Fishing Therapy

Alvin gunned the little flats skiff, and we shot across the turquoise water, heading into a stiff north wind on a morning bonefish expedition. To our left was the long, narrow strip of sand and coral known as Kamalame Cay, home to a discreet resort just off the coast of Andros, the largest and least-populated island in the Bahamas. To our right was a barrier reef that stretched as far as the eye could see, jutting out of the ocean like a saw blade.

It was unusually chilly for Andros (low sixties), and Alvin Bauld, our guide, had on enough layers to weather a New York blizzard. But more unusual was the fact that my wife, Susan, had come on a fishing trip with me. To put it mildly, she doesn’t share my passion for the sport, and she’s baffled by the amount of time, effort, and money it consumes. As we passed the spa, a gorgeous, two-story, cedar-shingled hut that sits out over the water on a two-hundred-foot-long pier, she shouted over the whine of the motor, “What time do you think we’ll be back?”

We had come to Kamalame as a kind of experiment, a test to see if there was a fishing lodge where my fishing-averse wife could be happy, or a truly comfortable resort that also happened to have world-class fishing. After a decade of traveling together, we’d concluded that fishing and vacationing don’t mix. I tend to like my piscatorial pursuits without the frills (and the bills) of high-thread-count hotels. But I also knew better than to strand my wife at a lodge with nothing to do but fish.