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Moray Key, a slender, half-mile tuft of tree-topped coral cut from the tail of Upper Matecumbe Key in 1955 by Hurricane Janet, is located on the northwest side of where three narrow channels converge. Shell Key Channel leads northeasterly into the trout and redfish grounds at the Everglades end of Florida Bay; the second, Race Channel, loops off to the western end of Florida Bay, where the bonefish and snook cruise the shallows and huge jewfish hide in the rocky deeps; the third, Teatable Key Channel, leads southwesterly under a Route 1 bridge with a twenty-foot clearance at high tide to the open sea, across Hawk’s Channel to the reef and beyond, where the bottom drops off to depths of four and six hundred feet and rises again ten and a half nautical miles away at the Hump, where the blue marlin lie waiting, where tarpon, blackfin tuna and swordfish feed.
Moray Key, then, is a judicious place for Avery Boone to have begun his career as a fisherman. He studied the charts, talked long into the nights in bars in Islamorada and Marathon with the old hands, hired an experienced mate and explored the waters on his own, until he had memorized the channels, lights, reefs, currents and fishing grounds. His boat, the Belinda Blue, though slow and with a four-foot draft, was large and simple enough for him to take parties of four and six north into the bay, where he could fish either from the channels or, with the dinghy, on the flats; and she was enough of a deepwater boat that, once fitted with outriggers, depth sounder and fifty-channel receiver, she could be pushed as far out as the Hump and beyond. The Belinda Blue, however, compared to the flashy, fast, sports-fishing thoroughbreds that galloped to the Hump in less than an hour and returned before noon with record-breaking marlin and swordfish aboard, was a slow mule of a boat, so Ave had quickly specialized in taking amateurs, weekend fishermen from the North, families on daily outings, into the bay, leaving the deepwater fishing, the tournaments, leaving the big money, to the men whose boats were designed for nothing else.
He didn’t care. Ave was making a living now doing what he had always regarded as recreation, and he was doing it in year-round sunshine among people he liked and admired, fishermen, bartenders, small-time drug dealers, young women whose entire wardrobes consisted of string bikinis, designer jeans and men’s dress shirts, people who’d never worked more than part-time or not at all but who managed to keep a little cocaine or grass around and always had enough money and time to sit up late drinking tequila sunrises and listening to Jimmy Buffett tapes.
When some Miami-based developers built a forty-unit condominium complex overlooking the marina, Ave bought a unit on the second floor, above the pool and with a view of the Clam Shack below and the boats bobbing in their slips beyond. The directors of the Marathon branch of the Florida National Bank thought he was a good risk, and the Belinda Blue, appraised generously at $75,000, served as collateral. Then, one night a few months later, he met the girl named Honduras at a party aboard a sixty-foot sailing yacht owned by a Philadelphia dentist who spent his winters cruising the Caribbean with attractively tanned young male and female companions he picked up in ports like Montego Bay, Negril, Freeport and Nassau. The second Honduras saw Ave’s lean, handsome face and sandy hair, she knew his sign was Sagittarius, and ended up staying at his new condominium for several days, until the dentist in a pique left for Grand Cayman without her.
She stayed on with Ave, and a week later he bought the van, with which, as he told the directors of the bank in Marathon, he expected to supply fresh fish from the bay to restaurants up on Key Largo and Islamorada and south in Marathon. At Honduras’s urging, however, he had the van carpeted and upholstered throughout and installed a water bed and a quadraphonic stereo system, and never carried any fish anywhere, although he and Honduras started taking off for weekends in Miami and out to Key West, where Honduras had a number of friends with no visible source of income, ex-lovers and acquaintances who hung around glossy waterfront bars and lived in furnished apartments. Many of them played musical instruments and had more than a passing acquaintance with the technical vocabulary of the film and recording industries, which impressed Avery Boone from New Hampshire. He decided he was circulating on the fringes of show business.
His life had got expensive. But soon he was learning from his new friends how, with the Belinda Blue and his knowledge of the intricate maze of channels crisscrossing Florida Bay, he could afford that life. He risked several nighttime runs from Moray Key across to Flamingo City, loaded to the gunwales with bales of Colombia marijuana taken off a Panamanian freighter a few miles off Alligator Light, and cleared enough cash to start thinking about buying another boat, a high-speed 31-foot Tiara 3100, maybe, with twin 205-horsepower OMC Sea Drive engines, fitted with outriggers, a flying bridge and fighting chairs, a Loran C navigational unit and an extra fuel tank for occasional long-distance runs to places like Grand Cayman, the Bahamas, West Palm Beach, a boat that would let him fish the big tournaments from Pensacola to Nassau while someone else chugged in and out of Florida Bay in the Belinda Blue, lugging day-trippers and kids and dads with Christmas-present rods and reels to fish the flats, providing the business with a small but steady income and, when Ave came back in the Tiara from Grand Cayman, Nassau and West Palm Beach with plenty of cash but no fish to show for his efforts, providing a cover.