prime source of calcium carbonate, must be quarried, crushed and recrushed, and in some instances refined before it can be utilized. By contrast, the aragonite of the Bahamian shallows is loose and shifty stuff, easily sucked up by a hydraulic dredge from a depth of one or two fathoms. The largest granules in the Bahamian drifts are little more than a millimeter in diameter. Because of its fineness and purity, the Bahamian aragonite can be used, agriculturally or industrially, without much fuss and bother. It is a unique endowment. There are similar aragonite drifts scattered here and there in the warm shallows of the world, but nowhere as abundantly as in the Bahamas. In exchange for royalties, the Dillingham Corporation has exclusive rights in four Bahamian areas totaling 8,235 square miles. In these areas there are about four billion cubic yards—roughly 7.5 billion long tons—of aragonite. At rock-bottom price the whole deposit is worth more than $15 billion. An experienced dredging company like Dillingham should be able to suck up 10 million tons a year, which will net the Bahamian government an annual royalty of about $600,000.
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