DESTINATION: ABACO BEACH RESORT
by
Jan S. Maizler
Prior to my arrival in December of 2004, Abaco Beach Resort had become something of a legend as the bulwark of the Abacos during that year’s horrendous hurricane season. As chronicled on television, the Resort served as command central, solid fortress, and island sanctuary for both seasoned residents and awestruck reporters alike.
I was drawn to this destination because of its reputation as an excellent full service family resort that offered exotic, outstanding, and unpressured fishing a short distance away. Of equal importance is the fact that Abaco Beach Resort itself is a short distance from the U.S. mainland: my flight from Fort Lauderdale to Marsh Harbour took less than an hour.
My transfer from the airport to the Resort likewise was a quick five minutes. Upon my arrival, reservationist Kevie Thomas quickly checked me in and I was shortly tucked away in a bright spacious room that overlooked the Sea of Abaco. In the distance, I could see the green shapes of the barrier out islands. I knew that beyond them, the ocean bottom would fall to great depths, and its sapphire waters would yield up wahoo, dolphinfish, and marlin.
Since I had the entire afternoon free, I devoted myself to exploring Abaco Beach Resort’s many features and amenities. Here’s what I found.
The boat harbour and marina has approximately 200 slips, with a complete offering of electrical, water, and telephone hookups. Vessels of various sizes can easily be accommodated, and this includes large sport fishing boats, as well as yachts. Boat owners are offered an ample fuel dock, jetty/harbour protection, dressing rooms, laundry rooms, and shower facilities.
The Resort has a harbormaster who administers this full service marina. Additional offerings include boat rentals, as well as offshore and bonefish charters. Divers and snorkellers are thoroughly serviced by the Resort’s Watersports Center and the dive shop.
As a traveling angler, you’ll want to be sure that your travel dollars are well spent on food and lodgings. Abaco Beach Resort will exceed your expectations in both areas. The Resort’s Angler’s Restaurant has excellent breakfasts and lunches, and their dinners are gourmet in quality. Their top-notch chef creates such delights as Tuna Tataki, steaks, lamb chops, grouper, duck, lobster, Caesar salads, conch fritters, and Ciabatta bread.
There are bars inside and outside of the restaurant that are perfect for socializing, talking fishing, or preparing for a sumptuous dinner.
When you’re not fishing, you can take advantage of the fitness room, tennis courts, or a brisk, refreshing swim in the Resort’s pools. If you are with children, there’s plenty of beach and sandy playgrounds for them right at the sea’s edge. For the shopping-inclined, Abaco Beach Resort features T-Zers gift shop, as well as their brand-new Wrackers art gallery and boutique. I found that this was an angling destination resort that has something for everyone.
Abaco Beach Resort has 72 fully air-conditioned rooms, four one-bedroom suites, and six two-bedroom cottages with fully equipped kitchens. Each room has satellite TV, coffee makers, hair dryers, and complementary toiletries.
Based on my interviews with the management, the Resort evidently provided the kinds of experiences that left many of their guests desiring a more permanent stay. Towards that end, Abaco Beach resort has plans in the next two years to offer a mix of villas and condo townhouse homes and vacation getaways.
THE RESORT AND THE MARLS
To some anglers, bonefishing is an exciting pursuit. To others, it is a way of life that follows the gray ghost far and wide, with a singular and endless passion. And if these fanatics demonstrate their limitless devotion through endless hours of poling under the tropical sun, their just reward and Holy Grail are the Marls of Abaco!
This “thousand island” area lies within the inside center of the Abaco Crescent. The Marls enjoy the distinction of having one of the densest bonefish populations in the world, and the good news is that this shallow water Shangri-La lies only one half hour from the Abaco Beach Resort.
The Marl’s unique physical characteristics qualify it as Great Abaco’s romper room for bonefish. This is an area that is a huge expanse of individualized patches and cribs of shallow water surrounded by countless keys, ideal for growing little gray ghosts. Indeed, when seen from the air, the area resembles a patchwork maze connected by creeks and openings. This affords not just sectionalized feeding areas for groups of bones, but offers a bit more weather “protection” than the open outside flats on this magic island.
As an “inside” flats nursery, the Marls feature an incredibly rich, soft bottom loaded with crabs, shrimp, clams, and snails- plenty of food for thriving bonefish! Another condition for growing bones is that the general “ultra shallow stability” of the area tends to keep down the number of larger predators-like bigger sharks and barracuda- from entering the area. Your average poling depth might only be 6 inches, hardly the place for a 60-pound shark!
In addition, because the Marls can be confusing to successfully navigate and pole without getting lost or running aground, there is less pressure by do-it-yourself visiting anglers than the open flats of Sandy Point to the south. Abaco Beach Resort is always striving to keep an updated, current list of guides that specialize in fishing the Marls. It’s crucial to have your guide lined up and booked the same time you make reservations for a stay at the Resort. Some bonefish guides are booked for over a year in advance.
I enlisted the services of Captain Danny Sawyer, a Bahamas-certified bonefish guide. The Sawyer name is well known on Abaco from Green Turtle Cay down to Marsh Harbour.
My first day at the Resort wound down, and as the sun set to the west, I dined on conch fritters, lobster, steak, and key lime pie. After this thoroughly satisfying meal, I walked across the spacious lawn back to my room. It was completely dark now and I looked up to a star-studded sky that would have been impossible to see from the bright lights of Miami. There was no breezy movement in the numerous palm trees along the beachwalk. In the conditions of this still December night, I felt optimism about the weather I could hope for with Danny, the Marls, and the bonefish on tomorrow’s trip.
The last remaining detail of the evening was a pre-trip call from Danny to orient me as to the specifics of the trip. Not long after I arrived back at my room, the phone rang, and it was Danny. He said he was pleased that the balmy conditions indicated that an anticipated cold front had not yet arrived on the island. He mentioned that even if the wind starting backing into the south and southwest as the front approached, we could still expect some good bonefish feeding patterns. He felt that the only problem about fronts was the temperature-plunging effects of the cold air mass itself. We agreed that he would pick me up in the morning at the check-in area of the Resort at 7:30 a.m.
I fell asleep that night and dreamt of silver tails, crystal waters, green mangroves, and blue skies. My excited anticipation awakened me numerous times during the night and I glanced through the glass patio doors, hoping for still palm fronds and clear skies. As usual, the night was always too long when waiting for tomorrow’s fishing, yet my alarm clock eventually rang.
An hour later, Danny Sawyer arrived. After we exchanged greetings, he mentioned that although the wind was starting to back into the south, the sky was still clear and the fishing should be good. He said that although we could see tailing fish regardless of the overhead light, we’d need plenty of sun to see cruising bonefish.
He grabbed my tackle and we headed to his trailered skiff outside the Resort’s gates. As I approached his Hell’s Bay Waterman, it was clear that Danny had chosen and set up a boat that was truly capable of floating in a few inches of water-this was an absolute requirement for fishing the ultra shallow mudflats of the Marls.
This was in contrast to the demands of the open, outside, sand-bottomed flats of the Bahamas. Therefore, Captain Ricardo Burrows of Sandy Point, Abaco, does quite well in his 20 foot Action Craft. He poles the oceanic flats, water level permitting. As the tide drops, or depending on his stealth needs, he simply anchors his skiff at the channel edge, and his anglers wade over to tailing fish. In his situation, he actually needs a bigger flats boat with a deeper vee, since he often runs over deeper water for long distances to reach Gorda Cay or More’s Island.
Yet, here, this morning, as we trailered to the nearby boat ramp for the Marls, the only kinds of skiffs that would truly work were the kinds shallow enough to pole “on bubbles.” Danny said that his skiff weighed just over three hundred pounds and featured a relatively flat vee bottom. Because of the light weight of the hull, all Danny needed was a 25HP outboard engine for capable running. Together, the low hull weight, flat bottom, and low engine weight created a flats boat that was thoroughly “Marls-appropriate.”
His tiller handle operation was common in the Bahamas: no console weight and no helm problems. His aft operator weight was compensated by built-in trimtabs, which provided a good hole shot and running trim. Once his skiff was on plane, his shallow water running capacity was vastly improved by an electric jackplate to raise the engine, as well as a tunnel bottom at the stern to feed water to the now-higher engine. Danny said he needed a four-bladed prop to get sufficient “bite” into the tunnel-generated water to avoid cavitation.
These are features any South Florida flats fisherman will appreciate, whether it’s tailing bones in the Keys or tailing reds from Flamingo to Pine Island Sound. However, these are the kinds of skiffs that tend to do their best when traveling “inside” waters from flat to flat. If you’ll be traveling over deep, open, potentially rougher waters, you’re best advised to look for something larger, heavier, and with a deeper vee.
As Danny launched his skiff, the first islands of the Marls were easily visible, and I could see why the short run in these shallows would be perfectly safe.
When Danny geared down fifteen minutes later, and cut his engine, he began poling into the maze-like Marls. I climbed onto the bow and we both went into ‘hunting mode.” Less than two minutes after he began poling, he stopped the skiff, and said “ two o’ clock and fifty feet away… there’s a big area of feeding holes.” I saw it immediately, a sight you don’t often, if ever, see on Keys flats: it looked like a swath of upturned garden soil with snout indentations. Danny said, “pretty dark holes, which means they were here recently. I thought to myself, “ not just a spotter, but a tracker…. talk about hunting!”
Moments later, he said, “ forty feet ahead, about a dozen tails.” My cast was airborne barely two seconds later, and the presentation landed about five feet in front of their apparent direction. It landed with the slightest plop, just enough sound to get their attention without spooking them. One particularly enthusiastic fish got there first, and as it tailed over the bait, its dorsal fin twitched and its body gave a twist. I could see my line tighten up and I struck the fish with moderate force, confident that my Gamakatsu 1/0 Siwash would do its job.
All hell broke loose in this tennis court- sized stretch of water surrounded by mangroves. My line literally ripped the water for fifty yards. Then the fish turned back towards me and I reeled frantically to keep tight to the fish. The seesaw battle went on for 2 more minutes, and we released a feisty 5-pound bonefish to fight another day.
As we released the fish, Danny spotted another fish tailing against the mangroves just outside of a creek opening. It wasn’t long before Danny’s poling put me in casting distance, and in short order, we scored a second release.
The conditions were perfect: bright sunlight and a 15 MPH breeze that created enough wavelets to cushion the impact of my presentations. In the four hours I allotted to fishing that morning, I released 9 fish to 6 pounds, and lost two others. It was never longer than a couple of minutes between spotting tailing or cruising fish.
As we headed back to the ramp, I thought about the various flats fishing destinations I had experienced. I had to conclude that as a full-service upscale resort with such close proximity to huge numbers of bonefish, Abaco Beach Resort stood alone.
WHEN YOU GO:
Abaco Beach Resort is only a few minutes away from Marsh Harbour Airport. There are daily flights from Orlando, West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami on American Eagle/American Airlines, and Gulfstream/Continental. Flights and special charters can be arranged with Yellow Air Taxi at 1-888- YELLOW-4.
Abaco Beach Resort and Boat Harbour
Marsh Harbour, Abaco
Bahamas
Tel. (242) 367-2158 OR (242) 367-2736
Fax. (242) 367-4154 OR (242) 367-2819
Reservations. 1-800-468-4799
Websites. www.abacobeachresort.com
www.abacoresort.com.
Monitoring VHF Channel 16
Captain Danny Sawyer
Marsh Harbour, Abaco
Bahamas
Tel. (242) 367-3577
Cell phone. (242) 477-5901
Website. www.bahamasvacationguide.com/dannysawyer/
Email. fishsmiley@yahoo.com
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