There are only six days until the Florida Powerboat Club’s annual Key West Poker Run! Read more below for awesome facts about the Key West Poker Run!
Just six days from now, the first wave of high-performance V-bottoms, catamarans and center consoles will depart Miami and Coconut Grove bound for Key West in the Florida Powerboat’s annual Key West Poker Run. Another larger wave of go-fast boats will depart the following morning and by the time they arrive there should be more than 150 FPC-organized vessels docked in various marinas in the nation’s Southernmost City. And for the next three days, the party—make that parties—will rage.
Of course, the next six days will find Stu Jones, the founder and owner of the Florida Powerboat Club based in Pompano Beach, Fla., in various mental states ranging from anxious to elated. That Jones has organized the event since 1993 makes some elements of doing it again “routine,” but there are always last-minute details and surprises of pleasant and unpleasant kinds that add gray hairs to the transplanted Canadian’s head.
Chatting with Jones yesterday to see how things were shaping up for this year’s event, I realized that despite covering the Key West Poker Run many times since 1995 that there’s a whole lot I don’t know about it. So I asked him a bunch of random and not-so-random questions. What follows are his answers.
Most Prolific Participant: Mark Fischer of Boats Direct USA
“I don’t know if anybody else even comes close. Since he joined the club in 2000, he has done every one of them. We have a lot of members who only do the Key West Poker Run, but by far Mark Fischer has done it the most.”
Longest-Running Sponsor: Nor-Tech
“Nor-Tech started with us in 1996 and they pretty much haven’t left. They have been a rock. In fact, I think they might be celebrating their 20th anniversary as a sponsor with us this year.”
Largest Fleet: 200-Plus Boats
“In 2007 and 2008—those were big years for us—we had more than 200 boats and it really wasn’t ‘too much.’ Key West has this amazing way of absorbing boats and people. Back then, it was easier because the City Marine was letting me run the show and they would make great money from it. One 40-foot dock space would have four boats rafted up in it, which meant something like 160 feet of dockage revenue. There were places where we had them in there eight deep.”
Smallest Fleet: 22 Boats
“In 1993, our first year, we had 22 boats. It was a Sonic event that had started as an owners’ rendezvous. I was hired to run it by the new owners [of Sonic]. We didn’t call it the Key West Poker Run. We called it the Key West Rally. We would stay in Marathon and boat down to Key West for the offshore race days.”
CLICK HERE to read more
This article is originally posted to Offshoreonly.com.