Extreme Polynesian Beach House is the way we describe our home on Jewfish Key in Florida and it's also the way we market it on the internet when we rent it on the occasions we're not there. www.extremepolynesianbeachhouse.com A more accurate description of the house is what my wife calls it, a "Glorified Treehouse".

You have to remember first of all that this is an island with no bridge to the mainland. My wife and I are boaters and I figured this was going to be like throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. "Oh Noooooo....don't make me go live on an island". Most days thats the case, but not always as I'll explain.

Although the house came furnished, and included a 24' Carolina skiff, we still had our own furniture and effects that we wanted with us in the home on the island. There were also upgrades that needed to be made like a new refrigerator and washer and dryer. The salt water environment makes the life expectancy of appliances and such much shorter there. I also had my eye on a 56" rear projection TV. Not the sleek slender high def models of today but a monster-of-a-case rear projection TV from the what-was-I-thinking era.

Moving and adding appliances and large TV's isn't much of a concern to those of you who can have a truck pull up in your driveway and offload said items. It's a much different set of logistics when you have to load these things in a boat and ferry them across the water and transport them into a house with a spiral entry staircase. Can you imagine the stares I got from fellow boaters as I was going across the water with a 56 inch monster TV in a 24 foot skiff? I got the same stares as I ferried the new refrigerator to the island. Even after getting the TV safely to the island it wouldn't go up the spiral staircase and I had to go and rent a lift, remove a section of railing from the lookout tower, and raise the TV twelve feet or so to two friends who grabbed it and quickly pulled it onto the tower deck.

 My wife's 11 year old son Byron had brought a friend along to help him transition to his new life on the island, and during the process of moving we needed a diversion for the boys to keep them occupied and out from under foot.  I had heard stories from some of the locals about burried treasure being located on the island.  Legend was that a man we'll call Junior, had been somewhat of a large independent marketing manager in the drug traffic during the 70's.  Junior owned the island of Jewfish Key and before he was incarcerated for these activities he had been rumored to have burried large sums of cash on the island.

While Junior was doing his time, his buddies had ransacked the island looking for the burried treasure.  We noticed a lot of depressions on the island and some were not so small.  I told Byron and his friend Leland about the burried treasure, and every morning the two would leave the house with a shovel and disappear all day.  The story worked like a charm.  It gave us time to do the work at hand and gave the two boys an adventure to remember.  They came home at night exhausted and fell asleep early.

Junior is a real person and is now out of prison.  Juniors girlfriend somehow ended up developing the island and owns one of the other homes on the island (there are only 4 homes total).  One day Junior pulled his houseboat up to our front dock and I was sitting there talking to him and decided to ask him about the rumored treasure.  Without hesitation he confirmed the existence of the burried money.  He had taken 6" PVC pipes and stuffed them with $125,000 in cash, capped them and burried them on the island.

I asked Junior how much cash he had burried at any given time and he told me that he had burried one and a quarter million dollars there at one point.  Of course I had to ask if he had recovered it all!  His reply was "to the best of my knowledge I got it all", but went on to say that he was occasionally drunk or otherwise incapacitated and couldn't be 100% sure.  Imagine the look on my face if those two boys had walked in the house carrying a large PVC pipe.

Day to day living on an island isn't such a bad thing if you have all you need and don't have to leave for anything. This was not the case when we moved to the island. I still had to work to support the lifestyle and Byron had to be at school at 8:00 am each day. I started a sign business in Sarasota, Florida because that's what I have done for 25 years and what I'm best at. www.RandyBroachSigns.com

Our day started early as it does for most people, but our day started with a one mile boat trip to our car on land. On nice days, and there are many of them in this part of Florida, the trip was a refreshing breeze-in-your-face start to the day. On other days it was a wet and nasty ride, and one memorable morning it was so foggy you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. I didn't have my GPS at that point and we set off to find our way to the car on land. I distinctly remember passing one channel marker six times as we drove the boat in circles. Then there was the day we went to leave the island and it was low low low tide. The boat was sitting at the dock on dry land and there was no way to move it by ourselves. We had to wait for the tide to rise and we were finally able to get Byron to school at 10:30 that morning. I'm sure he was the only kid at school that had a "legitimate" excuse that they were late to school because of low tide. Another day we were to leave for work and school and a large barge being pushed by a tugboat had run aground across our channel during a windy night. There are other instances, but as you see, it's not as easy as you may think.

There are no alligators on this island because it is surrounded by salt water, but there are plenty of other dangers. Florida is the lightning capital of the United States. On the coast of Florida many afternoons of the summer deliver afternoon thunderstorms. It was not unusual to arrive back at the marina, where we parked our car and left the skiff when we were on the mainland, to find an afternoon storm delivering its fury on the coastline. Many were the days we sat at the marina waiting for the last clap of thunder before we could get in the boat and make our way the mile across the water to the island.

With an array of things that could annoy you living on an island, my wife's biggest complaint is about groceries and trash. From her perspective she has to drive the car to the grocery store, buy the groceries, carry them to the car, drive to the marina, load the groceries in the boat, drive the boatr to the island, load the groceries in the dock cart, pull the cart to the house, and carry the groceries up the spiral stairway to the kitchen. Oh what she'd give for a driveway. Then the trash goes back out in similar fashion. OK Mr Robinson Crusoe.....how's this island living thing looking now?

Next time...more tales of Jewfish Key.