ALICE TOWN, BIMINI, The Bahamas — Chicago-based Horizon Hotel Group LLC has assumed management responsibilities for the historic Bimini Big Game Club Resort & Marina.

Making the announcement was Eric Jarvis, spokesman for the Southern California-based Hankey Group of Companies, owner of the 51-room resort. The Hankey Group of Companies is a privately held financial services, real estate and insurance organization based in Los Angeles, California.

A national hotel asset management and consulting company, Horizon Hotel Group specializes in the renovation, repositioning and rebranding of hotels and resorts. Horizon Hotel Group, headed by Principal James Gould, currently represents clients in Miami, Cancun, Dominican Republic, Mexico City and New York.

“Horizon Hotel Group is honored and privileged to be given this opportunity to take the leadership of such an important and historic resort in Bimini,” said Gould. “We look forward to working with ownership, the staff and the people of Bimini in creating a partnership for the future growth of the Big Game Club.”

The Big Game Club, which was founded as a dinner club in 1936 and relocated in 1947 to its current location, was re-opened in 2010 following completion of a $3.5 million renovation that included all guest rooms, the new Bimini Big Game Bar & Grill, Hemingway Rum Bar and Social Lounge and the Outfitter Shop.

From the Lucayan Indian word meaning “two islands”, North and South Bimini along with its smaller cays, is part of the Bahamas, an archipelago of 700 islands sweeping across 500 miles of open ocean.

For generations of angling and diving enthusiasts, Bimini, located less than 50 miles from 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 Gulf Stream.

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”.