“The story told the history of an unusual houseboat that had been seized in a drug bust. The boat consisted of an aircraft fuselage sitting on a narrow hull. In the newspaper photo, it was tied up at the Coast Guard Dock on Government Cut. It had been seized in a marijuana raid several months before and was due to be auctioned off that afternoon. The story went on to describe the strange craft. The fuselage was from an old Boeing 307 that had been built before World War II as Howard Hughes’s private plane.
“Hughes had flown the plane only five hundred hours. He had intended to take it around the world, but the war came along, and the plane was retired to a remote tract of the Miami airport known as ‘corrosion corner’. It sat there for fifteen years until it was bought and turned into a private yacht by an eccentric entrepreneur who died before he ever set foot on the bizarre boat, and a series of owners bad come and gone after him.
“… At the end of the day … she was the owner of strangest boat in the Caribbean. She promptly named it the Cosmic Muffin. It was all the rocket ship Desdemona could afford at the time, and she wondered how it would ever fly, but she trusted her instincts the same way she trusted the stars.”
From Where is Joe Merchant? — by Jimmy Buffett, page 77
