“I’m having fun,” said Hamlin, who has always had fun but is no longer paying too much for it. “You get a little tired of sailfish. But Choate and I are going down to the Cocos Islands in the summer on a mothership to look around.” And then Captain Hook’s eyes light up. And so do Tim Choate’s later that day, telling me about a pioneer operation he is beginning in Brazil for blue marlin. And so do Jody Bright’s eyes light up, talking about trying out new water in the Marquesas, Yemen, the Australs, New Ireland . . . and whenever he talks about returning to his bank in the Tuamotus.
Our day there had been a flawless marlin day with a hot, humid, big-fish wind out of the north and just the right chop on the sea. Jody and I watched Nameless Bank come up on the color video depth recorder, right where he knew it would be. Everywhere along it there were birds working and schools of yellowfin tuna crashing bait. David Beaudet dropped the lures overboard, into that water that no one had ever fished before, water where a marlin too big even to imagine might live . . . And five minutes later the boat broke. A tiny little thing called an injector seized in the starboard engine of that high-tech, half-million-dollar gameboat, and suddenly we might as well have been out there in the middle of the Pacific in a canoe.
We had to turn around then and head on one engine for the nearest populated island, nursing the boat along for hours at six knots. Jody never looked back at his bank, and “Pioneers get all the arrows” is all he would say on the subject.
Nameless Bank, of course, is still there. And in Captain Bright’s mind and mine, at least, so is Big Mama.
THE CLOVE KEY EXPERIMENT
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK WE STEP OUT OF THE BOAT ONTO A Bahamian bonefish flat of hard, white sand, ideal for wading and for spotting fish. The sun is shining and the wind is light. The tide has just turned and the two feet of water covering the flat is as clear as air.
There are, of course, bonefish everywhere on this flat—did you think there could not be?—and as soon as we spread out and begin walking the flat, the sun and wind both obligingly at our backs, even the tide running with us, we start spotting a school here, a pair of gorillas over there. I cast a perfectly built loop to the second school I see, and naturally the biggest fish in the school grabs the fly and heads for Cuba.
Tom Montgomery, the nonpareil fishing photographer and trout guide, runs over to take another series of lavish cover photos of me grappling with yet another lunker.
Ed and Becky Gray, founders of Gray’s Sporting Journal, look up from stalking their own fish and watch admiringly as I pass the rod around behind my back from my right hand into my left, then toss it up and catch it by the butt over my head—just a little thing I like to do.
Holding the rod overhead, I sense through its subtle throbbing that this bonefish is bearing down on a coral head a hundred yards away. A flick of the rod tip to the left—the Christmas Island whip, I call it—turns the potential world-record brute in the nick of time, while a second flick to the right bewilders the fish and parks him, as always, in the sand until Tom can get his shot set up.
“What shall we cook for dinner tonight?” I shout gaily to Becky Gray. “Barracuda roe for an appetizer? A little grilled triggerfish with some of that dill pesto in your traveling herb kit?”
“Do you think you can get that bonefish to back up about fifty feet and then sit in the sand again?” Tom asks. “It would improve the angle of the line.”
“Ho, ho, ho,” I chortle. “Not a problem, Tom.” I draw a quick figure-eight in the air with the rod tip and the bonefish shoots backwards for fifty feet and settles obediently to the bottom.
“Nice move!” exclaims Tom, snapping away.
“I call it my Belizean Figure-Eight,” I confide, straightening the photogenic bandana at my throat. “That’s one you won’t see from those stiffs down at the lodge . . .”
Whooaa! I am getting totally carried away here—reverting back to those impecunious but thoughtlessly happy days when I made my living writing for hook-and-bullet magazines. Sure, we were all pros out there on that flat—seasoned blood-sport reporters and world-romping gourmands at the top of our games—on the last day of another perfectly planned sojourn to one of those many junctions of Pleasant Street and Easy Avenue that make up the happy map of the outdoors journalist’s life. And, well, yes, you might say we were angling trail-blazers as well, shunning the lodge on the other end of the island in order to live and fish on our own, without the pesky interference of fishing guides, waiters with little gold rings in their ears, and sunburned, three-jawed chuck manufacturers from Detroit. And you want to know how productive, how effortless, how relentlessly fun our week had been—how we obliged the bonefish on the flats each day by catching them until our arms were sore, then trolled the cuts for giant barracudas and jacks, or perhaps traipsed out to the blue water to wear ourselves thin on wahoo, tuna, and a sailfish or two before going back to our private island for a snorkel, followed by chilled vodka and conch fritters on the deck, another perfect sunset and another perfectly prepared but simple supper . . .
Of course you want to hear about all that, and I would love to make it up for you. But unfortunately, I am saddled now with journalistic standards, so all you get from here on in this story is the sordid truth.
This particular sojourn started with a letter I received a few winters ago from Becky Gray. As it happened, I was recovering from an operation in the cold and drizzle of Birmingham, Alabama, and I must admit the letter made my heart soar like a virgin’s with anticipation of all the sport and creature comfort that Becky described.
Dear Charles,
We hear you are up and around again, so I am writing to suggest a jaunt, as I am sure you are ready for one. Last year Ed and I took a small group down the Bahamas and rented a wonderful house on its own private island just off the north end of Great Exuma. Can there be words to describe such perfection? The house sleeps and bathes eight, and has its own freshwater source for fairly limitless water. A large deck wraps around the house, so there is always a reason to be outside: breakfast on the deck off the kitchen, rum and tonics on the porch off the living room, a moonlit gaze at the ocean before bed. The house has a good kitchen and comes with all necessary amenities, including a 25-foot Whaler Outrage boat and a wonderful boatman/caretaker named Tony Smith who will not only drive you to the fishing every day in the Outrage, but will have one of his brothers dive for fresh langouste for your dinner. Tony is a wonder of dependability and organization. He brings over to the house each day crates full of fresh grapefruit, his mother’s fresh-baked bread, pigeon peas for famous Bahamian peas and rice, and fresh limes for our rum and tonics. He is also a wonderful chef and will cook dinner whenever we don’t feel like doing it ourselves. He keeps the Outrage shipshape and in good running order, and he knows the local water well.
As you know, Ed and I like to find our own fishing, so each day we would pack a lunch and go exploring in the Outrage. So many bonefish flats and so little time! Every day we explored new ones. We’d spend the mornings stalking and casting, watching the birds, eyeing the lemon sharks and rays, and catching bones. Lunch on a white, white sand beach with a swim. Then in the afternoons we would troll between the keys for big barracuda and jacks, etc., or go into the nearby deep water for tuna and bonito, or out to the navy buoy for the big guys.
All this by day. At night (those lovely, balmy nights!) for anyone who hasn’t had enough of fishing, you can catch jacks and even big sharks off the dock. The weather is always perfect—day after day of intense, wonderful light that starts in the morning with a warm, still brightness that makes everything, especially the water, sparkle. Mornings melt into hot, tropical afternoons with big, puffy clouds and occasional sprinkles of rain to dust the air with a bit of coolness . . . I’m waxing, I see, but it really is heaven.
In addition to the marvelous fishing and easy living, there is the adventure of exploring all the little deserted islands and finding your own flats. Can you and Patricia join us in March? It�
�s usually the driest month in the Bahamas. We could take along another couple if you like. Say yes.
Much love,
Becky
The trip actually started off perfectly well. We flew into Georgetown, Great Exuma, from Fort Lauderdale on Friday, March 12, to the lovely weather Becky had described in her letter—big, puffy clouds and all that—and lunched at the Peace and Plenty Hotel, where Ed and Becky would be spending a night in order to learn about the hotel’s new bonefishing program.
I had fished out of Peace and Plenty with my father back in the sixties, and it is as charming a place now as it was then. Then, you simply hired some local out near the airport with a leaky boat who might or might not know where bonefish were, and if he didn’t know, you found them anyway. Now the hotel employs six trained guides equipped with good boats and motors, whose jobs are to know where bonefish are. Given the excellent accommodations and food at Peace and Plenty, its well-equipped guides, and God’s own amount of bonefish on countless flats all around Georgetown, it could be wondered why anyone going bonefishing in Exuma would not fish out of Peace and Plenty.
One reason might be that do-it-yourself bonefishing, while admittedly a developed taste, has its own strong appeal, and Exuma is one of the few quality destinations in the world where it can be practiced effectively. To qualify as a do-it-yourself bonefish destination, a place must have plenty of fish on reachable and wadeable flats, some place near those flats where you can camp or stay, and some way to cook or buy your meals. This is a minimum. Personally I would add to that list of requirements a reliable supply of ice cubes and limes, among other things. The Florida Keys; a few other places in the Bahamas; San Pedro on Ambergris Cay in Belize; Cancún, Mexico; and Anegada in the British Virgin Islands are places that fit that bill nicely—but none more nicely than Exuma.
The Grays enjoy all kinds of do-it-yourself fishing, as I do, and we make a habit of prospecting for new opportunities to practice it. The nature of this prospecting is that sometimes you strike it rich, sometimes you don’t, but you almost always enjoy the digging.
One of the secrets of getting the best out of any new do-it-yourself location is coming to it well prepared. I had brought along four fly rods of different weights, various fly lines and shooting heads, dozens of bonefish and barracuda flies, a twenty-pound trolling outfit, feather jigs, Konaheads, squid lures, Bonita Expresses, Vortex Chuggers, Front End Cavitators, Side Flow Jets, rigging wire, shark hooks, ballyhoo harnesses, and Tuna Tails. Being geared up for any angling eventuality gives me a feeling of chip-counting smugness. It is probably as close as I will ever come to feeling like a mogul.
Late that afternoon on the ride out to Barre Terre, I went through my tackle as I am wont to do, fondling the lures and flies and sharpening a hook or two. We had left the Grays in Georgetown and were being driven by van to the north end of the island by Tony Smith, caretaker of the house we had rented and our boatman for the week, and his friend Norman. With Patricia and me was our twenty-six-year-old daughter, Greta, and her friend Scott. Greta has traveled with me before on prospecting fishing trips, most recently to Venezuela in search of baby tarpon. She gave me a bemused, slightly pitying look as I moguled around with my gear.
“Do you think we’ll catch anything this time?” she asked.
“Of course. Many huge fish beyond your comprehension. We just had bad tides in Venezuela.”
“How about St. Thomas?”
“Wrong phase of the moon. Tony,” I said, to change the subject, “we’d like to take out the Outrage tomorrow after bonefishing to catch this child many huge fish in the blue water. How does that sound?”
Tony had seemed a bit distant and preoccupied with his bottle of Kalik beer ever since picking us up at Peace and Plenty. I hoped to draw him into a spirited discussion of our chances with the big pelagics.
“She’s broke,” he said morosely.
“Who’s broke?”
“The Outrage—she’s broke,” said Tony.
“Sounds like us,” Greta sneered.
“What? The Outrage is the only boat we have, right? How long she be broke for?” I asked, falling into the ridiculous pidgin dialect I can’t seem to help speaking to locals everywhere in the tropics, even ones with Oxonian English.
“We waitin’ on a part from the mainland, mon,” sighed Tony “Maybe it come tomorrow. Maybe we cahn fish with my boat.” He took a pull on his beer and that was that.
Relax, I told myself: just fall into the easy rhythm of the islands.
The tiny town of Barre Terre was forty-five minutes of rutted road from Georgetown on the northernmost end of Great Exuma Island. We were to go by boat with Tony from there to our rented house on its private island, called Clove Key. The sun was going down as we reached Barre Terre. Remembering Becky’s commendation of Tony’s cooking, I hoped he was planning on plying his skill that evening at the house. But when I asked him about supper arrangements, he informed me that he had not had time—what with waiting for the boat part and other pressures—to stock the house with food. We would eat, he announced, here in Barre Terre at the only restaurant in town, one that happened to belong to his friend and our driver out from Georgetown, Norman.
At Norman’s Fishermen’s Inn, in fact, we drank and dined well on cracked conch, curried mahi-mahi, and green turtle steaks, and when Tony graciously allowed me to pay for his meal and six or seven Kaliks, I sensed he might be finally warming to us.
Clove Key and its house was all Becky had billed it to be. The 160-acre island, Tony told us—perhaps reassuring us over the absence of any food in the house—supported wild goats, chickens, and big land crabs. Sugar cane, kumquats, mangoes, bananas, and coconuts grew on it, and even in the deep dusk of our arrival we could see bougainvillea and hibiscus blazing everywhere. The house had a big vaulted central room, four comfortable bedrooms, and three baths. It was surrounded by a high deck and powered by a generator. A couple from Kansas City had built it in 1972. The man had died recently and the property was now for sale, we learned, which might have accounted for some of Tony’s seeming offhandedness. He helped us move our bags from the concrete dock to the house and said he would see us first thing in the morning.
There was a haze glazing the stars, and a breeze rising at a time of day when it should have been falling. I asked Tony what he thought the weather would be like the next day. He appraised the sky and then the sea. “She might blow a little,” he said.
I listened to the wind come up all night. By daylight it was blowing a gale out of the south, and the sky was a mass of ominous gray lumps. Tony arrived at seven-thirty with some groceries and other supplies for the house, helped himself to a little rum, and was less than enthusiastic about the day’s fishing prospects. We went out anyway, Greta, Scott and I, in Tony’s seventeen-foot Whaler. We trolled a couple of cuts between islands without a bite, and then went over to the lee side of a nearby key to look around. There was a big, discolored patch of water there, known as a “mud,” that often indicates bonefish feeding on the bottom. I threw a fly into the mud, and a bonefish obligingly slurped it up. I handed the rod over to Greta, who does not fool around with fish. She snubbed up the little guy and hauled him toward the surface. Just as the bonefish showed, we watched a four-foot barracuda eat him. The ’cuda turned toward us, leering and holding the bone crosswise in his mouth. Then he shook his head a couple of times and the leader parted.
“Do you think that’s an omen?” said Greta after a moment of silence.
“Of what?” Scott asked her.
“I don’t know. That something with big teeth is going to grab our trip and eat it, maybe? Never mind. It’s just typical is all.”
Scott is a very good trout angler from Wyoming who wanted his first fly-rod fish in salt water to be a bonefish. He and I walked up a little mangrove creek, hoping there would be a fish up there for him. He threw out a few blind casts at the head of the creek, and his first fly-rod fish in salt water turned out to be a six-inch jack. �
�Let’s don’t tell Greta,” was all he said.
Around ten-thirty the weather went from simply awful to Wagnerian. We ran back to Clove Key in howling wind, stinging rain, thunder and lightning, and hail. Hail in the Bahamas! Tony didn’t even know what it was.
After a short but miserable boat ride, Tony tied his boat on the lee side of the island and we bushwhacked, shivering in the hail, back to the house over jagged coral, through dripping undergrowth, making our way carefully around gaping sinkholes of black water.
“They’re calling it the storm of the century,” said Patricia cheerfully. She had been listening to the radio. “Birmingham got sixteen inches of snow. Atlanta is totally closed down. New England and New York are buried, and here we are out of it all on our own island in the Bahamas!”
“Have you been outside?” Greta asked her.
We cooked and ate a big, consoling frittata and put some rum in our coffee, then Patricia, Greta, and Scott went back to bed to read, and I went into Georgetown with Tony to talk things over with the Grays and Tom.
The Next Valley Over Page 10