Body of Water Author:Chris Dombrowski Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions?poetry and fly fishing; two children, one of them in utero; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: can't go, it's all paid for, just book a flight to Miami. — Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas; ... more »to its most elusive and prized creature, the bonefish; and to David Pinder, the legendary fisherman who created an industry. Bonefish are sought for their speed, skittishness, their sheer difficulty. And no one was better at hunting them than Pinder, a Bahamian whose vision, accuracy, and patience were virtuosic. He knows what the fish think, said one fisherman, before they think it.
But when Dombrowski meets Pinder, though venerated, he is abandoned by the industry he helped build: with cataracts from a lifetime staring at the water; a severance package of only $18,000 after forty years of service; watching the world of his beloved bonefish degraded by tourists he himself attracted. Only as Pinder's stories unfold does Dombrowski glimpse the beauty beneath the surface: the humor, immediacy, clarity, spirit, and peace that distinguished Pinder as a fisherman provide human lessons for us all.« less