We’re there by breakfast, dropping our bags on the porch of one of the half-dozen timber huts that decorate Mickey’s small acreage of thick saw-blade grass and coconut trees. Mickey’s place is only half a mile from the quay where deaf Roy left us. I turn to Matt and suggest that this has simply got to beat first class: we’re already three chapters into an Odyssean adventure and we haven’t even started fishing yet. I try to negotiate a fee, but Roy tells me to put my money away till we get to the far side, that just a few bucks will be fine, and we set off, sharing the ride with a very extended family and their extended luggage, the water lapping just a few inches short of the gunwales. “You wanna go to Mangrove Cay?” “Yes please.” “Huh?” “Yes please!!” “OK. But we’ve struck up a chat with Lionel “just call me chef, everyone else does” who takes pity on our plight and introduces us to Roy, a deaf crawfisherman who blew his ears out long ago free-diving. Mangrove Cay, our paradise, shimmers tantalisingly on the horizon, the far side of the Southern Bight and a long swim from where we sit with our rod tubes, rucksacks and chocolate biscuits (in case of shipwreck) all around us. The conversation is so crazy I begin to regret the two beers and a seasick tablet that have felled me like a rhino dart, but Matt holds up our end and as dawn breaks we glide silently into Driggs Hill. Biddy learns we are from London and worries that we might be terrorists and Lucifer suggests there are no terrorists in the Bahamas on account of the witches. We share our berth with a Rasta called Lucifer and his pal, who Lucifer calls Stinking Biddy and who calls himself Denzel Washington. When we check in the dock is alive with trucks and cars disgorging people, onion sacks and brick pallets on to the mailboat the lifeblood of cheap inter-island hopping. The Moxey sails overnight from Nassau to Driggs Hill, which leaves us across the water from where we’re heading Mickey’s place on Mangrove Cay: home of giant bonefish. He sells us two tickets for $30 that buys us a cabin and tells us to be back at 11, no later. In part because our coffers aren’t full, in part because we want to prove it can be done and in the biggest part of all because we suspect, like in the movie Titanic, that’s where the real party is.ĭown at the docks I get a straight answer from the chef cooking onions in the galley who I think might just be the captain too. Matt and I are, after all, doing bonefish on a shoe-string down in steerage. You know things will happen there beyond being asked for a gratuity on top of the tip. The previous night I’d been condemned to wakefulness by strange emanations from the room next door a sort of surreal mélange of ecstatic moaning and a conversation about golf. Though it is past midday I have some sympathy. Just make sure you don’t call me again, willya?”Īnd off he flip-flops. “How does a guy get some sleep round here?” He looks at me like it’s my fault. As I hang up a tousled and unusually skinny American comes blinking into reception, flip-flops clacking under his reluctant feet. I give up on the phone call, deciding instead to head to the docks and ask on the boat. We can take our pick from a handful of times and places. Holed up in the Orange Hill Beach Inn for a day much like checking ourselves in to a David Lynch movie we’re finding it difficult to get a straight answer from the dockmaster’s office about when the Captain Moxey actually sails to Andros, when it gets in and exactly where it goes.
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