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Wet Work

In Bimini, a day at the office can involve everything from grappling with sharks to running the reefs. Lucky the on-the-job dress code is casual.
By Sarah Friedman
Spring Fashion By Vicky McGarry

Bimini is only 50 miles from Florida, but there’s something unsettlingly distant about the islands. Even that old Caribbean salt Ernest Hemingway had difficulty reaching Bimini’s shores — he snagged a shark while trolling during
his first trip over and, while attempting to dispatch it, ended up shooting himself in both legs. He returned to the mainland.

Fish tales have always been part of Bimini’s local lore, but other stories also abound: narratives of a lost and sunken continent, whispers of a fountain of youth, testimony about sand mounds that magically formed in eerily perfect shapes — a sea horse, a house cat, a shark. Must be the water. It’s some of the planet’s clearest, virtually uncontaminable — since
Bimini lies smack in the Gulf Stream, clean water bathes it each day.

So it’s perhaps only logical that the wet stuff is the medium in which most of the place works, like at the Bimini Biological Field Station, on its southern edge, where students pluck baby lemon sharks from the protected shadows of the ubiquitous mangrove stands and drop them three miles offshore, the better to test their homing abilities. (Don’t worry — the little beasts
have a perfect return rate.) Or the tour operator on the northern banks who shepherds befinned humans into 30 feet of water, there to be gently mobbed by curious spotted dolphins, which can flock with a mammal-to-mammal ratio as high as 30-to-1. (That’s aquatic-to-landlubbing.)

Sitting in the sea hasn’t always gone well for Bimini, of course. In 1926 and 1935 hurricanes wiped a fair chunk of its infrastructure away, and seasonal storms can poke badly at island life. But buildings are rebuilt, swells recede, debris is swept away, and things go on — albeit slowly. Boys play cricket, grown-ups play golf (if high tide hasn’t drowned the putting
green), people earn their wages tending fishing boats at the marina or leading kayak tours to the bonefish flats — a life that lazes just a bit more for the 1,600 Biminians than for those two million harried souls angsting away in Miami, on the near horizon, where even in the evenings the lights of industry never seem to dim. On Bimini, industry and power are less of a
given. Three evenings a week the electricity can blink off, dropping the islands completely from distant view. No one seems to mind all that much.

Special thanks to the Bimini Big Game Fishing Club for accommodations. Call 800-737-1007 for reservations and information.

Photographs by Norman Jean Roy

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