Jimmy Johnson rebuilds his paradise

The electricity returned in a week. The sand filling the pool was hand-shoveled out in three weeks. The docks, destroyed by Hurricane Irma’s seven-foot storm surge, were rebuilt within two months.

“I still have to be careful [boating] out of the marina, because the water hasn’t been cleared of everything,” Jimmy Johnson says.

The seven doors destroyed by the surge were replaced. The salt-water pond filled in. The big tiki hut, its thick poles shattered by Irma, was junked.

“We had to go get a new one,” the former Hurricanes and Dolphins coach says.

Here we are, approaching six months after Irma, and life has returned to a functional state of normal for Jimmy at his six-acre, ocean-side paradise in Tavernier, meaning the same can also be said for most of the Upper Keys.

“I know I’m one of the lucky ones,” he says. “I could afford it. But the Keys — the Upper Keys — are mostly doing fine now, I know, because it’s February and March and there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic.”

Added proof of Irma’s fading aftermath comes with his $1.5 million fishing tournament, the seventh annual, “Quest for the Ring,” next week that brought him to the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood for a kick-off party.

He talked of the Dolphins trade talk with Jarvis Landry (“He’s one of my favorites — I’d keep him”) and new addition, defensive end Robert Quinn (“He’s a good one”). He talked of the charity component of the tournament going in part to Tranquil Shores, a rehabilitation clinic run by his son, Chad, a recovered addict.

He also talked of these past months of rebuilding the slice of paradise he bought