Special to the Washington Post
Remar Sutton - Washington Post - June 1998

Bimini, Bahamas—From Ernest Hemingway and former Presidential candidate Gary Hart to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King, the boomerang-shaped island of Bimini has always lured famous and exotic people as surely as a bait fish lures giant tuna.

It's also lured the less-famous but equally interesting, including my friend Nowdla, whose mother, an Eskimo, was raised in an Igloo, and Trimmer, whose grandfather's ties are so old to the beltway area that his phone number was the single digit "4."

Famous person or not, Bimini has always been an island for adventuresome types who don't worry about makeup or working up a good sweat. No more than 800 feet wide at points and seven miles long, it is a sports-fishing and scuba-diving Mecca. Literally thousands of fishing records have been set here and those fish that escaped the hooks seem drawn in swirling iridescent schools to the less-threatening divers who drift lazily down sheer walls and along with the nutrient-rich and toasty gulfstream currents.

Adversity, coincidence, and a sense of legacy are the glues which seem to hold this salty world together. Nowdla Keefe's husband, Bill, woke up one morning in 1980 with his arms frozen mummy-style as tight as guitar strings against his chest, his right shoulder atrophied from a vicious viral attack. At twenty-four Bill's scuba-diving career in the navy was over before it began.

Rather than give up, Keefe moved to the Bahamas, devised his own exercise program, rebuilt his shoulder, and met Nowdla at his first interview to be a Bahamian scuba diving instructor on Grand Bahama Island. "I was there for my checkout dive," Nowdla says, "but I really checked out Bill, too." He was hired, they started dating, and eighteen years later the Keefe's own and run the only diving operation on Bimini. A freckled five year-old and a blue-eyed five month-old girl complete the picture of this handsome poster family for wholesome independence and energetic togetherness.

Their dive operation is unique for two reasons: the staff is all women, a pleasant oddity in the diving world, and their boats have developed an unearthly and very friendly relationship to a large pod of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins. Nowdla, 33 and lithe, first noticed the dolphins following the boat about a year ago. She started logging their appearance times, eventually started swimming with them and finally started scheduling special "wild dolphin excursions." At times, up to fifty dolphins participate in trips, and it escapes no one's attention that the dolphins are in charge: they come to the boat, they examine and interact with the divers for an hour or so, and then they go. Yesterday, couples arrived all the way from Japan to experience this.

Trimmer Dettor, tanned, bearded and 22, has now added a third unique element to the Keefe's operation, Kayak tours of the mangrove flats and creeks. I think Trimmer is proof that active families by osmosis imbue their offspring with a hunger for activity. His grandfather, Clarke Daniel of Arlington, Virginia, has been a legend on this island since he and his brothers arrived in Bimini on their yacht, the Algol, in March of 1947. The brothers bought the hurricane-devastated Bimini Rod and Gun and with their own hands turned it into a Ozimandius-type family compound. For fifty years "Daniel House" has initiated four generations into the salty life.

"My first Bimini memory," Trimmer says, "is my grandfather taking me with Bonefish Willie to ‘Deepest, darkest Africa’—that what my granddad always called the tidal creeks and mangrove flats across Bimini Bay. I can still remember the silence of that trip! The only sound was of Bonefish Willie's rough, callused hands sliding up and down the pole and he pushed the boat through the flats."

After a literal lifetime of spring breaks and summers on Bimini, Trimmer has now started his kayaking venture here. For four hours yesterday Anne Hearst (on assignment for Hearst Publications) and I paddled through the mangrove creeks where Martin Luther King, a frequent visitor to the island, wrote his Nobel Prize accepantance speech while. Bonefish Willie poled.

Two hours into the trip, we tied our fourteen-foot Necky Dolphin kayaks to a red mangrove tree and waded through the mangroves to the Healing Hole, a lithium-fed spring, icy fresh-water in the midst of hot, brackish water. The natives, and many others from around the world, make pilgrimages to this hidden spring. Blue crabs line the moss-lined ledges surround the spring, their eyes still and focused on you as you float in the cool water.

At 87, Trimmer's grandfather still bone fishes, still enjoys a good cigar and a good martini, Trimmer says. At five, Bill and Nowdla Keefe's daughter is already helping in the dive shop, and jumping in the blue Bimini sea as if she were born there, belonged there. At 56, I feel pretty good today knowing I paddled four hours in a kayak and lived to tell you about it without a sore muscle.

Few of us have to be prisoners of circumstance, but all of us are children of our past. But the people on the tiny island of Bimini seem to show us that, prisoner or child, we can lead interesting, vibrant lives. Isn't that what we all want to do?