The Bahamas’ Quiet Side

Without explanation, the captain whirled the snorkeling boat sharply to the left, then laconically called, “Better get your flippers on fast!” I did.

“Jump,” he said.

I did, and landed in about 30 feet of translucent water. I jammed my mask onto my face and peeked below.

Nine steel-gray, torpedo-shaped bodies hung in the water just in front of and below me. Two of them had babies swimming close to their bellies.

My heart raced. I had always dreamed of swimming with dolphins but never liked the thought of doing so in a lagoon where they were held prisoner. But this was in the wild, an unplanned encounter on their terms.

Without thinking, I dived down toward them, reaching out my arms. They allowed me to follow them closely for a few hundred magical yards, then burst ahead as if jet-powered and vanished into the inky blue void.

It was the week before Easter, and I was spending a few days on the less developed western end of New Providence Island, better known by the name of its capital city, Nassau. The encounter with the dolphins typified my time there, which was full of quiet beauty and unexpected pleasure and a far cry from the atmosphere of the island’s more touristed areas.

Nassau is less than 200 miles off the coast of Florida, which makes it a prime stop for cruise ships sailing out of Miami. Its casinos and duty-free shops also attract Florida day-trippers, and its Paradise Island is one big high-rise resort.

To get a feel for the real Bahamas, you have to go a few miles west of Nassau, along the island’s north shore. There, a fringe reef parallels the coastline, creating protected waters of unparalleled beauty. About 15 miles out, next to Love Beach, Jamaican entertainment mogul Chris Blackwell has built a small, wonderful resort called Compass Point.

An exercise in colorful minimalism, the hotel has only 18 units, most of them cottages on stilts, all with the gingerbread trim, latticed windows and pitched roofs that reflect the historic local architecture. But, in a departure from the traditional use of pastels in the Bahamas, Compass Point is painted in colors so bright that the locals call it Crayon Point.

After two days there, I realized that every color in the decor was matched at some point by nature. The clear blue of the chairs around the pool was the same blue as the sky, the turquoise roof of the dining room glowed with the same intensity as the shallows, and the cobalt of a gingerbread trim was as dark as the slice of deep ocean outside the fringe reef. In between the cool blues were lavish swaths of fuchsia, orange and red taken right out of the garden.

The interiors were lower-key; my room was the bleached color of unpainted wood. And the beach-resort casualness was tempered by sophisticated touches, like CD players stocked with a variety of music, and a mini-bar offering three kinds of rum. The wood floors were so satiny they felt like skin; the batik bedspreads and soft white robes were sumptuous, and the comfortable bed had a heating unit under the sheets to take the damp out of unseasonable nights.

Outside, a path meandered through the landscaped grounds to the other cottages, the pool and dining rooms, down to the pocket-size beach and out to the little dock with a thatched shade hut sprouted at its end.

The ground level of the stilted cottages consisted of a latticed kitchenette with a cooking area, a perfect arrangement for beach-loving families at lunch or snack time.

Unlike larger tropical resorts where you have to get up at 6:30 a.m. to snare a good poolside chaise, Compass Point provided myriad chairs and lounges to suit every mood and angle of sun and shade. The armchairs on the dock were particularly wonderful for watching the sun set in the ocean. (Alas, the dock was lost and some of the resort’s landscaping was damaged when Hurricane Floyd blew into the Bahamas Sept. 13, wreaking serious havoc on the out-islands of Abaco and Eleuthera. But Compass Point management said last week the hotel was essentially unaffected, and that the dock will be rebuilt as soon as possible.)

At Compass Point, I never felt lonely--or lost in a crowd. We guests pursued self-directed pleasures but were cordial when paths crossed. From the pool area, I saw a man alone on the beach practicing his golf swing with his sand wedge. “My wet sand shot!” he said, grinning, when he saw me watching. One day I passed lovers cuddling in one beach chair; later I saw them dancing to the sound of reggae on their private deck.

I’ve visited the Bahamas often, and this time a few of my friends were more than happy to meet me for dinner at Compass Point’s restaurant. It is excellent--fresh, local food beautifully prepared and presented--and a big draw for island visitors and residents alike. I ate dinner there twice, and a few dishes stand out in my memory--a salad of baby greens with braised pears and goat cheese, “fingers” of grouper, crab cakes with a potpourri of sweet peppers, johnnycake bread and conch fritters. (Conch, pronounced KONK, is a large sea snail that locals prepare in every way imaginable.)

One evening, there was a large group from the nearby gated enclave of Lyford Cay. The people around the table were so uniformly attractive, I didn’t notice that Sean Connery was one of them.

And yet there were gaps. This is no perfectly manicured resort. Though featured on the menu, there was no conch sushi two days running. Coffee was served in cups without saucers. Snorkeling was listed on the blackboard as a possible activity, yet every time we asked the whereabouts of the boat driver, the answer was, “Collie’s boat is being worked on.” The property manager suggested that the snorkeling was very good at the fringe reef half a mile offshore but had no suggestions on how to get there because Collie also had the paddles to the ocean kayaks.

Collie never did show up. Which is how a friend and I found our way to Stuart Cove, a dive operation in the island’s southwest.

In typical relaxed island fashion, when we lost our way en route, a taxicab driver directed us across a golf course. “Not to worry,” he said, waving us onto the course. Half delighted and half embarrassed, we found ourselves bouncing along in my rented VW bug right next to some surprised golfers riding in a cart.

With its faded driftwood fish shacks and storefronts built on stilts over a narrow harbor, Stuart Cove looked like a movie set. And then we found out it was a set, from the old “Flipper” TV series.

Lines of sober-faced people checked their regulators and tanks while we flopped lightheartedly down into a shallow-draft skiff with only two other snorkelers.

It ended up being the most exciting snorkeling trip of the hundreds I’ve taken.

Best of all, of course, was the unexpected swim with the dolphins. But before that, we had snorkeled over the Goulding Cay reef, which has magnificent stands of coral and fish in colors as bright as stained glass windows. To me, it’s the Chartres Cathedral of reefs, worth a pilgrimage to Nassau for itself alone.

Our captain’s name was Darwin, a genial soul from an out-island so remote, he said the only way to live there was to have a private plane. He saved one big surprise for the end of our outing: We were, he said, going to swim with sharks. He was so matter-of-fact that I shrugged. After the gift of swimming with dolphins, I would have followed Darwin anywhere.

About a mile offshore Darwin anchored at “the wall,” where the water drops straight down from a depth of 50 feet to 6,000. The drop-off is marked by a demarcation of dark blue so profound you know this is “the deep.”

Darwin dropped a bait bucket down about 20 feet and within seconds swirling shapes of tan materialized up out of the deep into a score of reef sharks. I can’t say we jumped into their midst, but we did gingerly climb down the ladder and let ourselves go. It was an eerie sensation to be floating over a 6,000-foot ocean canyon with a maelstrom of twirling, banking sharks just below our flippers.

“You don’t want to move ‘round too much,” Darwin said. Sure enough, when one man’s flipper kicked down as he cleared his mask, a shark snapped at it.

That afternoon, we sought out tamer sights on a drive to the sparsely populated south shore. The village of Adelaide looked like what I imagined West Africa to be. Women sat in the shade of their front porches listening to a minister preach the Good Friday service to his open-air church.

The history of Nassau is both wild and tame. Columbus supposedly landed on the remote Bahamas island of San Salvador, where the inhabitants were Indians who had migrated from South America. By the late 1500s, pirates had discovered the deep natural harbor of Nassau and from there preyed on Spanish galleons. The Bahamas remained largely unsettled by Europeans, the islands’ poor soil being unsuited to cash crops like tobacco or sugar cane. That changed when revolution broke out in the American colonies, and loyalists to England fled by the tens of thousands, bringing along their African slaves.

The islands have been through a few spells of illegal or immoral but highly profitable activity, starting with enslavement of the Indians to work in the Caribbean colonies. During the U.S. Civil War, Nassau boomed with wealth as blockade runners made the port crucial to the movement of contraband into the South. Rum runners blossomed during Prohibition. And in the 1980s, cocaine left a trail of gold and plane wrecks before the government cracked down on the drug-runners.

Nassau still makes its living off outsiders: Tourists, offshore banking and casinos are the backbone of the economy.

The Bahamas, independent since 1973, has kept a few distinguishing British touches. The starched white uniforms of the constables, the elegant social manners and a passion for cricket are some of the remnants of the colonial culture.

One day I met an old friend on the deck of the Bahamas Cricket Club, across from Ft. Charlotte on western Bay Street. We spent a relaxing hour admiring the landscaping and trying to appreciate the match being played.

After a while we strolled across the street to Arawak Cay, where a string of pastel-painted fish shacks sold such culinary delights as conch salad, the Bahamian form of ceviche: raw conch soaked in lime juice and chopped up with tomatoes, onions and peppers.

As day slipped into evening, out over the harbor the water silvered and, after a day of blue skies and no wind, a pale gray curtain of rain moved toward land. A fresh breeze danced in front of it, stirring the sultry air.

Another place for exploring the locals’ Bahamas is Potter’s Cay, an islet beneath the bridge from East Bay Street to Paradise Island.

This is where out-island boats unload fish and conch for sale to the vendors whose wood shacks line the docks. Early one morning I was the sole tourist on the quay. All around, vendors were busy at the arduous task of shelling conchs, thick mollusks about the size of a football.

I strolled farther out to where two mail boats were taking on supplies for their regular run to the out-islands; one was leaving for Ragged Island, the other for Abaco. I almost cast aside my plans for the evening. The thought of leaving the harbor on the flood tide for an unknown island was almost irresistible.

Instead I enjoyed dinner with friends at the Poop Deck, a new restaurant at Delaport Point, a few miles west of Nassau’s downtown. The restaurant had an elegant plantation look, with very high, bleached-pine, pitched ceilings, white ceiling fans, dark nectarine walls, teak furniture and giant terra cotta pots filled with tropical plants.

The sweet potato fish cakes and stuffed crabs with mushrooms were excellent. The view was of the ocean and distant reef and, closer in, the sands of a superb and empty beach.

After dinner we moved down the road to the Johnny Canoe cafe in the Nassau Beach Hotel where a local percussion band was giving guests a hypnotic experience: The conga drums, whistles, horns and cowbells build to a frenzy until your chest wall thrums, your heart races and you slip into another dimension.

That night I fell asleep to the sound of lapping waves and a thin scent of wood smoke wafting across the road from the village of Gambier where roosters still crow, girls still fetch water and women still cook over open fires.

I had marked the next day for exploring the lakes and pine forests of the island interior but instead gave myself up to the lazy comfort of Compass Point.

As far back as 1671, a disapproving British governor wrote that he could never get people to work because they were “run a-coasting in shallops which is a lazy course of life.” But I approved. For the following morning was still and the water along neighboring Love Beach so clear that the coral shone through the tiny waves as if it were an imprinted diamond pattern outlined with gold. I lolled in tide pools, walked through the lavender shadows of beach pines and sunbathed on the powder sand. It was the way mornings and oceans and life should be but rarely are.

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GUIDEBOOK

Beached on Island’s Quiet Side

Getting there: American, Delta, United and US Airways have service from Los Angeles to Nassau; all require a change of planes. Round-trip fares begin at $566.

Where to stay: Compass Point’s 18 units range in price from $200 to $280 depending on size and view. Telephone (800) 688-7678 or (242) 327- 2398, fax (242) 327-2398, Internet https://www.islandoutpost.com.

Where to eat: The Compass Point restaurant is considered one of the island’s finest. Figure on $30 to $40 for lunch for two, up to $80 for dinner.

The Poop Deck at Delaport Point, tel. (242) 327-3325, is an upscale copy of a long-popular Poop Deck in Nassau Harbor.

Swimming with sharks: Stuart Cove at South Ocean, tel. (800) 879-9832 or (242) 362- 4171.

For more information: Bahamas Tourism Center, 3450 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1204, Los Angeles, CA 90010; tel. (800) 439-6993 or (213) 385-0033, fax (213) 383-3966, Internet https://www.interknowledge.com/bahamas.