Jay’s Sandbar gets outpouring of help after popular food boat capsizes
Owner vows his business will recover
FORT LAUDERDALE — This popular, waterborne restaurant once delighted passers-by as it traveled across South Florida’s waterways — adrift with the smell of jalapeño, basil, garlic and other mouthwatering spices. But the vessel instead sat on its side in 4 feet of water Wednesday, only smelling of saltwater, rotten food and sweat.
The Jay’s Sandbar Food Boat stirred a spectacle Sunday when one of its pontoons detached from the boat and it ran aground at the sandbar in the Intracoastal Waterway in Fort Lauderdale, tipping over.
On Wednesday, the boat’s owner and chef Jeremy ‘Jay’ Lycke joined a handful of volunteers to salvage and clean up what they could from the accident site, vowing to recover.
“We’re out here demolishing the Sandbar,” Lycke said Wednesday. “It got destroyed and it sunk so now we have to remove it so it doesn’t affect the waterway and take away from its beauty. It’s a shipwreck. We can’t leave it there. There’s no way in hell.”
No one on board was hurt when it sank Sunday, but Lycke said it was a “total loss.”
Lycke built his boat over a three-month period in 2017 with his life savings, he said. Since then, he’s served baconwrapped jalapeño bites, calamari, clam nachos and other delectable dishes from his boat, which he’d anchor in the Intracoastal Waterway near the Fort Lauderdale Yacht Club.
He and his workers would cook and sell 150 meals per day, he said. People could even bring fish they caught that day and he’d cook it up for them. The popular floating food spot had become an institution.
By 9 a.m. Wednesday, about a dozen people were pulling nails out of the hull and a refrigerator and microwave out of the boat’s kitchen.
More friends and volunteers were on their way, with several more trickling in on skiffs, fishing boats and inflatable dinghies as the morning turned to afternoon.
One of those people was Kyle Lajiness. He has known Lycke for five or six years and took a day off work from his engineering job to help the crew.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Lajiness said of hearing the news that the food boat sank. “I was out there the day before Mother’s Day. I jumped up on the boat with Jay and his girl and I said, ‘Make sure you clean up the boat so it doesn’t sink,’ and the next day it sank.”
Volunteers donned fishing gloves and waded in waist-deep waters as they took apart countertops on and around a small barge anchored adjacent to Lycke’s boat.
A winch on the barge was used to hoist up Lycke’s motor. One man stuck a pry-bar in his swim trunks as he went back and forth between boats.
Everyone there knew Lycke and seemed to know one another. He had cultivated a community of friends and customers over the years.
“These are all my customers and my friends. They’re more my friends than my customers,” Lycke said. “I just put the word out and everyone’s coming. If it was a Saturday, there’d be 200, 300 people, but people had to work today. A lot of these guys are taking off work to do this for me.”
Lycke would set up at the sandbar near the Fort Lauderdale Yacht Club with his boat every weekend. It was a “staple,” Lajiness said. “It’s just gonna be weird for the rest of the summer not having Jay’s Food Boat out there. It’s not gonna be the same. A lot of people expect it, a lot of people like to see Jay and he’s not gonna be out there. It’s gonna be weird.”
A GoFundMe campaign, begun in the hours after Jay’s Sandbar sank, had raised more than $8,500 by Wednesday afternoon. The goal is $85,000 toward removal and rebuilding.
“It took me 90 full days to build the Sandbar Food Boat and unfortunately, it’s a total bitter thing, tearing her apart,” Lycke said, before thanking the volunteers and GoFundMe donors. “We’ll be back. And I’ll be back.”
Austen Erblat can be reached at aerblat@sunsen tinel.com, 954-599-8709 or on Twitter @AustenErblat.