Miami Skyline, Kevon Andersen, Sailing novel

Kevon Anderson's Biography

Kevon Andersen, author of SoBe Boatees, has been a liveaboard sailor on Biscayne Bay for almost two decades. This nautical novel is Kevon’s third book, second novel. Kevon has a Bachelor of Journalism Degree with Honors from the University of Texas at Austin, and is in that despicable fraternity of ne’er-do-wells known as law school dropouts.

He worked (and sipped) at premium wineries for two years in Sonoma County before moving to San Diego to help his brother, Brian David Andersen, co-author the nonfiction book Prisoners of the Deep, published by Harper & Row in 1984. He worked odd jobs for several years as bartender, floor sweeper, even flea-market vendor as he wrote and rewrote an unpublished novel set in Northern California’s Wine Country.Fed up with starving, he ducked under the corporate umbrella of a big airline in the late 1980s as he continued to write, and has been hiding out there ever since.

With the figurative twin crashes of Eastern and Pan Am in Miami, Kevon and his wife Debbie transferred to MIA and soon bought their first sailboat, Pure Miracle, a Glander yawl, and moved aboard six months later. After Hurricane Andrew, they bought a Pearson 390 sloop seriously damaged in the storm and spent three years restoring it.

Kevon first sailed when he was about eleven, learning simultaneously to question the maxims of his mother. She was an aquaphobic parent who drilled into him the deadly importance of waiting an hour after a meal before swimming. At summer camp on the quaintly named Possum Kingdom Lake in West Texas, each evening he shoveled down dinner and waited for the bell so he could race the 200 yards to the water, where he swam out to a moored Sailfish. He was hooked on sailing – and he didn’t drown!

At 15, Kevon and his father met Hobie Alter at the Dallas Boat Show one cold, January day and bought one of the first Hobie 14s, sail number 1145. On their inaugural sail that March on Lake Dallas, they turtled the boat in the still-frigid waters. Keith, a diabetic, went into shock, and Kevon had one arm round his father’s neck and another around a hull as he shouted for what seemed like forever. A big motor yacht, the only other boat in sight, pulled up and hauled them from the water. Interestingly, one of their two saviors was the famous Western movie actor Jack Elam; they were too shaken to even make the connection at the time. It was an unpleasant introduction to sailing for his father (and for years they never told the tale to his mother.)

Kevon and Debbie have made many sailing excursions to the Bahamas and Keys, most on their sloop Ionia, including a six-month trip to the Out Islands in 2002. In the late ‘90s, they also crewed on a delivery of a sailing cat from George Town, Bahamas to St. George’s, Grenada.

Kevon has written about several of their adventures by air and sea, including picking grapes with a family in Tuscany and sailing into the Bahamas with a bang (both the boat and the dock suffered.) The author continues to write onboard Ionia including tapping out the next two books in the Blackie Petersen series. And all while they stand watch and watch, keeping a vigil off the port beam for the next big sequel to the infamous Miami hurricane of 1926.

Q&A with the author:

Where did you come up with the name Te Cuesta Isle?

There already is a Tequesta Point, that cluster of high-rise condos at the mouth of the Miami River, the ones with the huge statue of the Tequesta-tribe guy blowing a Queen Conch – the shell, not a Key West transvestite. But my mythical island, Te Cuesta Isle, lies between the Venetian Islands and the Julia Tuttle Causeway in upper Biscayne Bay, just off South Beach. In the mid-‘90s, I had a friend from El Salvador I worked with in “The Dungeon,” the ground-ops room for an airline at MIA; he had me laughing when he came into that dark room one day shouting, “Te Cuesta! It’s gonna cost me!” – an appropriate name and place en español for my SoBe Boatees to live.

So your island doesn’t exist?

Been nothing but an oval of pilings poking out of the shallow water since the late 1920s. I lived for a decade in a marina off South Beach and many evenings I’d look west to the sunset with a glass of Chilean Malbec in hand and see that circle of posts protruding in silhouette on the bay. And I sailed by them every time I went out on the boat. For the book, I simply dredged the nearby muck and plopped it down within those posts – the same way that Star, Palm, the Venetians, the Sunsets and all those other islands were created.

The characters are based on past and present marina neighbors? Is there a Blackie and Dani?

They are all composite characters. I’ve kept logs, journals and character sketches of many of the incidents and sailors encountered at the dock and while sailing. After living aboard for more than 17 years at most every marina in Miami, I’ve met some interesting characters. There is something incredibly romantic and fascinating – even bizarre – about boat life and the people who are drawn into it.

Blackie’s a pilot, are you?

I work for an airline but I’m not a pilot; in fact, I’ve told several passengers at MIA that they’re quite fortunate that I’m not flying the plane. I’m like a kid when it comes to looking up to people in just a few professions, and their prestige and number are dwindling. So I still revere pilots, firemen and surprisingly doctors – even my urologist. In the book Blackie is Danish like me, but I made certain he wasn’t a ground-services agent at MIA like I am, or the readers, as passengers who’ve been forced to fly through MIA, would probably raise a hearty cheer if I had the character keel-hauled or “flogged ‘round the fleet.”

What about Dani?

Dani, another composite, physically resembles a woman – a model – who lived with her boyfriend on a boat one pier over from me at Sunset Harbor on South Beach. They were an incredibly nice couple. But her profile, though, is a composite of several female sailors I’ve known over the years.

And Yul?

We bought our first boat in Miami back in 1990, a Glander yawl. We woke up one day and were literally forced to live aboard at a marina at North Bay Village, after being victims of yet another Beach condo scam. In the slip next to us was a rotund, bald man – a retired cop from New York – on a canoe-stern cutter. When I had to leave town for a week, my wife and I were concerned about her being alone on the boat. I asked him to keep an eye on her and I remember him poking his head out of his companionway, holding up what looked like a .38-caliber handgun, and saying, “I hear one shout from her and I’ll come out shooting.” He became a favorite nautical neighbor – one of many over the years at Miami’s marinas.

Reading SoBe Boatees, one gets the feeling you don’t care too much for Miami.

Nothing could be further from the truth. My feelings are of sincere, heartfelt ambivalence. I love this place; I love to hate this place. And I should have copyrighted the slogan, “Miami is a beautiful city, but only from one’s stern.”

I took the Metrorail downtown to the Miami Book Fair in November of ’06 and was shocked by the upheaval caused by the condo construction. The number of condos being built in the downtown corridor is in the neighborhood of 50,000 to 70,000 units in a three year period – if the bust doesn’t come first. (They had built 10K units in the previous 10 years.) That’s nuts! The place is turning into what author Joel Kotkin has called an Ephemeral City, composed of “a cosmopolitan elite and a large class of low-wage service workers.” Miami becomes just another second-home winter playground for the out-of-town wealthy, with our major industry parking their car, feeding them lunch and wiping their --- (and not necessarily in that order.)

The scenario now looks and sounds uncannily like Miami before the 1925 land bust and 1926 hurricane. I’m keeping an eye out for dark clouds building on the horizon, cynic and pessimist that I am.

Who are your favorite writers, and what’s the genre?

I love nautical historical fiction. I’m a diehard Patrick O’Brian fan, having read every word he has written about the sea, even his pre-Aubrey novels. And what a character O’Brian was, including the charade surrounding his true identity. I’m also a big fan of two contemporary American writers, Richard Woodman and Dewey Lambdin. I love Lambdin’s books because his protagonist, Allan Lewrie, is by no means flawless. Some of the earlier writers of historical nautical fiction had rigid, upright protagonists that I tended to loathe by mid-series – if I had been a minor character in one of those novels, the protagonist would have mysteriously disappeared over the side by about the fifth or sixth book.

On the local front, I’m a big reader of most of the tropical mystery writers living and writing in South Florida: Carl Hiaasen, James W. Hall, Randy Wayne White, Les Standiford, and Edna Buchanan to name a few. I enjoyed both of Dave Barry’s novels immensely. And I’ll be honest: I wouldn’t put my nautical-niche book on the same shelf with theirs.

You hang with any of them?

I’ve never met a one of them with the exception of Carl Hiaasen; I checked him in at the airport a few years ago – what a nice guy. He wouldn’t recall it, but from my remembrance, I’m sure that he, too, was relieved that I’m not flying the plane. As a liveaboard, I’ve always been something of a loner, plus I don’t play an instrument, either, so I have no chance in a writer-band, although I’m considering taking up the xaphoon.

What’s on the horizon, word-wise?

Getting this book from rough draft to being bound and in my hand was a challenge. But I am writing two sequels to SoBe Boatees. Both involve Blackie Petersen, with much of the action taking place through the Out Islands of the Bahamas. I’m developing the character of Blackie Petersen in the sequels. I purposely did not delve too far into Blackie’s persona or past in the first book because, one, that was how Blackie, that “tight-assed pilot” (Dani’s words) wanted it, and two, my goal was to show how this sailor/pilot’s rigid routine can suddenly be shattered, and how he dealt with it. In truth, we knew much more about Dani than Blackie in SoBe Boatees; I’ve felt that she was the real protagonist of the novel. She does “float to the surface” in one of the next two books.

I’ve also been writing articles for sailing and travel magazines, trying to eek out a little extra income from writing. But I’ve had enough sense not to quit my day job.

The action of future books is on the water?

Mostly. My other passion besides sailing is wilderness hiking. We sail in winter and spring, but Debbie and I make at least three trips a year in summer and fall (aka hurricane season) to parks and wilderness areas out West or in the Canadian Rockies; it has helped to work for an airline. Last year we heli-hiked into Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park and hiked out. And I make an annual week-long backpack with a friend, Tony, from the day job. So the action for a few chapters in one book will take place at a couple of my favorite hiking spots.