Of beaches, boats and blarney in the Bahamas

By Bob Friel

“Tim, there are two sharks right behind you.” My cousin Tim, a Philadelphia cop, is treading water in a deep cut that runs alongside Sampson Cay, a small private-island resort and marina midway down the 120-mile-long Exumas chain. There’s a cleaning station here that anglers who bring their big sport-fishing boats over from Florida use to fillet their catch. The daily dose of blood and guts draws hungry sharks and stingrays. That doesn’t bother Tim, though. He suffers from a genetic disposition to actually enjoy things like being surrounded by sharks. In fact, he’s carrying the mutilated carcass of a big grouper with him, determined to hand-feed it to one of the beasts.

Now there’s three of them,” calls out Tim’s father, my uncle Frank. “No, four.” “And a couple of big rays,” adds my dad, another Bob. The three of us are standing on the seawall looking down while Tim gets set to do his Siegfried and Roy impression. At this point — as the sharks catch the scent of blood and start approaching more aggressively — it looks like he might end up like Roy. Tim pops his head up, and we point toward the growing pack of predators. He nods and sticks his face back underwater, calmly spinning in a complete circle. It’s easy for us to see the sharks and rays from up here, but not so easy for Tim even though the visibility is excellent — water in the Exumas runs either gin, vodka or white-rum clear depending on your preference. But that doesn’t matter in this case. Tim twirls around again and finally spots something. He zeros in and holds one hand out of the water giving us the OK sign, then boldly moves in, carcass held out in front … and tries to feed it to a dock piling.

Frank shakes his head. We call down, but Tim can’t hear us, his ears underwater as he insistently shakes the dead fish, incredulous that the big, dark fuzzy shape in front of him won’t eat it. Meanwhile, the real sharks nose not 5 feet behind him, looking increasingly frustrated. I strap on a mask and grab my underwater camera. This could be worth a picture. It’s not Tim’s fault that he can’t see the sharks: He isn’t wearing his Hubble-strength contact lenses. And that’s not his fault either.

The Bahamas was our choice for a long-overdue family-style boys’ week out because each of us loves to be on the ocean. Snorkeling, diving, fishing, kayaking, boating, you name it — just add water and we’re there. Maybe that, too, is in the genes. And while the entire Bahamas archipelago is an island-hopper’s paradise, to water-loving sportsmen there’s no more beautiful stretch than the 365 or so islands and cays that make up the Exumas.

Flying over in a small plane — the Exumas are close enough to Florida that it’s economical for even a small group like ours to go by charter air — our pilot made a low-level sweep down the islands. The Great Bahama Bank spread out to the west, its shallows glowing turquoise, while the indigo depths of Exuma Sound sharply defined the eastern boundary. Strung along this blue edge was a ragged collection of stone and scrub cays, many of which were surrounded by a radiant fringe of coral-sand beach. It was what lay between the islands, though, that kept our four faces pressed against the windows, mouths watering over ripe bonefish flats and snorkeling reefs all perfectly visible through the clear sea.

Bob Friel

Our first evening on Sampson Cay, we settled into one of its villas, the Maine House, a hilltop three-bedroom home with a commanding view of the surrounding islands and the sunset from its second-floor balconies. After a dinner of grouper fingers made from a fish caught just hours earlier by one of the other guests, we moved to the west-facing porch and planted ourselves in Adirondack chairs. With our feet up on the railing, and rum and ice within easy reach, we sat back to watch the sky fade to its final purple over Pipe Creek. And started to talk. They say the Irish have the gift of the gab; well there’s not one in this Celtic clan whose birthstone isn’t a rock named Blarney. To our family, arguing is a sport, storytelling an art and laughing a right. And since it’d been literally years since the four of us had been together like this, it turned into a marathon.    

Tim, 30-something, being the youngest and still having some sense, abandoned the gabfest first, before we’d even finished the second bottle of rum or solved half the world’s problems. It was sometime between 4 a.m. and breakfast time when Frank, my dad and I finally called it a draw and decided to turn in. We swayed down the stairs one by one and navigated to our respective bedrooms using dead reckoning and a few helpful walls. Before bedding down, Frank made a pit stop at the bathroom he shared with Tim and downed a glass of water that someone had thoughtfully left on the counter. It was only when Tim woke up the next morning and stumbled his way to the sink that he discovered his dear old dad had drunk his only pair of contact lenses.

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