Jimmy Buffett’s music will provide the musical score for my life story when the movie is made. Reanimated and youthful, thanks to artificial intelligence, Robert Redford will of course portray me. It will be filled with sailing adventures and Walter Mittie stories of adventures I never actually had, while Jimmy Buffett’s music plays in the background (“…some folks go for the sailing, called by the lure of the sea….”)

After years of sailing, I “retired” to a lifestyle befitting my income. I found solace on the incredible beaches along the Gulf Coast-particularly St. George Island. Nearby is Apalachicola, the most beautiful little town on the “Forgotten Coast” of West Florida.

Once a busy port at the mouth of the Apalachicola River, the port city was -before the Civil War-  the destination of the  downstream carriage of the year’s slave-grown cotton crop from southwest Georgia and southeast Alabama. In Apalachicola the cotton bales were loaded on sea-going vessels bound for European and New England cotton mills. Steamboat traffic kept the town going for a time, but railroads gradually replaced river traffic. For a few years, the cotton boom of the World War I years brought new life to the little town and Craftsman-style bungalows joined the Ante-Bellum and Victorian houses built by the early cotton factors, ship captains and warehousemen. It’s a charming place.

The Old Customs House  on Apalachicola’s waterfront. Import duties had to be collected and cotton loaded for shipment to the mills of Western Europe and the New England states. Photo by the author.

The long drive from Tate in North Georgia to Apalachicola is always spent listening to Jimmy’s music. Gulf beaches are seven or eight hours away by car. We make the trip to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

From Atlanta we take I-85 toward Columbus and picked up Route 27 (the “Martha Berry Highway”). Below Columbus you feel like you have entered a forgotten land for sure, with few towns of any size and vast farmlands with center-pivot irrigation systems. Gradually the great farms give way to the pine “barrens” and timber towns of the Georgia-Florida border.  Dense stands of pines in the Apalachicola National Forest seem to crowd onto the highway. We almost abandon hope that a gas station will turn up at the next crossroads. We stop at the Kolomoki Indian Mounds Historic Site to picnic, where we get directions to the nearest town and service station.

Jimmy’s “Margaritaville” revives us as we emerge into the bright sunlight of the Gulf Coast highway. We cross the long bridge over the waterway at the mouth of Apalachicola Bay and a great panoramic view opens to what seems an endless leapfrog of concrete islands that carry the sections of the bridge toward Apalachicola.  St. George’s Island can be seen on our left, Apalachicola Bay on our right. We turn up the music (“Down around Biloxi, pretty girls are dancing in the sea, they all look like sisters in the ocean. Boy will fill his pail with salty water; He sees pictures of his dreams under water, and the sun will set from off toward New Orleans.”)  It’s Jimmy’s ballads I love the most.

Thankfully, the weather is perfect, and the family vacationers (“…all of those tourists covered with oil…”) have returned home for the start of the new school year. The surf is like a warm bath as the sun sets without even a single cloud to flash its colors. Four days on the beach. Shopping around Apalachicola. Homemade Margaritas. Dinner on the deck at the Blue Parrot. Naps on the beach. Wrestling matches with a cantankerous beach umbrella. Long walks with our Lab, Emily, who is eager to dig up all of the 10,000 sand crabs holed up along the waterline.  What’s not to like? Actually, Emily hates the water. Some Lab.

White Sand Beaches and gentle warm surf greeted us onSt. George Island. “Pretty girls are dancing in the sea.” Photo by author.

Shopping and Restaurants are enjoyable in the quaint town of Apalachicola. There are fewer sailboats around these days. Photo by author.

Our return route is usually along the Gulf Coast toward our old haunts in Tallahassee and takes us through Carabelle, its harbor filled with sailboats. These are the popular sailing grounds for southwest Georgia and Tallahassee. A telephone booth with a “Police Department” sign announces that Carabelle is proud of its smalltown “Mayberry” status. Sheltered by offshore islands, the ride toward Tallahassee is along miles of pine stands, gray waters and (when the tide is out) vast tidal flats.

Back to Jimmy:  his earliest and best music is about sailing, coinciding with a tremendous growth in sailing as sport and recreation. Gas prices, inflation, and recession “tore my sails and broke my oars,” as Jimmy put it.   “Southern Cross” is my favorite of Jimmy’s sailing songs (…God I wish I were sailing again…”).

Boats that seemed indestructible and maintenance free (at least as described in Sail and Yachting magazines) inspired a mass market for small, “lightweight” yachts weighing in at a ton or so and offering a cramped space in which two adults and two small children conceivably might spend a night -and sail next day on a distant lake or even in protected coastal waters.

These craft were relatively inexpensive, and millions bought boats that required much less of the tedious and expensive upkeep of wooden boats. For sailors and those who only sailed in their dreams, Jimmy’s beach-party music became a welcome alternative to increasingly manic hard rock and the drone of sad country music. Inspired by Jimmy’s blend of Caribbean and country sounds, boats in the marinas of a thousand seaside towns resounded with the musical racket of shrouds bouncing against aluminum masts along crowded docks. It was a golden age of pleasure sailing.

The sailing phenomenon for small boat sailors declined sharply when inflation and steep gasoline prices in the late seventies began to spoil the fun. Former small-boat owners nursed their sorrow by reading a new magazine, Good Old Boat, a do-it-yourself guide to reviving derelict old boats, boats with indestructible fiberglass hulls, stainless steel rigging and aluminum masts all of which would likely still be around when the pyramids were reduced to rubble and humans no longer required fossil fuels.

The magazine attracted a close community of older sailors and would-be young sailors- with the time and money to restore classics like the O’Day, Catalina, Morgan and Irwin yachts that could be bought for a song. Restoration was time consuming, but parts were available -and still are. The process itself appealed to so many. Scenes of aging men and women fixing up sailboats as a hobby became common “character defining” moments in TV drama. It revealed that even hard-boiled detectives could be salt-water deprived romantics- if only while working in the garage.

 I chose to save a twenty-foot Balboa sloop which cost $3500. I would sell it a few years later for the same $3,500, enabling me to pay back the loan I took out to purchase her. She was a stout boat, built for San Francisco Bay and designed by Lyell Hess along the lines of a Sherman tank. Oh, well.  I could always sail away on Jimmy’s music and enjoy the salt life once a year on trips to the beach.

Sailing music had its day in the late sixties and seventies. There was a mainstream moment for sailing music when Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young made a billion dollars or so with their rendition of “Southern Cross”.  (“In a bar in Avalon, I tried to call you….”). And Christopher Cross  had a hit with “Sailing” (“Sailing takes me away to where I want to be…”).

Jimmy’s ballads may be less well known than his Parrot Head music, but they are still appealing to those of us who are hopeless romantics about the sea-as well as about life.  Jimmy was a storyteller above all else, recounting his adventures and the characters he met (or imagined he had met) in distant ports and bars.

 Jimmy’s unabashed admissions of his shortcomings endeared him (“Some people claim there’s a woman to blame, but it’s my own damn fault”).  “Island” conveys the humility of a man with a great heart. (“… I try to fly in on wings of silver, but I always hit the ground….).” We all need an occasional moment of self-forgiveness.

I often sing in the shower, imitating Jimmy’s version of “Stars Fell on Alabama” (“We played our little drama. We kissed in a field of white and stars fell on Alabama last night.”).  Or Jimmy’s gentle melody “Lovely Cruise” and its refrain “And those harbor lights, Lord, they’re coming into view. We say our farewells much too soon. I’m sorry it’s ended, oh, it’s sad but it’s true. It’s been a lovely Cruise.”  And so it has been for more than thirty years at my house.