May is here!

Suddenly, the 20 MPH winds that blew all April long have stopped. The trees and flags around the marina are sitting still and the tempurature has risen 10 degrees. There are boats everywhere! The sandbar is packed and the dolphin tournaments have started. Here are a couple of quick news items:

1. 2009 PBM Owner's Tournament - We are less than 30 days away from the big event! You guys better get your entries in ASAP. Remember, this year the tournament is in June (5-7) so you guys better get your boats ready now! The Key Largo Grande and the Lookout Lodge are offering reduced rates for tournament participants. Click on our tournament page each week for continued updates.

2. Rooms for the Bimini Shakedown are selling fast. We have 27 rooms booked as of 5/8/09. That leaves us with 4 rooms available.

3. Destination Plantation for May will be held May 30th. Come down on Saturday for some food and drinks and check out the awesome cars and bikes that are on display.

Now, some fun news.
First off, lets have a moment of silence for a dear friend of ours. Anyone who has been to our monthly Destination Plantation events knows that we purchased a giant blimp with our name on it. Every month at the event, we spend 2 hours inflating the monster blimp that is 20' long and 8 feet tall. We engineered a rope a pully system on the side of the building to launch this monster with. Well, looks like we planned for everything except the 20 MPH winds. During the April Destination Plantation, our blimp was flying high, proudly announcing our event to anyone within a 6 mile radius. Then, someone informed me that the blimp was missing! We ran outside and sure enough, there layed about 40' of rope with a frayed end. Someone spotted the blimp a second later and it looked to be about 500 feet above the highest cloud in the sky. That stupid blimp must have snapped the rope and gone into orbit. Maybe someone in Mexico will find it and call us to return it. If so, I'll have it washed down thoroughly to kill off the swine flu. So long to our dear friend the blimp.

Grove Slam dolphin tournament (May 2nd) I want to say thanks to all our friends who passed by to hang out at the Grove Slam. We ran a couple of 4100CC's during the weekend and had a good time up there. DJ Laz ran one of the boats and Dennis ran the other. Neither of them caught any fish, so not much to say here. We know how to throw a part though!

OK guys, that's it from my desk. Hope to see everyone down here for the Owner's Tournament in June!!!

Destination Plantation & PBM Owner's Tournament

Destination Plantation is approaching! April 25th, 2009


We are making preperations for our monthly car and bike show. This month, along with the clasic hot rods, exotic speedsters, custom choppers and sport bikes; we will be hosting some of the local Jeep clubs at our marina. Anyone and everyone is invited to attend. If you would like to show a car or bike at the show, send me an email at eddie@plantationboat.com

Plantation Boat Mart Owner's Tournament - June 5-7, 2009

We already have 30+ entries in house for this year's tournament. The Lookout Lodge and the Key Largo Grande will be offering discounted rates for anyone participating in the event. It looks like so far we have 5 of the past winners returning to fish this year. Cecil Everett on the 'Nuff Said won the event last year and is looking to become the first repeat winner in the 10 year history of this tournament. I know his crew and they are good fishermen, but I still bet that a first timer will win this tournament.

More news and notes:

With the hot weather and calm winds we have experience here over the past week, fishing reports are coming in HOT!!! The dolphin bite has been amazing off Isalmorada. Many of our friends have crossed to the Bahamas over the last week. Don't forget to send me pictures of your boat and all the fish!

I am looking for some good spear fishing pictures. If anyone has some good spear fishing pictures, please send them to me so I can start a spear fishing picture gallery.

Triplets update: Jesse, Jeremy and Jocelyn are doing great and hopefully, they will be at the tournament spectating the weigh in.

Don't forget, if you come to Destination Plantation and mention that you read our blog, you will get a free PBM t-shirt. See you guys soon.

Eddie

Spring Break in the South Florida

You know, when the weather starts getting hot and the winds start to die down it won't be long before the boating season is in full swing. There are already signs that the boating season is here. We have been re-filling our fuel tanks every week now. The service barn is full of 100 hour service boats. People are calling me to find out about our tournaments, parties and the Bimini Shakedown.

Well everyone, the return of day light savings time is here and with that, the boating season begins. We have been very busy here at PBM and at our sister store in West Palm Beach. The West Palm Boat Show has just wrapped up and we are very happy to welcome the new PBM/PBBM customers to our family. Steve Kent is getting ready to take delivery of his new 4100SF which he will be fishing in the SKA and FLW kingfish tournaments throughout the South-Eastern United States. His new 4100Sf is powered by triple Yamaha F350's and he is pulling this 26 thousand pound bad boy on a custom quad axle, goose neck trailer by Real Extreme Trailers. Look for his "Team White Trash" (what is with that name Steve?) at the nationals this year. Skip Petzold also took delivery of a beautiful new Hydra-Sports 3300CC with twin Yamaha F350's. That black hull color looks so rich in the water.

Speaking of shiny new fiberglass, its also time to get your boat dirty! The summer fishing season is here early. Almost everyone that has gone out recently has seen good numbers of dolphin and tuna. The small black fin tuna and skip jack tuna are showing up in schools on the edge between Key Largo and Marathon. They are easy to spot underneath the flocks of birds that accompany these fish schools. The dolphin are in all the usual places from 400-800 feet of water. Joey Panse aboard his 3300CC "It Ain't Easy" caught a cooler full of gaffers under some debris.

The Grove Slam Dolphin Tournament is coming up on May 3rd. Any Plantation Boat Mart customer wishing to participate can contact me for a reduced entry fee under our group entry.

The Tenth Annual PBM Owner's Fishing Tournament is coming up in June. You can register on our web site starting April 1st.

SATURDAY, APRIL 25TH
DESTINATION PLANTATION AT PLANTATION BOAT MART
We will be holding our monthly BBQ/car and chopper show on April 25th. We will also be selling fuel at a discounted rate, so whether you are cruising down by car, bike or boat; make sure you stop by PBM during our Destination Plantation party. As a special bonus, anyone who is reading this blog and comes to our Destination Plantation can find me and ask me about the new PBM t-shirts that are being designed right now. As a reward for reading our blog, I will mail you a free shirt when they come out, but you have to tell me you read the blog! Otherwise, no shirt for you!

Miscellaneous news:
*PBM has been the un-official boat dealer for the Miami Beach Police Department. I think we have more customers from MBPD than any other district. They are holding the MIami Beach Police & Fire Fighters Fishing Tournament on June 13th out of Miami Beach. Contact me for more information.
* For all of those who ask and send your well wishes, thank you very much. Myself and Monica are happy to announce that our triplets (Jesse, Jeremy and Jocelyn) are doing great and should be home from the hospital this week. They were born on February 16th at 2 pounds a piece, and are now just over 5 pounds and growing like weeds. I don't think mom will let me enter them into the junior division of this years tournament, but look out all you junior anglers for the 2010 PBM tournament!
* DJ Laz and Big Will from the Power 96 morning show will be fishing the Grove Slam and the Coconuts tournament this year. Maybe this year they will actually catch something other than a buzz. Their Hydra-Sports 3300CC is called OFFSHORE PIMP and is pretty hard to miss. That custom wrap is amazing!

That's it for now. I look forward to seeing everyone on the water soon.
Eddie

March 14, 2009

Spring fever has hit the Florida Keys! Maybe it's the great weather we have had lately; maybe it's the excitement of the up coming summer boating season or maybe it's the incentives and rebate programs from our manufacturers. Whatever the reason, we have been very busy delivering new boats to customer following the Miami International Boat Show. In the last 30 days we have delivered 26 boats (new and used) and are currently working on delivering a large number of boats this weekend and next. Here are a few stories on some of our newest PBM customer's:

Carlos Sanchez has been a long time Hydra-Sports owner here at PBM. After joining us during our last 2 Bimini Shakedowns, Carlos decided to trade in his 2006 2800CC and upgrade to a new 2900CC. Maybe now Carlos will actually make it to our events on time instead of his normal 2 to 3 hours late to everything!

Joe Gilbert, David White, Jamie Guillen, Tyler Garcia and Jorge Amador are some of our new PBM customers who recently took delivery of a 29' Hydra-Sports. Congratulations to everyone on their fine new boats and I look forward to seeing you guys at the PBM Owner's Tournament in June!

I would also like to welcome Lee Lavery to the PBM family. She is an avid fisher-woman who recently purchased a tricked out Hydra-Sports 3300CC with twin Yamaha 350FS. Her boat is highly customized with powder coated aluminum railings throughout the boat. We custom painted the motors to match the boat. It is a very cool looking boat!

Some news on our up-coming events:

*This month's Destination Plantation is March 21st. Coem by the marina to check out the cool cars, custom choppers and new boats.

*West Palm Boat Show starts March 26 and runs through March 30th.

*I am planning a raft up at a sand bar in N. Miami. I think we will do the sand bar at Haulover Inlet in the up coming weeks. I'll bring drinks and some free PBM stuff. The date will be anounce here next week, so keep checking in.

*Applications for the PBM Owner's Tournament will be on line starting next week. My goal is to break last years attendance record of 84 boats.

Once again, I look forward to seeing everyone of our customers at some point this year. We are planning great events and more of them, so there are no excuses for not joining in.

Until next time,
Eddie

Welcome to the new blog!

I would like to welcome you all to the new PBM blog. I will try to keep everyone up to date with the happenings and events here at Plantation Boat Mart.

This week we celebrated another great Miami Boat Show. We displayed 17 boats at the show including several of the new 4100CC's. The weather was perfect all weekend and we had the boats running all weekend long. While traffic at the show was off as everyone knows, we were please with the results and are excited to welcome several new customers to the Plantation Boatr Mart family. It looks like we will have several new faces at the PBM owner's tournament in June and at the Bimini Shakedown in July. We delivered 9 new boats between Friday (2/20) and Saturday (2/21).

Jorge Fernandez took delivery of his new 3300CC this weekend. We ran the boat up to Key Biscayne for him on Sunday and man does he have a nice boat!

I also want to say thank you to our friends at Maroone Chevrolet for getting us our new luxury suburbans in time for the boat show. They were SWEET and our clients enjoyed being shuttled around the show in style.

We also hosted our monthly Destination Plantation party on Saturday. It is part car show, part custom chopper show, part boat show and all about having fun and celebrating the fun lifestyle that makes boating special.

To round out what is already the busiest time of the year for us (boat show weekend) I personally had my own excitement. On Monday (2/16) during the last day of the Miami Boat Show, Monica (my pregnant wife) called me that she was heading to the hospital because of a high blood pressure reading. That high blood pressure reading turned out to be a complication that required the delivery of our triplets that night. At 6:37 PM, Jesse took his first breath, followed 1 minute behind by his sister Jocelyn and 1 minute later by brother Jeremy. As of today everyone is doing fine. The kids were born at 29 weeks, 3 days and weighed almost 3 pounds a piece. I promptly decorated each one of their incubators with a UM blanket so their would be no confusion which school to root for later on. I would like to thank everyone who called and emailed during the past week. It has been very exciting!

OK guys, keep checking this site for more news and information. If you have any questions or comments, please emial me at eddie@plantationboat.com

Last Day Of Freedom! I'm Gonna Miss Er! - Fishing Tournament

Friday December 26th 2008 - What a great time!