“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 stopped,” Gil Junior recalled by phone from his home in Florida, where he still makes a living as a guide. “We had to walk seven miles down the limestone just to hit the dock in McLean’s Town. The kids would come up and pull the hair on my arms. They’d never seen anything like it before, never seen a white guy. Now of course they’re totally self-sufficient, but back then you couldn’t really count on the locals doing anything without supervision. I mean, they couldn’t read a map, couldn’t run a boat without trashing the prop. But we got along well. We were all using those cheap polarized glasses. Just about everyone who spent time on the water had cataracts. Not one of us knew what he was doing. Famous guys like Al McClane, Joe Brooks: nowadays they would be barely adequate casters, but they looked the part.”
Valdene, too, remembered the early fly-casting acolytes, “the dudes in their khaki outfits: khaki shorts, khaki shirts, everything was khaki. And all were kind of stodgy but very nice, all very sweet people.”
Then khaki-clad, if less than stodgy, a young Miller watched dumbfounded as David, circa mid-1970s, first employed a fly cast from the bow of a skiff.
“What’s he doing?” Miller asked his father.
“He’s cheating,” his father said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when we make a bad cast, we have to reel it all the way up and cast again. If he makes a bad cast, he just picks it up and wings it out.”
Like most of the guests at the club, the Millers soon graduated to the more sporting means of fly casting for both its efficacy and its grace. They were among many who had never cast a fly rod but had, somewhere or other, seen one employed—the first loop of line sailing back and unfurling before being powered forward in a second unfurling loop—and wrongly assumed that the traveling line’s fluidity would translate into an ease of aptitude.
Although twenty years had passed since Florida Keys captain Billy Smith landed the first fly-caught bonefish, saltwater fly tackle hadn’t evolved much in the interim. Despite the elements’ demands, rods were still fashioned largely from slow-moving fiberglass—a traditional, if slothy, material that serves well for tossing dainty dry flies on chalk streams in Pennsylvania for ten-inch trout, where an angler wading, say, the famed LeTort Spring Run might see a trout rise to take a natural mayfly in the shade of a willow, and be afforded the time to stop casting, change flies, perhaps light his pipe, then make a proper premeditated presentation of his fly to the steadily feeding fish. All of which is to say: neither angler nor prey, resting comfortably in its lie, is going anywhere in a hurry.
However, on the saltwater flats where middle-of-the-food-chain, ever-hunted targets such as bonefish don’t loiter, anglers must be prepared to present flies instantly and instinctively, mirroring their quarry’s modus operandi. (“Big bonefish coming fast at eleven o’clock,” a guide might say, “ninety feet. Put it on his nose! Now!”)
As a result, fiberglass and bamboo eventually gave way to speedier graphite, though even the early-generation rods of the mid-1970s responded too slowly to be considered effective, let alone enjoyable to wield. The necessities of a saltwater fly cast coupled with the prevailing elements (fifteen miles per hour is considered a light breeze on the flats) often turned experienced freshwater fly casters—accustomed to casting a rod weighing three ounces instead of one twice that weight—into first-rate floggers. One illustrative photo from the early fly-rodding era, accompanying a 1981 Field and Stream article about Deep Water Cay Club, shows author Ed Zern on the bow of David Pinder’s skiff roughly two rod lengths