Boat U.S. Magazine has a feature article: Jimmy Buffett: A Bard’s Life in 4 Boats
As cultural icons go, Jimmy Buffett was a slippery trickster. He was one of the great mystical troubadours of our lifetime. (Ask Bob Dylan). He was a middle-aged jester prancing before hordes of sunburned suburbanites, garishly dressed, making shark shapes with their hands. He was an authentic artist who mixed existing cultural elements in entirely fresh ways. He was a shameless shill in a shameless age. He was a rags-to-riches entrepreneur whose example spawned stirring tales of American enterprise. He was and was not an A-list pop star, whose diverse factions of devoted fans could be as different from each other as night is to day.
Jimmy Buffett was all these things. He was also a sailor, surfer, and fisherman who brought an enriching life on the water into our ears, into our hearts, and into our souls like nobody else on the public stage. He made people happy and made them dream. As we remember the singer/songwriter who died from Merkel cell carcinoma on September 1, 2023, let’s look back on Buffett’s magnificent life through the lens of four boats that reflected and shaped it.
Boston Whaler 13
In November 1971 Jerry Jeff proposed a road trip from Miami down the Overseas Highway, and Jimmy Buffett’s arrival in Key West was like a chemical reaction: Neither the man nor the place would ever be the same. Key West in those days had writers but didn’t yet have musicians or tourists – or, for that matter, margaritas. Ernest Hemingway was a ghost, while writers Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane were alive and well and drinking at Capt. Tony’s Saloon. Truman Capote still turned up at Tennessee Williams’ infamous pool parties.
Buffett had found him a home – and stayed. The people he met and their exploits in those first few Key West years inspired “White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean” (June 1973). One track extols the pleasures of “sailing in those warm December breezes;” another, the “old red bike” that gets him around to the bars and beaches of his town.
It was those songs that bought him his first boat. A Key West banker had refused Buffett’s request for a $500 loan to buy the boat of his dreams, a Boston Whaler 13. But the $11,000 deal for “White Sport Coat” clinched it. In ABC’s video for Buffett’s first hit – or, as he later quipped about his entire life’s work, “one of my 2.4 hit records” – the man behind the wheel of a boat in the video for “Come Monday” could not possibly look happier in his newfound home on the water.
Read the full article at Boat U.S. to learn more about Buffett’s four boats: Boston Whaler 13, Euphoria, Continental Drifter, and Last Mango
