I will see you on the sandbar this summer.

More on JetLev here.

A good friend up in NYC connected me with the reporter who wrote this article. She seemed amazed that I wear flip flops to the office once in a while. My response was basically summarized in that final quote below.

Cale Smith realized he had to change his style four years ago when he moved from Washington to the Florida Keys. The self-described “yuppie workaholic” brought along his wardrobe of dress pants and button-down shirts and immediately felt out of place.

“People gave me odd looks and thought I was a salesman,” said Mr. Smith, who is the managing partner of Islamorada Investment Management, where he manages two portfolios totaling $7 million in assets.

To fit in with his clientele, Mr. Smith changed his wardrobe to the more casual Keys style and sometimes even wears blue jeans and flip-flops to the office.

“If someone can show me the correlation between wearing a suit every day and portfolio returns, I’d be happy to wear a suit — despite the odd looks I’d get around town,” he said. “Around here, everyone is focused on performance, and that is all that matters.”

Wearing flip flops to the office is not always a conscious choice. I work a lot. I wear flip flops a lot. The two are not mutually exclusive. Plus, you just can’t buy socks anywhere in Islamorada. Seriously. Nobody sells them.

I think baseball legend Ted Williams summed up my position on this issue the best:

“I’ve found that you don’t need to wear a necktie if you can hit.”

Kelli’s a veteran Realtor with Freewheeler. You can reach her at 305-240-0573, on FaceBook (Kelli Brower & Candi Graves, Florida Keys Realtors) and on Twitter, too: @Flkeyshomes. She’s also a huge force when it comes to helping kids in the Keys – so she deserves even more unsolicited plugs for her business.

Though I’m not a real estate investor, an undervalued asset is an undervalued asset and – look away, subprime condo flippers! – there appear to be some pretty good deals on homes and commercial properties in town. More important for the local economy, though, is that our housing inventory appears to be starting to clear – so I must not be the only one seeing those deals.

And the new Cheeca is gorgeous…

View from the new Cheeca Lodge

If you ever have the opportunity, jump on it. This video doesn’t begin to do it justice, but it is amazing – even before you get to see the gators.

And remember in “Crocodile Dundee” when he hypnotizes that water buffalo in the road? Anyone?

Well, it works on gators, too.

Thanks to the federal tax credit to buy high-mileage cars that was part of President Obama’s stimulus plan, Uncle Sam is now paying Americans to buy that great necessity of modern life, the golf cart.

The federal credit provides from $4,200 to $5,500 for the purchase of an electric vehicle, and when it is combined with similar incentive plans in many states the tax credits can pay for nearly the entire cost of a golf cart. Even in states that don’t have their own tax rebate plans, the federal credit is generous enough to pay for half or even two-thirds of the average sticker price of a cart, which is typically in the range of $8,000 to $10,000. “The purchase of some models could be absolutely free,” Roger Gaddis of Ada Electric Cars in Oklahoma said earlier this year. “Is that about the coolest thing you’ve ever heard?”

The golf-cart boom has followed an IRS ruling that golf carts qualify for the electric-car credit as long as they are also road worthy. These qualifying golf carts are essentially the same as normal golf carts save for adding some safety features, such as side and rearview mirrors and three-point seat belts. They typically can go 15 to 25 miles per hour.

In South Carolina, sales of these carts have been soaring as dealerships alert customers to Uncle Sam’s giveaway. “The Golf Cart Man” in the Villages of Lady Lake, Florida is running a banner online ad that declares: “GET A FREE GOLF CART. Or make $2,000 doing absolutely nothing!”

Golf Cart Man is referring to his offer in which you can buy the cart for $8,000, get a $5,300 tax credit off your 2009 income tax, lease it back for $100 a month for 27 months, at which point Golf Cart Man will buy back the cart for $2,000. “This means you own a free Golf Cart or made $2,000 cash doing absolutely nothing!!!” You can’t blame a guy for exploiting loopholes that Congress offers.

The IRS has also ruled that there’s no limit to how many electric cars an individual can buy, so some enterprising profiteers are stocking up on multiple carts while the federal credit lasts, in order to resell them at a profit later. We should note that some states, such as Oklahoma, have caught on to the giveaway and are debating whether to cancel or limit their state credits. But in Congress they’re still on the driving range.

Found it posted on the blog of Islamorada local and Outcome Labs head honcho John Fleming, @JohnFleming, who picked it up from FishMonsterMedia and @KeysTreasures.

Brilliant. Thanks to all for sharing.

Saralyn and her partner came in second. Then they got to meet Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre, better known as the Prince of Monaco. That’s him in the third picture below.

Watch that hand, Prince.

And here’s more about my lil sis.

Starting to get cool up north, eh? Come on. Go ahead and peak.

In a nutshell: overseas highway, pirates, margaritas, black powder cannons and that special kind of burlesque that can only be found in Key West. Plus, bugs. This kind, I mean.

Here’s the promo:

If you’ve never been to the Keys before, a note on ordering beverages:

Corona is a fine beer, but let’s not confuse it with something that men drink. That would be more like Kalik, brewed in Nassau.

It was once explained to me that Kalik was popular in the Keys because of the Bahamian Conchs who originally settled here, but I suspect it also might be because it’s just an excellent kind-of-local beer. And it’s pronounced Ka-LICK, like the sound an old cowbell makes when it’s rung. (Thus the cowbells in the logo.)

Here’s a great story from a Canadian gentleman desperate for some Kalik.

And stout fans may not know that in the Caribbean there is actually a third type of Guinness – Foreign Extra Stout. To make sure the beer would hold up well when shipped long distances around the world, brewers back in the day added extra hops and brewed it longer. As a consequence, it had a higher alcohol content. Still does, despite modern transport. Read into that whatever you may.

Other Caribbean beers: Piton from St. Lucia, Carib from Trinidad and Tobago, and of course Red Stripe from Jamaica. Aruba makes a local beer called Balashi that is supposed to be pretty good, too.

And ya can’t plug micro brews in Islamorada without mentioning The Trading Post. Across the street, Morada Bay has Stella Artois on tap. And although it’s not actually brewed in the Keys, Key West Sunset Ale isn’t half-bad, either.

See there? Sitting around reading annual reports has other benefits, too…

Gorgeous boat, great crew. Then there was the tropical breeze, perfect music and cold beer…plus dolphins, a black powder cannon, some truly impressive shiphandling and – most important – mounds of free jelly beans for the kids. I should do a commerical.

Their website is www.calypsosailing.com. The clip below doesn’t do it justice…I’m sort of the anti-Coppola behind a camera. But here’s another vid for the jet ski crowd, a future postcard, and a clip of her off Sunset Key the day before, too.

Yeah. I’ll stick to investing.

Tarpon on Fly Rod

Leaping Tarpon

Down the Hatch

Captain Ted Wilson and geek Cale Smith.

Here’s a video of the above, another of the tarpon leaping, and Ted where he’s most at home. Also, from the bow of Ted’s skiff, running through the mangroves.

Ted’s site is http://www.captaintedwilson.com, and you can read more about the silver king here.

And, yep, he swam away just fine.