Keep up with Garden and Gun. Set two top-notch anglers loose in the untouched waters off Andros Island and you have a master class in angling—and pure joy. By Charles Gaines. On our first morning of fishing, we leave the mother ship Eleven at a leisurely and run north for half an hour to a little shoreline flat.
It is a pluperfect bonefish morning: cloudless; the sun just high enough at our backs for good spotting; just enough breeze, also at our backs, to riffle the water. John Green, our guide, shuts down the engine well off the flat and poles in to it against an outgoing tide. And there, thirty feet from the shoreline and no more than six feet off the bow, is a bonefish—lying perfectly still in the water and facing the skiff.
As if waiting for us! Meredith smiles. And I particularly love fishing with female fish hawks, whose oblique approach to the sport paints it for me, when I am in their company, in fresh, revivifying colors. So when I had the opportunity last February to fish with two such women off a mother ship in the Bahamas, I crashed it like a trout on caddis and invited my friend Richard French to join us.
One of these women was my daughter, Greta Gaines, my favorite fishing partner since she was old enough to hold a rod—at about age six, a spinning rod for bass in Alabama, and then a fly rod by the time she was eight for brook trout and smallmouths in New Hampshire. Since then, she and I have angled for dozens of species in dozens of places, and Greta brings to her fishing the same raptor qualities she brings to everything else she does.
The second woman was Meredith McCord, who has also swooped on her eclectic life like a falcon and has held a fishing world record or two herself. By a. I am well into my second Kalik, and McCord has caught eight bonefish and had two more come off the hook. As Green poles up the shoreline, McCord stands on the bow, firing off pinpoint-accurate forehand and backhand casts, hooking almost every fish she throws to, and all the while talking to me over her shoulder in answer to a question I had asked her two hours earlier.
