Bahia Mar, Where Travis McGee Docked
Near Fort Lauderdale, Florida
At the Bahia Mar marina, where the yachts crowd in beside the beach, there is a berth famous in the world of fiction. This was the home of Travis McGee, the beach bum philosopher and self described salvage consultant invented by the novelist John D. MacDonald.
McGee lived aboard a fifty two foot houseboat he called the Busted Flush, which he claimed to have won in a poker game, and he kept her tied up at Slip F eighteen right here at Bahia Mar. MacDonald launched the character in nineteen sixty four with the novel The Deep Blue Good by, and he wrote twenty one McGee books in all, each one with a color woven into its title. The books made Fort Lauderdale, its canals and marinas and sun bleached scoundrels, into a literary landscape read around the world.
In February of nineteen eighty seven, the year after MacDonald died, the Friends of Libraries U.S.A.
dedicated Slip F eighteen as an official literary landmark, marking it with a bronze plaque. There is a fine irony in it. The slip began as a fictional address, and the real world later arranged a plaque to match.
