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Home sweet away from home
After a sunset happy hour on the seaside deck, dinner is served in the formal dining room as a first-night occasion. Once we’re seated around the big mahogany table — an heirloom that’s over 100 years old — Gary and Amos serve five courses — six if you count Brendan’s special order of hot dogs (the chemical-red-hued Jamaica kind). The rest of us have to make do with a main course of fresh snapper in local spices with a homemade sweet-tooth-tantalizing coconut-cream pie for dessert. Pauline, who tells me she learned to cook at her grandmother’s side, is a crowd-pleaser, and there’s not a crumb of leftovers.
Once the kids are snug in their beds the grown-ups and the really grown-ups settle around the patio bar. We plug a reggae-filled iPod into the villa’s sound system and turn on the pool’s underwater lights to provide a cool glow below the star-packed sky. Gary the butler makes us a first round of drinks, but then Gary the brother-in-law takes over. Talk and laughter lingers late into the night until, two by two, we head off to bed.
In the morning, coffee is ready and waiting before even the earliest risers get downstairs. Breakfast is on a garden patio, where we dig into a pile of bacon and eggs and slices of sweet Julie mango, pineapple and passion fruit. A rumble out past the cove signals the arrival of our charter boat, and the men walk out to the point and hop aboard the 48-footer.
Lines go into the water as soon as we clear the Discovery Bay buoy, and the crew says we could hit barracuda or kingfish close in, dolphin (mahi-mahi), tuna or marlin just a mile or so farther out. The real secret to a successful fishing trip is in the stories: the tales of other trips, other fish — ones that got away and ones that didn’t. As my dad and Jerry alone are stocked with about 100 years’ worth of anecdotes between them — none of which either has ever heard — the talking part is a huge success, even if the actual fishing isn’t.
The captain is working at it, though, steering for every stick of bamboo or clump of sargassum he can find in the hopes there’ll be a dolphin or two shadowing beneath it. After several hours of unproductive trolling, we duck into the cabin and break out the sandwiches the villa staff packed. Another secret about fishing is that nothing happens until you stop paying attention. Sitting on the couch with my mouth full, I see first one and then another of the six rods take serious dips as simultaneously we hear the snap of an outrigger clip. I’m out the door, in the fighting chair and tied to an angry 25-pound mahi-mahi before I can even swallow. My dad grabs the other rod, and we fight both fish to the boat. We’d release anything not quite so savory, but these beauties will give the entire family a taste of the freshest possible fish; our mouths are watering just imagining how a pro like Pauline will prepare them.
The boat drops us back at the villa around 5. Apparently the spa day was a winner, too: Carol, my mom and Ginny float down the lawn to greet us, massaged to the melting point, serenity in their smiles. Brendan had been Charmed all day, and Meghan shows me her fingernails; one of Carolyn’s crew gave her the whole soaking, buffing and painting treatment — another first. I find Sandi up at the villa, getting the final touches applied to her own manicure, with her toes freshly pampered and her whole being still aglow from a piña colada body scrub performed at the edge of the sea beneath the casuarinas.
Normality is now totally banished. We take all our meals on one of the patios, never out of sight of the water. Shoes are lost; bathing suits are the uniform of the day. Meghan has been practicing her swimming and is bursting to break out of the pool. We find a dive mask that fits her just right and head down to the beach for her very first snorkel. She climbs on my back like a baby otter and I swim along the rocky walls inside the cove, following a school of tiny bar jacks. When Meghan gets comfortable leaning over my shoulder and putting her face in the water, I fin out to the reef. We start shallow, but soon the water is over 10 feet deep, and still she’s totally at ease — too busy watching fish and the myriad other critters we find to worry. She quizzes me on everything, our heads popping up every minute so I can explain some new wonder. Soon she’s off my back and beside me, hanging onto my arm.
When Sandi swims out to meet us, I hand Meghan off so I can dive down to bring up some curiosities. When we finally haul ourselves out of the water, Mom-Mom is there to meet us. As she wraps Meghan in a towel, she asks her what she saw. I try to remember a couple of things to prompt her, but before I can say a word, Meghan starts rattling. “Oh Mom-Mom, we saw a baby French angelfish, a school of silversides, lots of sea urchins — which you have to be careful of but they won’t hurt you if you don’t bump into them — and trumpetfish, two big ones and then a baby one, and then a blue tang and two butterflyfish and then ... oh, yeah, a scorpionfish that looks like a rock and doesn’t move much but you still shouldn’t try to touch them, and then an ‘enemy’ that looks like a flower and has colors like my fingernails and then Uncle Bob found two brittle stars that look like spiders and I didn’t want to touch them, and then he found a sea cucumber that I didn’t want to touch either, but I held the sea biscuit and then you wouldn’t believe it: A cute little baby fish was living inside the skeleton of a sea urchin! He swam out but we caught him in our hands and made sure he went back inside so no big fish would eat him, and then Uncle Bob caught a pufferfish that puffed up and got all spiky but I didn’t touch him either.”
I’m stunned. And humbled by the abilities of a sparkling-fresh brain. Meghan and Mom start up toward the villa, but Meghan runs back to me. “Uncle Bob,” she confides, “snorkeling is my favorite thing in the world.”
And that’s enough to make the entire trip worth it. Seeing a little loved one embrace something I enjoy so much is a genuine family moment. As I’m rinsing the sand off the masks and fins, I look around. Sandi’s folks are relaxing out on the point in deck chairs, Carol is stretched out on a lounger watching Brendan and Gary splash in the pool, and Mom is applying yet another layer of sunscreen to Meghan — who’s filling her in on a hundred more details about our snorkel. Dad is wandering around taking pictures of everyone and everything. Sandi squeezes my hand and tells me to meet her in the hammock under the casuarinas. A delicious smell is wafting from the kitchen where the staff is preparing lunch — I bet it’s mahi-mahi.
I realize that by staying in a villa like this, we have our own private resort, with all the amenities, activities and attractions possible. The family factor? We all eased into a rhythm. In a natural, comfortable ebb and flow, everyone from age 2 to 67 gathers to play and laugh and enjoy meals, and then moves off to relax and renew in a more private manner before coming together again as one big happy family.
Now I wonder, What the hell — oops — what the heck was I ever worried about?
Bob Friel is the Editor in Chief of Caribbean Travel & Life.
Caribbean Travel & Life is the magazine for anyone in search of the perfect tropical getaway. Each issue presents expert insider’s advice on where to find the Caribbean’s best beaches and attractions, its finest resorts and spas, liveliest beach bars and activities, and its friendliest people.
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