Still More Nostalgia About The Jolly Sailor Pub

Yes! More Nostalgia! Deal with it! My sister Susan and I returned to what I call the Jolly Sailor Pub this past Friday night. It is an outdoor bar with great views of the Sunset Bay Marina and the St. Lucie River. The actual name of the restaurant is Sailor's Return, but as you can see from the sign in the photograph on the left, which is hung just to the right of that outdoor bar, it is easy to be confused. The Jolly Sailor Pub was located in downtown Stuart for many years before the couple who owned it decided to retire. Then in 2009 they opened Sailor's Return, a rather upscale restaurant with wonderful views of the sunset over the St. Lucie River. I assume they put up that sign for old times' sake, but to me that outdoor venue will always be the Jolly Sailor Pub.

The Jolly Sailor was famous for having a traditional black London cab parked out in front, where someone was kind enough to take the photograph on the right of my mother Mary, Susan, and myself. God knows what year it was taken - probably sometime in the 1990s. It is hard to tell, since I have not aged a bit since that photo was taken, and so every year I just look the same (I do have a portrait of myself hidden away in the closet of my Denver condo that a street artist drew years ago in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, but I have been loath to take it out and look at it after all these years). After all, you all probably know what happened to Dorian Gray, after all. Let's not even go there.

The thing I like best about sitting at the bar at the Jolly Sailor is being able to look at all the boats (many of them good-sized yachts) in Sunset Bay Marina. Interestingly enough, just beyond this marina is a place where people can moor their boats in the middle of the St. Lucie River. For free! At least for a while. Most of these boats look like they are in pretty good shape, but years ago I remember that people with nowhere else to live would get hold of an old, run-down vessel with an interior cabin and live there permanently, rowing to shore on a dinghy or inflatable when they needed supplies. I'm not sure how the county resolved that, if they did, but I personally would not recommend that lifestyle, since those craft are not very seaworthy, and there are a lot of storms around here during the summer months. If I tried something like that, I am sure the boat would sink within days. That is called karma, and not the good kind.