Tag: Northern Gulf Coast

Going once, going twice….Marina Jack SOLD!

Marina Jack in Sarasota, Florida, recognized as National Marina of the Year in 2015, has been sold to Suntex Marina Investors LLC. The Dallas-based investment firm did not disclose the sale price. The merger includes the 316-slip marina in downtown Sarasota, adjacent to Oleary’s Tiki Bar, as well as Bayfront Yacht Works & Marina, Bayfront Excursions and Turtle Beach Grill on south Siesta Key, Florida. “This is without question a merger of strengths from an operational and managerial standpoint,” says Robert L. Soran, CEO of Marina Jack. “We share a vision of future growth opportunities for our people and our combined companies.” Soran will have an equity interest and board advisory capacity with Suntex. Suntex now has a portfolio of 34 marinas in Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and St. Maarten.

With direct, no-bridge access to the Gulf of Mexico, Marina Jack’s marina operations have kept up facelifts and improvements at a pace that is matching the transformation of downtown Sarasota. The marina features slip accommodations for vessels up to 228 feet with 316 wet and dry slips, a full-service fuel dock, ship’s store, and an on-site Yacht Services department. Downtown Sarasota has become a trendy center for urban condo living and features many eclectic street-side dining venues for foodies, a Saturday morning farmers market, and an ever-changing collection of boutique shops that are favorites of cruisers.

Marina Jack acquired the Turtle Beach Marina in September of 2015. Now known as Bayfront Yacht Works & Marina, this south Siesta Key business features a full-service boatyard with haul-out capabilities for vessels up to 65 feet. Bayfront Yacht Works & Marina adds an additional 60 dry and wet slips to the portfolio, along with a rapidly growing boat and watersport rental business known as Bayfront Excursions. The merger also includes three well-known restaurants, including the Marina Jack II—a 96-foot passenger vessel known for Sarasota’s preeminent sightseeing and sunset dinner cruises.

Holiday Boat Parades

While a few communities are struggling to rebuild docks and find enough money just to survive, let alone sponsor annual lighted boat parades, the show will go on in some of Florida’s Panhandle cities.

• Carrabelle, December 10th: The Boat Parade course starts at the Pavilion on Marine Street and proceeds up the Carrabelle River to the Tillie Miller Bridge. It can be enjoyed from anywhere along Marine Street and Highway 98. carrabelle.org

• Destin, December 11th: Judging of the 30th Annual Harbor Lighted Boat Parade will start at 6PM upstairs at Harry T’s Restaurant. Boats will start lining up in the harbor between 5-5:30PM. Fireworks in the East Pass will light up the sky after the parade.

• Cedar Key and Steinhatchee have both sustained significant dock damage, and at press time, were unsure whether the events normally scheduled for the first week of December would take place.

By Alan Wendt, Southern Boating Magazine December 2016

Gourmet food scraps

The Cajuns of South Louisiana are known for their interest in spicy food and exotic flavors, but fishermen all along the northern Gulf Coast have their secret culinary delicacies as well. Most anglers who have grilled a monster blackfish appreciate the fish’s sweet and delicate cheek meat, but only the truly old school fully uses the bounty of these waters and can turn a fish carcass into blackfish jelly. Generations on the coast have long kept this culinary knowledge secret, yet it was fading into “culinary backwaters” until a revival of interest saved these savory treats from vanishing. These are some of my favorites.

Perhaps shrimp throats, aka “spiders,” are among the more common and likely the easiest to go mainstream. On the larger, jumbo to colossal-sized white shrimp, there is a bit of sweet meat that is nearly always wasted. Easily freed by placing an index finger into the head along the bottom and pushing down, this tasty nugget when washed, spiced, breaded, and fried is an amazing twist on shrimp meat with a unique texture and becomes a perfect and delicious finger food.

Mullets are one of the rare species of fish to have a gizzard, similar to a bird. Mullets are bottom feeders and it is best to only use the gizzard from mullets caught near the islands offshore where bottoms are sandy and not full of mud. The mullet gizzard is a small little nodule about the size of a fingernail and located after the throat. It must be sliced open and thoroughly washed before being simply spiced, battered and fried, just like the shrimp “spiders”—a tasty treat.

Red snapper are highly prized along the entire Gulf Coast, but from the piers of Galveston, Texas, to Orange Beach, Alabama, the snapper throats are simply tossed out. Yet these throats on the larger snappers are filled with delicate meat between the pectoral fins and are almost always scraped off the fish stations into the water for crabs or pelicans. I knew of a group of cruisers from Pascagoula, Mississippi, that would often do the voyage to Destin, Florida, along the ICW and arrive as the Destin charter boats were docking and the fish was being cleaned. Florida’s charter captains always found it a bit curious that these Mississippi natives would walk up and ask for these discarded portions of the large snappers. That was until they tasted the snapper throats scaled, spiced, breaded, and fried.

There is obviously a theme here regarding the frying of these tiny leftover morsels of meat, but with reason: They’re delicious and have a sweetness to them not found in the other meatier portions of fish or shrimp that is accentuated by the spicy batters of the Gulf Coast. Ask anyone who’s tried the little thumb-sized scallop of meat above and behind a redfish’s eyes.

Go for it and try one of these Gulf Coast’s unique delicacies. A nice comeback sauce and saltines will certainly help for that first sampling.

By Troy Gilbert, Southern Boating Magazine April 2016

 

Katrina 10 years later

“I’ve got ¾-inch nylon lines that I use for storms, and the boat gets so much pressure on it with the ropes getting so tight that they become like piano wires,” says Dennis Raziano. “The lines were actually sawing through the boat in places and they started moaning.” Raziano rode out Hurricane Katrina on board his 34-foot liveaboard oyster trawler in the Orleans Marina in West End New Orleans. “I was taught many years ago to never leave the boat. Even if it’s floating down the highway—you never leave the boat.”
The miserable and dangerous adventure Raziano and a few other brave souls went through in New Orleans in the summer of 2005 during and after the storm was ill-advised, but a decade after its landfall on the Mississippi Coast and the levee failures in New Orleans, their stories are now legend. After this terrible chapter, the recreational boating community on the Northern Gulf Coast has made great advances toward rebuilding and now holds thousands of state-of-the-art marinas and mended yacht clubs.

In Mississippi alone, nearly 1,000 slips have been rebuilt in marinas from Pass Christian to Pascagoula, and an entire new marina has been constructed adjacent to the historic and quaint downtown of Bay St. Louis. Out of the 33 Gulf Yachting Association’s yacht clubs from New Orleans to Pensacola—including 3 of the 5 oldest clubs in the Western Hemisphere—18 have been rebuilt or repaired. The 166-year-old Southern Yacht Club of New Orleans has a new 30,000-square-foot facility. Many of the more than 150 years of historic trophies and Olympic medals lost in the dual calamities of fire and water are slowly being replaced, including a Lipton sailing trophy, which was generously rebuilt by the Lipton Tea Company using the original London silversmith.
On the coast, junior sailing programs have been re-invigorated. Fishing tournaments and 150-year-old regattas have quickly returned with participation now getting back to “Pre-K” numbers as boats have been replaced and boat shows have boomed, including the Gulf Coast Yacht and Boat Show that relocated in 2010 to Gulfport, Mississippi.
The one outlier has been the Municipal Yacht Harbor in New Orleans and its 600+ slips. One of three public marinas in the city, the marina’s management board has been battling with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for rebuilding funds and now stands as a flashing beacon of bureaucracy, still without utilities and half empty.
The New Orleans’ boaters and the many businesses that serve them have struggled but learned to make do. New Orleans and this heavy boating community along the Gulf Coast will have endured everything from catastrophic hurricanes to oil spills, yet the strong boating culture and its infrastructure will continue their resurgence. The love of pulling in those red snappers or racing sailboats in century-old regattas will never be quashed on this coast—we are boat people.

By Troy Gildert, Southern Boating Magazine September 2015

Megayacht marina in New Orleans

As a growing home to a fleet of cruise ships exploring the Caribbean, a large stretch of New Orleans’ massive wharfs on the lower Mississippi River have been modified and beautified for passenger traffic, including megayachts. For Superbowl XLVII in 2013, the wharves adjacent to the convention center and just a few blocks from the French Quarter were treated to a rare spectacle of two large yachts—Kismet, the 308′ Lürssen yacht owned by Shahid Khan, who also owns the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Paul Allen’s 414′ Octopus. Now the city of New Orleans is floating the idea of a large megayacht marina on the Mississippi River as part of what could be a massive $1 billion riverfront redevelopment and expansion of their hugely successful convention center.

Centrally located on the Northern Gulf Coast, New Orleans is already home to large recreational marinas, the second oldest yacht club in the western hemisphere, and the sprawling Trinity Yachts boatyards. The city’s historic marina district of West End on Lake Pontchartrain is the home port for Saints owner Tom Benson’s 122′ yacht Lady Gayle Marie and others that regularly transit the lake’s near uniform depth of 12′ and the Rigolets Pass into the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean.

The proposed marina would seek to allow vessels walking distance access to the French Quarter and be located on a bend upriver from the central business district and away from the currents and shipping traffic on the nearly mile-wide river. According to officials from the Port of New Orleans, the Mississippi is a fully navigable river and therefore open to recreational vessels, however docking facilities are only currently recommended and available to boats over 100′.

A side benefit of the proposed marina could possibly come in the form of capturing cruisers transiting the Great Loop. With a dearth of facilities and fueling stations located on the long stretch of the river from Memphis to New Orleans, most Loopers opt for the traditional route down the Tombigbee waterway that exits into Mobile Bay in Alabama, but this marina could open up a new alternative route for the more adventurous.

With New Orleans experiencing an unprecedented modern period of growth, gentrification and as a host for major events such as the Superbowl and Mardi Gras, it seems natural for the city to attempt to capitalize more on its natural allure as a cruising destination. Construction of a marina capable of handling large yachts only a few blocks from the French Quarter would go a long way to achieving these goals and allow for yacht owners to realize their fantasy of playing Huck Finn on the mighty Mississippi.

By Troy Gilbert, Southern Boating April 2015

Southern Traditions

As the first cool fronts make their way down from the north and with the holidays right around the corner, the second major boating season gets underway on the Northern Gulf Coast. Flatboats and pirogues are readied and ponds in the marshes are scouted. Fishermen head out for those big reds and trout that got away over the summer, and the oystermen fan out from the coast to bring in those salty mollusks so necessary for this coast’s holiday celebrations.

Thanksgiving and Christmas on the Gulf Coast have always featured time-honored traditions incorporating boating with holiday meals that reach back to subsistence fishing and hunting. It’s hard not to notice the flatboats covered in fresh marsh grass on Thanksgiving morning in New Orleans’ Garden District with hunters rushing in their camouflage gear to start the smokers. On the coast of Mississippi, boats skippered by “paw paws” and grandfathers are eased back onto their trailers as the proud and sleepy grandkids are ready for a nap from their quick morning of trawling for the day’s shrimp. On the bayous of Alabama, crab traps are raised and early morning trout are cleaned while the luggers in Apalachicola bring in those all-important oysters.

As families descend on their gathering spots on the coast from Pass Christian to Bon Secour and from New Orleans to Clearwater, ladies in their kitchens and men at their culinary stations out back come alive. Recipes handed down from generations long past  are shared with the next in line. The number of oysters in this year’s dressing is marked on the handwritten recipe that now scrolls back fifty years. Empty shotgun shell casings and old tangled fishing line are placed with moss, green mirlitons and heirloom crystal candleholder centerpieces, while laughter and the smell of redfish court-bouillon permeate the house. Out back, brothers and uncles sip on cold beer while their sons and daughters watch as ducks wrapped in bacon are smoked to perfection—the black labs wait for that one dropped bird.

On piers and docks, oysters are charbroiled while a brisk cold wind whips down across the sounds and bays—boats pop in the water in a building chop while sailboat stanchions clink. Windows of the houses glow with the warm yellow light of families and friends gathered, their cars parked in the lawn underneath sprawling oaks next to a few boat trailers holding license plates from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

While the arriving winter means many cruisers across the country prepare to put their boats to bed under cover for the inevitable snow and ice, on the Gulf Coast and throughout the South, boating springs to life in a second season. Away from the summer waterskiing, regattas and the heat of waiting on that tuna to bite off shore, many might say that it’s the more important boating  season.

By Troy Gilbert, Southern Boating November 2014

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