Arrival

At low tide you can walk out from the beach for about four hundred yards and the water does not get above your chest. It is one of the strangest and best things I have done at a hotel. You keep going, the sand stays firm and rippled underfoot, the colour of the water changes three or four times, and at some point you turn round and the club is a small pink thing on a green cliff a very long way behind you, and there is nobody else within two hundred yards.

That flat is why the place exists. It began as a fishing club, and the fishing was the sandbar: a bonefish and pompano flat, which is what the club is named after, and the front desk will still hand you a rod and light tackle for nothing at any hour of the day. If you catch something worth eating, the kitchen will cook it. I did not, and the kitchen was kind enough not to ask.

The same family has run it since it opened, and there are not many rooms. Those two facts produce almost everything that is distinctive here. Nobody is optimising this hotel. There is no brand standard being rolled out and no repositioning under way. The people at the desk have worked there for a long time and behave accordingly. The word “club” misleads: it is not a members’ club and not a day-pass beach club, but a small family-owned resort on a cliff on the south-west shore, and it kept the word because it started as one.

The property is stacked vertically. Reception and the dining rooms are at the top, the rooms step down the slope in low pink and white buildings, the pool terrace sits below those, and the beach is at the bottom, reached by several flights of steps. Every level has a view because every level is above the one below it. Every trip to the beach is also a climb back.

The room

I had an ocean-view king with a balcony. The rooms are comfortable rather than designed: well kept, generously sized, and almost all of them face the water, which is the thing that actually matters. Nobody is going to photograph the furniture. Ask for one low enough on the cliff that the steps do not become the subject of the holiday, and ask about the shuttle, which runs around the grounds as well as off them.

Noted

Observed on the stay, not measured.

What	Checked on the stay
Sandbar	About 400 yards, knee to chest deep at low tide
Pool	Heated, waist to chest deep, open around the clock, no lifeguards
Hot tubs	Three, including one that spills into the pool
Boathouse	Mid-May to late October only
Airport	About 45 minutes; Hamilton about 25
Car hire	Not available to visitors anywhere in Bermuda
Wi-Fi	Spotty in the room, weak through the resort
Water pressure	Not great, and the fixtures are dated

Eating

Ocean Grill is the dinner room and the good-looking one: double height, coffered ceiling, glass on two sides, and the sea filling every window so completely that on a bright day the room is lit turquoise. It takes reservations. The house dish is a spiced fillet of pompano, which is the correct thing for this hotel to serve and it is properly done.

The Cedar Room is the other one, panelled in dark cedar, with outdoor tables and no reservation system, and it is the room most guests end up preferring by the third night. There is a Monday barbecue, which is an event and which not everyone likes more than the ordinary menu.

An honest note on the cooking, because the property is sold on half-board and the food therefore matters more than usual. This is hotel cooking done properly and generously — five courses, cooked to order, consistent night after night. It is not destination cooking and does not set out to be. The fish is the thing to order, every time.

The pool, the reef, and the flat

The main pool is heated, waist to chest deep the whole way, and set behind a white balustrade directly above the sea, so that swimming in it you are looking straight out at the reef line. A circular hot tub with a glass-fronted waterfall spills into it, and there are two more jacuzzis lower down the cliff.

All of it is open twenty-four hours. There are no lifeguards, which is the reason a larger operator would never allow it and the reason it is worth mentioning. Getting into a heated pool above a dark ocean at one in the morning, with the Milky Way up and nobody else awake, is not an experience most hotels are still willing to offer. I recommend it to anyone who can find their room afterwards. Even better — last time I went was during a meteor shower and I borrowed a pool float lounger and floated out into the flats until it was dark enough to see EVERYTHING. It was SPECTACULAR. No light pollution — meteors have colors.

The snorkelling is the reason to come between May and October rather than in winter. Two swim platforms are anchored offshore, one just off the beach and one out at the edge of the flat by the coral, and the reef around the second is dense with sea fans and small fish and shallow enough to see everything without diving for it. The boathouse rents snorkel gear, kayaks, glass-bottomed kayaks, paddleboards and small catamarans by the hour, from the middle of May to the end of October. Outside those months it is shut.

Visitors cannot rent a car in Bermuda; it is the law, and it catches people out every year. What you can rent, on site, is a moped, a scooter or a small electric two-seater. The alternative is the hotel shuttle, which is free and unusually generous: the ferry, the bus stops, the Railway Trail, the grocery, the golf course and the marina, as well as anywhere on the grounds. The buses and ferries are good and the front desk sells the tickets. The golf course next door is a short walk.

Service moments

The rod handed over the desk without a form. The shuttle driver who knew which ferry I meant before I had finished the sentence. A tide table, unasked, on the first morning.

Seventy years of the same family, and a beach you can walk a quarter of a mile into. Nothing here needs improving.

Who it is for, and who it is not

Come between May and October, on the package, for a week. Check the tide table on the first morning and plan one walk out onto the flat at low water. Take a towel down with you, because they are stocked at the pool and not on the beach. Book the Ocean Grill for one night and let the Cedar Room have the others. Borrow a rod at least once, because they will hand you one for the asking, and it is the reason the place is called what it is.

Look elsewhere in winter if the beach and the reef are why you are coming: the hotel stays open and the heated pool and hot tubs stay open around the clock, and it is a perfectly good winter hotel, but it is not the property in the photographs. Look elsewhere if a knee or a stroller is coming with you: four flights of steps between the room and the sand, several times a day, is a real physical fact. And look elsewhere if you want the room to be the point; here the room is where you sleep between the sea and dinner.

See the full set: Pompano Beach Club, Bermuda — in frames.