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They Live on Boats and Solve Mysteries...

Maybe you've seen Travis McGee's slip at Bahia Mar (F-18), home of houseboat The Busted Flush. If you haven't, and you're wondering who this is and why you should care, it's time to immerse yourself in some classic Florida fiction.

We love Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, Tim Dorsey and the rest, but Florida mystery fiction has its roots at Bahia Mar Yachting Center. Novelist John D. MacDonald wrote 22 books about Travis McGee, a "salvage consultant" who lived on a 52' houseboat at Bahia Mar. McGee was a beach bum, idealist, womanizer/romantic and an environmentalist before it was cool to be one.

Throughout the novels, each of which features a color in its title (The Deep Blue Good-By was the first), McGee manages to get himself involved, usually accidentally, in some sort of caper. There are always bad guys, sexy women, and financial rewards, but McGee somehow remains oddly pure. The stories are fast-paced, and set a standard that all mystery writers, whether they write Florida fiction or not, have had to keep. Carl Hiaasen says of McGee, in his introduction to MacDonald's books, "Most hard-bitten sleuths could not pass for a poet-naturalist, or a political wag. Travis McGee was special. Is special. He would not be McGee without his reflections. Once, while tangled in a particularly foul mess, he wondered why he bothered to remain in Florida as the place went steadily to hell. It's a question many of us have asked."

Without MacDonald or McGee around anymore, who's taking up the slack and keeping track of South Florida's bad guys? Seychelle Sullivan, novelist Christine Kling's heroine, could have been McGee's dream girl. She's a tugboat captain on Ft. Lauderdale's New River, and she knows more about boats than any of the guys.

In Surface Tension, Kling's first novel, Seychelle, in a similar manner to McGee, gets caught up unexpectedly in a bizarre South Florida mystery involving a sinking vessel, a shattered love affair, seedy strip joints and a halfway house for girls. Sound good? In Kling's second novel, Cross Current, Seychelle discovers a swamped fishing boat in the middle of the Gulf Stream. Aboard the boat is a murdered woman and a traumatized Haitian girl named Solange. Seychelle must bring the girl back to shore, where she is faced with the border patrol and the police. She is determined not to have the girl sent back to Haiti, but she must uncover the mystery of the girl's past in order to help.

What MacDonald and Kling have in common, beyond their boating heroes and heroines, is a sensitivity to environmental and social issues in South Florida. While Travis McGee and Seychelle Sullivan deal with the lowliest criminals and inhabit some of the seediest locales, they are both sincere, real people who love South Florida. They are tough and sentimental at the same time, which makes them all the more human and makes us love reading about them.

Summertime, and the Listening is Easy…

So we might be in for a bad hurricane season. So it might be a hundred degrees on Biscayne Bay right now. So the fish might not be biting, or it might be so foggy up in Newport that you can't see past your forestay. All of these things are probably true, or probably will be true at some point during the summer. But when you're not worrying about getting your boat ready for the hurricane season, why not plan for a little down time, listen to some good music, and have some fun?

We have a few suggestions for your summer parties, get-togethers, or just for hanging out on the boat. Our recommendation this summer is to go back to some island classics, like the Barefoot Man.

German-born George Nowak is better known as Barefoot Man. He combines calypso, country, reggae and soca with the tongue-in-cheek kind of humor that traditional calypso requires.

Nowak moved to the islands in 1971, with nothing but a guitar and a bag of his belongings, and he built a name for himself traveling around and performing his own style of music--barefoot, of course. His life has followed a pattern of cold to warm; he spent his early childhood in Munich, ended up in North Carolina as a teenager, and became a permanent fixture in the Caribbean after Nashville wouldn't grant his wish for a country music recording deal. When he was in high school, he spent most of his time reading National Geographic and looking at maps and atlases, planning his escape to the tropics. He ended up exactly where he wanted to be.

Check out Barefoot's Calypso Gold 2 CD or come to our new our store. It's a good mix of the classics, and will put your mind in the Caribbean no matter where you're anchored. Barefoot has been around long enough to know what works for different folks, so his appeal is wide.

If you already know Songs You Know by Heart by, well, heart, try some vintage Jimmy Buffett. Your party guests may roll their eyes at Margaritaville, but when was the last time they heard "Livin' it Up" from One Particular Harbor? The sure cure for the world-weary Parrothead is to dig up really old Buffett albums and skip over all the songs that made it onto Songs You Know By Heart. It's not that the popular ones aren't good--after all, that's how they got to be so popular--but sometimes the more obscure (and more irreverent) songs tend to be overlooked. Some of them will make you laugh out loud.

Try A1A, Living and Dying in ¾ Time, Last Mango in Paris, Coconut Telegraph or Havana Daydreaming. The Jimmy Buffett Live CD, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, is a Bluewater favorite. It includes Buffett's version of Crosby, Stills and Nash's "Southern Cross," which is an all-time sailing classic no matter who's singing it. Also, Bluewater has just started carrying Buffett's 2 CD set The Best of the Early Years, which includes songs that were previously only available on the hard-to-find album Before the Beach.

Between Barefoot and Buffett, you should be able to liven up the summer.