the tides were right to dive for them. But most important to his new employer: David had encountered plenty of bonefish.
“We hadn’t been on the island for more than a week, when Mr. Drake’s assistant comes to me with a very serious look on his face. ‘David,’ he says, ‘Mr. Drake has something he needs to ask you. Immediately.’
“I know I haven’t done a thing to upset anyone, but I assume there’s some mess. I put down my machete, and walk over to Mr. Drake who’s down at the water.
“‘David, look,’ he says, stone cold, pointing back toward town. ‘Do you see the water rippling out there? A school of bonefish. You’ve seen them before?’
“Straightaway, I light up because I knew how to catch them with a hand-line—but I wonder what he wants with the bony things. So many better-eating fish. I’d seen them since my youngest days. Walking along the beaches, looking for something to eat, there were always schools around.
“Mr. Drake was mad for fishing. You could see him looking at the water every day, keeping his eyes peeled for fish. In between work shifts he would ask me to take him out in the boat. Pay was the same either way, fifty cents an hour. After two weeks he said he would hire me seven days a week, twelve months out of the year. Couple seasons later I was guiding full time.”
Could this shore-foraging boy turned rock lugger ever have imagined that he would, decades down the line, be recognized as the head guide and cornerstone of one of the world’s most fabled sporting lodges? Or that, a half century after Gil Drake first employed him, Bahamian prime minister Hubert Ingraham would visit Deep Water Cay Club to personally thank David Pinder for his indelible impact on the Bahamian economy and the sport of bonefishing, the activity upon which the Ministry of Tourism bases its faith?
“No sir, I never thought that far down the line,” David said, kneeling in some tide-strewn turtle grass to lift a weathered Kalik bottle from the wrack-line detritus of dry shells and flotsam. He held the bottle up to the sky and swooped it across that backdrop for a moment before shrugging his shoulders, as if to imply that it would be easier to account for the bottle’s arrival here than to account for his and the bonefish’s rise. He slid the bottle in his trouser pocket, knelt down again, and rinsed his hands.
What is man but his passion?
—ROBERT PENN WARREN
One of the first fishermen David guided, a childhood friend of Drake’s son named Guy de la Valdene, arrived on Deep Water when the island was still choked with mangroves. Valdene has in the decades since authored several beloved books on hunting and angling, including The Fragrance of Grass and Red Stag, and recalls with fondness David’s excellence in the early days of the club.
“When I was thirteen years old,” he told me by phone, “I started traveling to Deep Water Cay with the Drakes. They lived in Palm Beach so it was just a short hop over. Gil Senior had leased the land from the Crown for ninety-nine years.”
“From the get-go, David became the number-one guide,” Valdene said with a tone of voice that balanced nostalgia and reverence, seemingly intrigued by my budding interest in David’s life, the way a scholar might perk up at the mention of a long-forgotten classic. “David was superior intelligence-wise to the other guides. Head and shoulders above the rest. Strangest thing about David: he never used Polaroid sunglasses”—which, worn by nearly all anglers today, polarize the glare from the water’s surface, and are considered essential to optic health and spotting fish.
“I don’t know how long he fished without glasses, but he always saw the fish regardless. Very smart about how to approach the fish. Calm, moved the boat well. He was also a whiz at fixing engines, which seemed to break down every day. He moved fluidly from hauling rock to hacking mangroves to catching lobsters to getting us into bonefish. There was a grace about him.”
Having placed his youthful bare feet on nearly every square inch of the island before Gil Drake purchased it, having memorized the flats and their tides to the extent that plying them was instinctual, David flourished in his early guiding days. Because of his purview, he didn’t need tide charts the way the Drakes did, and could lead them to spots that weren’t shown on their nautical maps.
“Three or four months after the [Florida] Keys guys caught a record permit on the fly”—the permit, a flats-going member of the pompano family, is infamous for its fickle attitude toward flies—“we went to one of the flats on East End to look for a world-record permit on the fly. Eight-pound test, this big fucking thing took off! We took all the silly pictures, but we had no live-well because we’d gone out in the johnboat. Gil thought it was only twenty-five pounds, but it weighed twenty-seven, dried out. If we would have put it on the scale right away, it would have been the record by a few pounds, and of course we would have listed David as the guide. I think the picture is still up in the bar at the lodge.”
When Valdene first started spending time at Deep Water Cay at age fourteen, there was nothing on the island: “And I mean there was nothing. We slept on a thirty-two-foot Nova Scotia called the Magic, and we helped build docks and clear ground every summer thereafter.”
Virtually overnight the island became a destination for wealthy explorative anglers, due in part to its proximity to astoundingly fertile habitat—over 250 square miles of flats within a reasonable boat ride—and in part to its owner’s friendship with Field and Stream fishing editor A. J. McClane, who profiled the outfit in his fabled magazine.
For the first few years, the lodge itself grew quite slowly, beam by beam, stair by stair, row of bricks by row of bricks, many of which were laid by David’s hands. A little bungalow housed four anglers, Valdene recalled. “By the next year it accommodated eight, then twelve. But within three years, the lodge could comfortably host fourteen people.”
A passage from a 1971 Sports Illustrated article by Coles Phinizy adds details to Valdene’s sketch.
By any name, the place doesn’t interest most people. Which is good. The Deep Water Cay Club opened 12 years ago as a fishing resort and it is still that. Compared to the average tourist Casbah in the Bahamas, the club lacks a lot. It does not have a man-made, chlorinated swimming vat, or a cunning Buccaneer Bar, or a gambling casino, or a gift shop. The guests are welcome to use the backgammon board in the main lounge. At the desk a guest can buy monofilament and poppers, wigglers and squirmers, to catch fish and (sometimes) a brush to clean his teeth, but that’s about the limit of it. The accommodations at the club are comfortable. The lizards that occasionally stray into the room are small and friendly. The food is simple but good; the drinks come from the best bottles and are cheap. The dinner conversation rarely drags and is always intriguing for those who dote on fish lore. The club has never advertised, but has depended simply on one satisfied customer telling another.
In large part, according to Valdene, said satisfaction stemmed from the fishing. “Very good for bonefish, but in those days it was all shrimp and spinning rods. There was very little fly-fishing. Al McClane did. I don’t even think Gil’s father or Gil did—or me for sure—for a long time.”
POSITIONED CURIOUSLY IN THE EARLY DEEP WATER dynamic was Gil Drake Jr., not for a moment the snotty kid of a wealthy real state tycoon, but a true fish hawk who preferred the company of Valdene and David to that of the lodge’s moneyed guests.
“In the early days the road from West End just
