The real (or rest of it) story... in Jim Burg’s words...

In the summer of 2000 while vacationing on my family’s ranch in Wyoming, I got a call that the owners of Capt. Paul’s Landing (formally Capt. Cal’s Bait and Tackle) were looking to sell the property located at the end of Love Street on the Jupiter Inlet. Ironically my dad and I used to buy bait there when snook fishing in the inlet and he had once discussed buying the place.

As soon as I got home, I went straight there. Pulling into the parking lot I was taken aback, as it wasn’t what I remembered. All I could see was trash, abandoned boats, dilapidated sheds and a thick forest of exotic plants and trees. The beautiful neon blue water of the incoming tide could not be seen until you made your way through the bait shop and onto the back deck. By the end of the day I had arranged the purchase of the property for $1,050,000 and we closed the deal on September 8, 2000.

From that first day, people always suggested I put in a bar and restaurant. One Sunday afternoon while sitting at the outdoor bar at the Crab House, I found myself gazing out toward the ocean. After realizing I had to look over my property just to see the inlet and receiving a $100 bar tab, I knew right then and there what I was going to do, build a bar of my own. My friends and I went to work that day, in the summer of 2002.

It became a labor of love. Up to that point all I had done was put in a deck and a new seawall, yet left everything else pretty much the way I bought it. So we cleaned up, added an old keg cooler, second hand chairs and televisions. It was like having an adult tree fort, we just put cash in a bucket for a beer and when the beer ran out we took the bucket and went and got another keg. Other people began to just show up and asked if they could buy a beer, the answer was just “put some cash in the bucket and help yourself.” During the college bowl season I knew something was getting going when I stopped watching a game and realized there were nearly fifty people hanging out. Its time for a cash register I thought. The first day the bar officially opened was Super Bowl Sunday January 26, 2003 with Tampa Bay beating Oakland 48 to 21.