© 2017 Tom Corcoran
The guidebooks said don’t sail into Bimini at night. The entrance was narrow, the sandbars shifty, and the coral destructive. You didn’t go into Bimini at night—unless you absolutely had to.
Anchored thirty yards from the western shore of North Bimini, the Euphoria’s crew felt the pull of necessity at the end of a long, exhausting day. The trip had been Captain Buffett’s idea. The newest Captain Buffett—Jimmy. He’d called Corcoran and suggested a run through the Bahamas. Thanks to the United States Navy, Corcoran could read a chart and plot a course. Thanks to the Chart Room, he could ready a drink. He picked up two new job titles: navigator and beer-stowage consultant. If the boss wanted to go to the Bahamas, to the Bahamas he’d go.
On January 13, the Euphoria set out from Coconut Grove for a quick sail to No Name Harbor on the southern tip of Key Biscayne. They dropped anchor that evening and, according to the logbook,I “commenced cocktail routine.” They noticed the anchor was dragging, repositioned the boat and dropped anchor again. “No further dragging noticed,” Buffett wrote. “Crew and captain, however, were dragging noticeably.”
About that crew. There was of course Captain Buffett, and first mate Jane. National Lampoon–managing editor P. J. O’Rourke, identified as “itinerant journalist, jester and Big Apple raconteur” was aboard. He and Corcoran had become good friends at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. O’Rourke visited Corcoran often in the early seventies and even put his name on National Lampoon’s masthead for a time. He and Buffett hit it off, and Jimmy and Jane would visit when they were in New York.
There was Corcoran, of course, and a deck aid named Juan. The logbook gave no last name, but the last name was Thompson. Juan was the twelve-year-old son of Hunter S. Thompson. Jane and Jimmy had been spending time in Aspen, Colorado, and met Thompson through mutual friends.
But Hunter wasn’t aboard. He and his wife were fast fighting their way toward divorce and thought it would be better for Juan to go sailing with Jimmy Buffett. He knew how to sail and loved boats. What could go wrong?
Captain Buffett was awake at 7:15 a.m. the next morning. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, bacon, “and green and yellow motion pills.” By 11 a.m., they were cruising comfortably on Biscayne Bay, listening to James Taylor and preparing to tan. “Domestic beer served, imported cigarettes consumed.”
Soon the Euphoria would make south for Key Largo and anchor in Jewfish Creek. The plan from there was to set off across the Gulf Stream for Bimini, which they did despite dense fog. Fog so thick they were nearly run down twice—by the same tanker. “It was a Gulf supertanker, but it came so close all we could see was the U,” O’Rourke wrote in his 1988 book Holidays in Hell.
“I have to assume they had a radar and knew where we were, or they would have been all over their foghorn before they struck us, but who knows?” Corcoran says. “We’d have never been heard from again.”
Once their heart rates returned to normal, they picked up an AM station in the Bahamas, dialed in the onboard radio direction finder, and Navigator Corcoran charted them across the Stream in rough seas. Every hour or so he’d check the signal, see how the Gulf Stream was moving them, and adjust. Buffett, wrapped in yellow foul-weather gear, stretched out with a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.
They found Bimini—after dark—as conditions continued to deteriorate. They could hear waves breaking on the beach, and however calming that sound might be to a vacationing couple from Cleveland lounging onshore, it’s unnerving aboard a boat. Options were considered. Decisions were made. Corcoran, wrapped in his foul-weather gear, took the dinghy ashore to look for someone who could guide them into the harbor.
He tried a church first and the minister recommended a guy named Boaty the Loadie. Boaty could get them in, even loaded, and the working assumption remains he was, or else why the nickname?
Corcoran tracked down Boaty and got him back to the Euphoria. Boaty took control and cleanly navigated the cut between North and South Bimini. The Euphoria tied up at Brown’s Marina in Alice Town, a few steps from the Compleat Angler HotelII where Hemingway stayed as he worked to finish To Have and Have Not. Or at least that’s how it was advertised. They got to charge more for one room that way. Buffett had paid the extra few bucks when he first made the trip to Bimini in 1971 aboard a Chalk’s Ocean Airways seaplane from Miami.
The next day, Corcoran, Jane, and O’Rourke caught a seaplane back to Florida. Buffett waved good-bye from shore, bundled in a long-sleeve shirt, his Euphoria T-shirt peeking out from underneath. O’Rourke headed back to New York. Jane was going to Fort Lauderdale for a few days. Corcoran needed to check on his wife and an ex-girlfriend who’d come to stay with them. Buffett and Juan watched a storm roll in.
The skies over Bimini darkened, temperatures dropped, and the wind twisted palm trees sideways. Buffett later swore to Corcoran he saw snowflakes. Two hundred miles west-northwest of Key West, a 410-foot Panamanian tanker capsized in eight- to twelve-foot seas and thirty-five knot winds. In the Bahamas, twenty miles northwest of Nassau, a four-masted schooner, with 127 on board, was stranded on a sandbar and battered by fifteen-foot waves.
On Wednesday, January 19, the Key West Citizen reported three endangered shrimp boats near Shoal Channel. A twenty-eight-foot cabin cruiser run aground near Boca Grande. One sailboat was in trouble in Boca Chica Channel and another ran aground near Safe Harbor Channel, which had to be frustrating, to be so close to Safe Harbor Channel.
In an attempt to save crops from the freeze, helicopters hovered over vegetable farms on the edge of the Everglades. Citrus growers set tire fires near Fort Lauderdale. Temperatures dropped to twenty-seven degrees in West Palm Beach and twenty degrees in Orlando. Snow was reported in West Palm and Orlando, in St. Petersburg and Fort Myers, in Christmas, and even in the town of Frostproof—though city officials said they had no plans to change its name.
Farther north, in the nation’s capital, jackhammers chipped ice from Jimmy Carter’s inaugural parade route. In a generous act of bipartisanship, Republican senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, invited Carter to move the festivities to Anchorage, where the high was forecast in the forties, compared to the twenty-degree outlook in Washington, D.C.
The weather sucked all over, and there was Jimmy Buffett, freezing his ass off in Bimini. With the Euphoria’s high-end radio up and running, he gave an assist to the coast guard as it attempted to find another stranded vessel.
When the weather finally improved, the group (minus O’Rourke) reconvened and set south for Nassau and then farther south still toward the Exumas, an archipelago of hundreds of small islands like Little Hall’s Pond Cay,III which appeared deserted when the Euphoria arrived.
After casual exploration, the landing party prepared to claim the island in the name of cocktail hour when a woman emerged from a building wondering 1) where they’d come from and 2) if they’d like to stay for dinner. It’d be served at 5 o’clock. A couple more boats were expected from Staniel Cay. Cost was $12 per person. Grouper was on the menu.
The crossing to Bimini was a memory by then, another funny story, another near miss they could laugh about. They had perfect water, perfect weather, and perfect music for the cruise. They’d packed along Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and Little Feat. Corcoran had left his job at the radio station in Key West, which was fine by him, but it upset Vic Latham, who had opened the Full Moon Saloon.
The Full Moon would quickly become known as the Full Spoon Saloon, a nickname it earned for rare was the occasion you’d find fewer than two sets of feet in any bathroom stall. Latham had intended to use Corcoran’s radio show as barroom entertainment. In its place, he asked Corcoran if he could make some mix tapes to play. Corcoran did, and packed a few aboard the Euphoria.
Especially popular was Greatest Hits of the Lesser Antilles, where Tom Waits’s “Shiver Me Timbers” captured clouds “like heaven on a new front-page sky,” and where James Taylor hoisted “Captain Jim’s Drunken Dream.” Leon Russell urged himself “Back to the Island,” and Jimmy Cliff was just “Sitting in Limbo.”
Corcoran even snuck “Havana Daydreamin’ ” into the mix. Buffett would pick up a guitar and play along with Waits or sing a few of his own. If he was drunk—really drunk, like so drunk he could barely sit up (yeah, God’s own drunk)—he might even inhabit another alter ego, Blind Lemon Pledge.
And they hadn’t left Florida without the new one from the Eagles, Hotel California. Buffett had struck up a friendship with Glenn Frey and the rest of the band since that first nervous gig opening for them in South Carolina. The Eagles had recorded at Criteria not long before Buffett made Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, and it had continued to rocket them to a level of stardom few bands have attained—an altitude Buffett dreamed of.
They’d closed their new album, however, with an especially earthy, seven-and-a-half-minute lament about how we ruin every good thing we get our hands on. Don Henley wrote “The Last Resort,” wondering why we’d ever call anything paradise, because all it ever does is invite the bulldozers. “You call some place paradise,” Henley sang, “kiss it good-bye.”
Had Buffett been home in Key West, he might have pulled up at Louie’s, on the Afterdeck, ordered a beer, paged through the Citizen, and learned 1976 was a banner year for Air Sunshine. The carrier moved 112,274 passengers in and out of the Keys—more than double the business it had done in 1975 and 14,000 more passengers than the entire airline industry carried a year earlier.
During the recent Christmas holiday, Key West sold out of hotel rooms, forcing the chamber of commerce to turn to its list of residents willing to rent rooms to tourists. A spokesman for one hotel told the newspaper the heaviest traffic seemed to be folks from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—with a noticeable increase in travelers from Europe and South America. The manager of another estimated a 35-percent increase in business in 1976.
Not that Buffett needed to read that in the newspaper. He’d written all those tourists, baking under a tropical sun, into the first verse of “Margaritaville,” and then added the portly caricatures into the verse he cut in the studio. They were real, and they hadn’t been there five years earlier when he arrived with Jerry Jeff and Murphy. They’d called it paradise back then, and now the beaches were filling and strangers would knock on his door offering a six-pack because everyone wanted to get drunk with Jimmy Buffett. Key West wasn’t the same as it was, but what ever is? Don’t like it? Keep moving forward in search of whatever’s next.
The Euphoria made south for Staniel Cay, home of the Staniel Cay Yacht Club. “An oasis of tropical charm,” according to its brochure. There was a new 3,000-foot airstrip, and for those arriving by private plane, Staniel Cay Yacht Club monitored Unicorn 122.8. They even took American Express. “A get-away haven on a happy island.”
There, in a squat yellow building behind a white door lined by windows, there was a phone. The sign outside said Bahamas Telecommunications Company. Buffett and Corcoran were strolling past when Buffett, half-joking, said “Maybe I better call L.A. and see if I still have a job.”
© 2017 Tom Corcoran
Corcoran waited outside while Buffett dialed back to the world, to his job. Corcoran recalls the half of the conversation he was privy to:
“That wasn’t supposed to be the single,” Buffett said.
He thought “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” would be the new album’s lead single.
“It’s what?!” Buffett said.
Radio was showing interest in “Margaritaville.” It was looking like a hit.
Change of plans. Get your ass back to the bus, Buffett, and fire up those diesels. Unexpectedly, they had someplace to be. Oh, they celebrated the news that night, sure. But they set out fast for Great Exuma. A few days—and a few more celebrations—later, a chartered Beechcraft King Air turboprop landed in Georgetown. Larry “Groovy” Gray, Corcoran’s road-trip partner to Provincetown and Jane’s old college friend, was there already and he’d take care of the Euphoria. Vacation was over.
Buffett had to reassemble the Coral Reefer Band. It was time to tour, and he couldn’t possibly have imagined as he lifted off from the Bahamas that the tour would never really end.
I The logbook, in this case, reproduced in The Parrot Head Handbook.
II The Compleat Angler burned down in 2006.
III While shooting Pirates of the Caribbean, Johnny Depp came across Little Hall’s Pond Cay and bought it in 2004 for $3.6 million. It’s forty-five acres and includes six beaches, one of which is named Gonzo in honor of Hunter S. Thompson.