Our lawyer read the unopened 2019 letter over the phone, went quiet, and then said, Mrs, this is the whole case. This company admitted in writing, five years ago, that your husbands dock permit was permanent and valid. Now they are telling you it expired. That is not a mistake. That is a lie they signed.
Bubbas green tackle box on the top shelf of the bait shop held two things under the lures. First, a laminated letter from the Army Corps of Engineers, dated 2018, approving a permanent permit for the dock. Bubba never even told me. He just filed it and went back to work. So when the developer in boat shoes told me the permits expired after 2018, he was wrong on the one point that mattered. They never expired. They became permanent.
The second thing was an unopened envelope from the developers own company, dated 2019. Inside was their offer to buy Bubba out, and in it, in black and white, their own acknowledgment that he held a valid permanent Corps permit on the dock. They knew. Five years ago they put it in writing, and then they came to his widow and claimed the opposite.
He told me I was trespassing on state land. His own company had already admitted, in a letter Bubba never even bothered to open, that the dock was legally permitted forever.
A permanent federal permit is not expired because a yacht salesman says so, and a company that admitted the permit was valid in 2019 cannot claim it was void in 2024. The lawyer put both documents in front of them, and the luxury marina found another shoreline.
Bubba built the dock and the screened fish-cleaning station by hand and knew every bass fisherman in South Florida by name. He also quietly won this fight in 2018 and 2019 and never mentioned it, because that was Bubba, who fixed things and went back to work.
The camp is still open. The fishermen still come. Bubbas dock still stands on a permit that outlived him, and will outlive the man in the boat shoes too.