The Tribune

A Long Island family has shrugged off the devastation Hurricane Dorian inflicted upon their sponging expansion plans by targeting another island as an alternative.

Lou Carroll and his brothers are harvesting, purchasing sponge from local harvesters, and processing the product for export to Europe and Asia even though the destruction inflicted by the Category Five storm on east Grand Bahama's sponging beds stalled their growth plans for that island.

The Carroll brothers, who started their business Long Island Sponge Company, on that island two years ago, decided to instead switch their focus to Eleuthera as a result of Dorian's impact. Lou's brother, Ricardo, is in charge of Eleuthera operations, while another brother, Charles, heads operations in Long Island.

Describing sponging as a “hands-on business” from which a decent standard of living can be earned, Lou says there are thousands of species of sponge in the world but only five of commercial value are found in The Bahamas: hardhead, grass, wool, reef and yellow.

He added that hardhead and grass sponges can be harvested in shallow water, while wool sponge is found in deeper water. "Young people can find beneficial work in harvesting sponge in shallow water," Lou Carroll said.

The Bahamas Agricultural and Industrial Corporation (BAIC) said sponging in The Bahamas was started by a French sailor, Gustave Renourd, who after recovering from a shipwreck in 1841 began harvesting sponge in the waters of this nation for sale in Paris.

Up to 1938, Bahamians around the archipelago were engaged in sponging mainly in the shallows of the Great Bahama Bank on the west coast of Andros. The Bahamas was exporting over 1.2m pounds of sponge annually in 1908, only to be undone by the 1926 hurricane and a microscopic fungus attack in 1938, which wiped out 99 percent of the sponge beds and caused the industry's collapse.

However, by the 1950s, The Bahamas was back to exporting some 600,000 pounds of sponge annually. To ensure Bahamian spongers capture a larger portion of revenues from sponging, the Government and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) agreed to fund a $1.11m project to revitalise the industry.

BAIC was selected as the designated executing agency for the project, which was launched In 2016. The project was started in New Providence; Red Bays, North Andros; and Mangrove Cay, South Andros, and it was also supported by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, the Bahamas National Trust, the Department of Marine Resources and the Bahamas Commercial Spongers Association. The project is ongoing.