Support a Beach Bum: Just another Day in Paradise

Support a Beach Bum: Just another Day in Paradise

My name is Daveed. I moved to Florida about three years ago, 2 in the suburbs, and the last here in Jacksonville as a single man. I get to do what I want, when I want and its actually pretty good. After the death of my father last spring, being disowned by my mother, divorced by my wife, and loosing my job with a major corporation I decided it was time for another change. A dear friend of mine from High School encouraged me to write a book as she found my stories of my day to day life here interesting. We had emailed each other for a while about our lives and our friends, but I decided to try doing it this way, depending on the honesty, integrity, and goodness of peoples souls to make a living as a Beach Bum. Admit it, haven't you always just wanted to go walkabout down a beach with the sun beating down on your shoulders, relieving your stress? If you can't do it for whatever reason right now, help me to provide the Daveed da Beach Bum experience for you. This will include stories from my everyday life, my friends, travel tips and out of the way places, food & drink recipes, and tips for vacationing or living in Florida inexpensively but still have just as much fun! I have a knack of turning the simple things in life into adventures and hope to share them with you for as long as you will support me.

I thought I might just start this blog by introducing you to a few of my diverse group of fishing buddies. I live about a three minute walk from our community dock, more of a socializing place than anything. A joke of ours is that this is a quiet drinking village with a fishing problem. It is as much comedy central as serious fishing, good for the soul! My fishing crew is Slinky, a 320lb retired Navy Veteran...black guy from St. Croix, USVI who likes to sing romantic songs to the fish to bite his shrimp, ...Sandy , a boat detailer..young white guy who grew up on a Sailboat in St. Thomas USVI and Javier & Juan, two nice Hispanic brothers in elementary school who live on the waterfront and are excellent fishermen for their age. Quite a diverse group of avid fishermen who at least one or four of us are at the dock at any given moment.

Super Bowl Sunday: Nice day about mid 60s, I walked down to the dock in the afternoon and Slinky and Sandy were there already. Sandy was the first to land one, a 22" Catfish. I had been there about 20 minutes, my rod bent and I landed a 18" Redfish (highly prized, beautiful and tasty) on a whole shrimp. Slinky caught a nice trout, but told me I caught HIS Redfish!!! I left soon after as I had plans with a lady friend to watch the Super Bowl. They were kidding me about "Lover Boy Daveed" came down for 10 minutes caught MY Redfish and now he is leaving. They then nicknamed me "da Red Snacher Mon", a nickname that has stuck for the last month or so. It was the first Redfish caught there in about a month and I became somewhat of a celebrity in our community. People said they had heard that one was caught here recently, would shake my hand and say they were happy the Redfish were back! I guess they heard it on the Coconut Telegraph.

I went home, watched the Superbowl, and had to throw my "BAD CALL Brick" at the TV a few times. It is a piece of foam, looks like a brick, but BIG FUN! We good ole boys originally from Memphis need something like that....Elvis used to shoot his TV and I throw my foam brick when I don't agree with the officials call! Actually its just something to make the game more fun.