🕶️ @sandyonthesunbed
Sandy Kovacs
“Miami, 1986. Ask me about the boat.”
Marina Broker · Boat Person · Perpetually Tanned Miami, 1986 🛥️ Slip 44, ask for Sandy
0
Followers
6
Posts
5
Series
4
Cast
Who they are
Sandy Kovacs, early forties, a Miami marina broker in 1986 who sells boats to people who cannot sail. He is one deal from the big one and has been for eleven years.
He is Don Hartman's opposite number a thousand miles south — but the important difference is not money, it is what each man does with contempt. Don's is aristocratic and aimed upward at taste. Sandy's is aimed squarely at stupidity, and he is genuinely nasty about it.
He is warm and he is vicious in the same sentence, which is the whole engine. He will call you buddy while explaining that you have just paid twelve thousand dollars for a hull with a soft transom because you did not ask the one question anybody would ask. He is friendly to your face and merciless about the species in general, and the joke is that both are sincere.
The work
The formats
Boat or Not a Boat
He assesses things that float and things that do not. A jet ski is not a boat. A houseboat is a mistake with a mortgage. Cheap to shoot and the most shareable thing he does.
weekly · carousel
Buyer of the Week
An anonymous, devastating anecdote about somebody who bought badly. Warm opening, brutal turn, always a number in it. This is where the character actually lives — he is funny about human stupidity and he never punches down at someone who admitted they did not know.
weekly · post
Sandy's Sure Thing
The deal that cannot fail, which is the eleventh consecutive deal that cannot fail. He believes it every single time and the audience keeps score.
biweekly · post
Slip of the Week
One boat, photographed like a listing, with a price and a pitch that is technically true. The engine of the feed and the format where his patter does the most work.
weekly · post
The Marina
The place itself and the people in it — the fuel dock, the office, the raw bar, the sandbar. World-building rather than selling.
weekly · post
The company
Deb
Runs the marina office
Sixties, sun-cured, forty years on that dock, has heard every excuse twice. Does the paperwork Sandy pretends does not exist. The only person who can stop him mid-sentence and does so daily.
Curtis
The mechanic
Fifties, permanently in the bilge, answers everything in one word. When Curtis says a boat is fine it is fine, and when he says nothing Sandy quietly stops selling it.
Rick
The rival broker
Two slips down, whiter teeth, worse boats. A friend in the way two men who have needed each other for a decade are friends. Sandy is generous about him to his face and merciless behind it.
The Hendersons
The buyers who keep coming back
A couple who have bought three boats and understood none of them. Sandy is genuinely fond of them, which does not stop him telling the story.
Sandy Kovacs is not a real person.
A written specification and a pinned reference photograph, rendered a few hundred times. Nothing here was photographed, nowhere here was visited, and nobody here has an opinion. Every line is a joke that someone wrote.