You might think of the Bahamas simply as a place where your IQ gets sawed in half by a dizzying cocktail of rum and saltwater, where you stumble idly along, gambling away children and vital organs while finding reggae music suddenly tolerable, trusting that dumb luck will act as a nullifying agent against it all, or failing that, the public relations attaché of your local embassy. But beyond the casinos, conga lines, and holding cells is a different Bahamas, one that annuls the phoniness of Atlantis for the real paradise looming all around.
I’ve spent a weird amount of time in Nassau, the capital, on the island of New Providence, owing to my father being partnered in a timeshare there, a venue for family summits going on 20 years now. We come for the food and the fishing. Spiny lobster — called “crawfish” in the Bahamas — is a clawless, warm-water species with a tail as fat as a beer keg but far tastier, and can be speared by the dozens in their underwater lairs. Conch, an improbably delicious mollusk that’s eaten every conceivable way in these islands — grilled, steamed, “cracked” (deep fried), stewed, chowdered, frittered, and chopped raw in conch salad (the local ceviche) — abound on the seafloor.
That alone is enough to keep us coming back. But I should also mention the white-sand beaches, the startling blue sea, the red powder-puff and silvertop palms lining the streets, and a comically uncoordinated bird called the smooth-billed ani, which, when landing in a wind, will go tumbling in a ball of feathers. The 340 sunny days a year don’t hurt. Neither does the water temperature that almost never falls below 71 degrees. A population of 340,000 spread out over a 5,383-square-mile archipelago of idyllic islands and pristine cays makes convalescing from the winter office grind totally effortless. The Bahamas has been good to me over the years, is what I’m saying, even if I haven’t always returned the favor.
But at midday, when a mutant lobster-donkey hybrid comes into range, I rear back on my spear like Hector, close my eyes and release.
My father and I, along with our Bahamian friends Steve Darville and his son Demetri, will often head out to Rose Island for a day of spearfishing. I can’t tell you exactly where our hunting grounds are, as they’re the Darville’s secret spots — lovely stretches of reef-bound coast that Steve has been fishing since he was a boy. But you shouldn’t have much trouble finding crawfish in the waters off western New Providence. Just ask around. It’s not uncommon to see a Bahamian walk into the ocean and walk out with lunch, so natural is the connection between the two.
On a recent trip, we bounced out of Nassau in the Darville’s 18-foot Sea Boss, the sun rising beyond the western horn of the bay. Just four miles offshore, Rose Island is a showpiece of nature in all of its terrifying glory. “Two enemies, earth and sea, man and nature, meet in eternal conflict,” a French historian once wrote, as if picturing this very coast.
My father, although he hails from Indiana soybean country, is oddly at home on the ocean. As the rest of us hunted lobster, he paced the foredeck with a spear, keeping an eye out for sharks — black-tip reef sharks, typically harmless, sometimes like to challenge you for the meal at the end of your spear — and hollering instructions like Tashtego.
