Florida Lobster








Photo by Newell

 

 Showing My Age

by

Alec Newell

 

Back in late March of this year, after what seemed like an endless winter, I fished about 30 miles off-shore, near Blackmar's Reef, with a young crew that included Matt Evitt, Mike Conte, and divers Tim Cullen and Mike Shipe.  We had a great day, with about a dozen pink snappers, our bag limit of B-liners (vermillion snapper) to 19 inches, a very nice haul of large spiny lobsters, a sheephead, several triggerfish, a large mangrove snapper, half a dozen large red snapper that, of course, had to be thrown back, and some lion fish that I let the divers clean.

 

There are some huge mounted langouste or spiny lobsters on the wall of the Marine Science Center in Mayport, but not being a scuba diver, I tend to forget how big the lobsters here actually get.  I used to free dive for "bugs" or spiny lobsters in the Keys, but the last time I was there in 1972,  you could still order sea turtle steaks from the menu at Sid and Roxy's Green Turtle Inn on Islamorada.  According to Tennessee Williams' Memoirs, the turtle steaks and drinks there were excellent;  he looked forward to eating sea turtle, and (mostly) drinking there whenever he was staying at his house in Key West.

I never ate at the Green Turtle, but remember the restaurant, with its chalkboard menu out front, as a landmark when I stayed at Marathon.  We'd fish and dive Marathon for lobster by day, then head down to Key West to drink at Sloppy Joe's Bar at night.  I remember seeing old eight by ten inch black and white photographs, on Sloppy Joe's walls,  of  1930's and 40's era celebrities.  One was of a very nicely dressed Johnny Weissmuller perched atop a  barstool, wearing a double breasted tropical suit, with an open necked sport shirt.  He is mugging grandly for the camera but his unfocused gaze betrays his extreme intoxication.  The picture offered an entirely new perspective on the childhood image I had of Tarzan.

photo by Newell

Sloppy Joe's always reminded me of Pete's Bar.  Ernest Hemingway had hoisted a few in both places, but he is more often associated with Sloppy Joe's, where he'd left some personal affects and a trunk full of old manuscripts parked in a back room of the bar.  Shortly after his death, the trunk was opened and found to contain an unfinished manuscript for what would later become Islands in the Stream.

Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary, had the manuscript edited, added to, and posthumously published (1970).  The book was later adapted to a movie starring George C. Scott (1977) and became the inspiration for a Bee Gees' song (1983) that was originally performed by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.  Islands in the Stream became a block buster enterprise which earned a financial bonanza for the Hemingway estate.

But I'm not here to count the Hemingways' money or to digress over Tennessee Williams' culinary habits; this is a fish story, or rather a lobster story, and we all know what fish stories are about: "mine's bigger than yours is," right?  So I'll just cut to the chase, and since a picture's worth a thousand words, here they are.

Photo by Newell