Trip to the Bahamas

The best part about the Bahamas is that it sounds relaxing. For the last week of May, everything was a little calmer, a little breezier, and a little more hakuna matata – because I was in the Bahamas. I spent the entire time there fly fishing for bonefish off the island of Andros with my two cousins, uncle, and dad.

All in all, I’m counting myself lucky for being able to go and we definitely made the most out of it. It goes without saying that the fishing was fun, but it was really just liberating to be on the water. After all, there aren’t many better places to be than in the ocean and under the Caribbean sun. One of our guides put it nicely when he called it “the world’s best office.”

I’ll let the pictures tell most of the stories but a few general thoughts:

• Bonefish have a cool scientific name: abula vulpes means silver fox. They also have an even cooler nickname: “ghost of the flats”.

• I went down a Youtube spiral when we were close to leaving for the trip and two highlights were these videos Yeti made on giant trevally in the Seychelles and tarpon in Florida. There’s also this gem.

• Having a doctor as a parent is awesome for many reasons, one of which being that doctors are always there to swoop in and save the day on planes. Midway through the flight to Nassau, a guy sitting in front of us fainted and the captain used the intercom to call for help. My dad parkoured over the seat and started doing his thing. A nurse and an ER doctor came over too eventually. The good news is that the guy ended up being okay. The bad news is that he was forced to drink orange juice with like 3 salt packets poured into it. Anyways, you’re my hero, Dad.

• Bahamian coins are neat and very island-y. The quarters have sailboats, the dimes have little bonefish, the nickels have pineapples, and the pennies have starfish. For some reason, they also have a square one that’s 15 cents? Kind of weird to pick a number that you can’t break a dollar evenly into but still cool.

• Along those lines, I later found out that the Bahamas is a tax haven. It has historically strict banking secrecy laws, a reliancy on offshore finance, and zero income taxes to speak of. Leonardo Dicaprio should’ve stashed away his money here instead of going all the way to that bank in Switzerland.

• In elementary school I read about Atlantis Paradise Island in an issue of Nat Geo Kids. I thought it was the place to be at the time but today it just seems super touristy. You could definitely pick out the people in the airport who were staying there. That’s not to say I wouldn’t absolutely jump on any opportunity to go to Disneyland, though.

• The people were, of course, incredibly nice and hospitable. Admittedly, the backbone of the Bahamian economy is tourism but, after being there and seeing that it looks exactly like the postcards, it’s hard to find a reason why anyone who grew up on an island wouldn’t be so friendly. No wonder Obama seemed like a pretty happy guy.

Alright, let’s get on with it.

The lodge we stayed at is called Swain’s Cay - the parts of the island highlighted in yellow are where we fished. Each day, we’d split up into different groups between the middle and the bottom.