John Losey
There are things you can’t measure in dollars and cents.
For fishing-boat captain John Losey, those things are found 60 miles off the Volusia County coast. That’s where the 35-year-old Deltona man finds happiness among sun-dappled waves and big-game fish.
“Being out there in the ocean where nobody can bother you, it’s real peaceful,” he said.
Losey has been taking tourists deep-sea fishing for six years. He works up to 14 hours a day — not for the money, but because he loves being a mariner and teaching others how to fish. Unlike others who have found riches on Florida’s coast, Losey found sunsets, peace and tranquillity, which no growth report can analyze.
“The money is good for the summertime. But the rest of the year, you have to save your pennies for the winter,” said Losey, who earns about $30,000 annually plus tips. “The best part about the job is watching the kids catch the fish.”
Losey works out of Ponce Inlet, where his company’s boat is docked. But he wasn’t always close to the sea.
More than 14 years ago, he was living among cornfields and pastureland in tiny Cincinnati, Iowa. Tired of the Midwest, he packed his bags in 1992 and moved to Deltona, where his grandmother lived.
He began working as a mechanic, but Losey found his true calling during a fishing trip four years later.
Nowadays, his job is to make sure tourists and anyone else willing to spend at least $500 to charter his company’s boat are able to catch grouper, snapper, king mackerel, amberjack and other fish.
Felix Amon
Felix Amon found his gold mine on Volusia County’s coast.
While others were reeling from the recession of the early 1990s, Amon was busy playing Monopoly. During a business trip to Daytona Beach in 1992, the Austrian-born investor bought 36 single-family homes in several coastal cities. During the succeeding years, he snatched up apartments, strip malls and office complexes.
“It was dirt cheap,” the 46-year-old said. “I felt it was going to make me really, really rich.”
He was right. The economy rebounded and boosted real-estate prices, making Amon a multimillionaire during a period when Florida’s coastal economy grew faster than the rest of the country.
“I played Monopoly, and it paid off big time,” said Amon, who lives in Wilbur-by-the-Sea. “It was a great feeling.”
At the time, Amon was working in the pharmaceutical industry in New York City. But he knew there was more money to be had if he moved to Volusia.
“I had to dedicate my full time to real estate,” he said. “The market was hot.”
In 1999, he set up shop in Daytona Beach and became a developer. Since then, his company, Amon Investments LLC, has worked on 15 projects, stretching from Volusia to Tampa Bay. Some of them are completed, while others are in the planning stages.
In South Daytona, the company helped build two condominium high-rises along the Halifax River, which hold more than 1,000 units. In Orange County, Amon helped build 134 luxury condos near Walt Disney World.
In Tampa, Amon plans to build two 625-foot-tall high-rises downtown. The skyscrapers, which will have residential and commercial space, will cost more than $1.5 billion to build.
It’s safe to say the coastal economy has helped Amon make it.
“It made me rich and happy,” he said.
Vered Cohen
Vered Cohen enjoys selling merchandise and talking to people from around the world.
You can see her doing that almost every day in a large gift shop on State Road A1A, a block from the ocean in Daytona Beach.
Not only are the tourists interesting, but most of them are friendly, she said.
“You are on vacation; you are in a good mood,” said the 34-year-old sales associate at Maui Style Sportswear. “I like to joke around with them.”
Since 1993, Cohen has been selling everything from T-shirts to shot glasses to visitors at the beachside store, which her husband owns. Coastal tourism exploded during this period, contributing to Florida’s remarkable shoreline growth.
Cohen, who was born in Israel, moved to Montreal as a little girl before she moved to Daytona Beach to live with her husband.
At the store, she can be seen straightening merchandise, smoking cigarettes, listening to tunes on XM Satellite Radio and helping inquisitive customers. Many of them flood the store during Daytona’s special events, buying popular items such as bikinis and T-shirts with the city’s name or funny sayings on them.
Business is booming most of the year, she said, except from October to January. Like other stores that sit in the shadow of behemoth hotels, Maui Style is in a competitive place where a plethora of vendors compete for the tourist dollar. The store uses merchandise that ranges from a $1.99 pen to a $150 NASCAR jacket to lure sunburned visitors off the street.
“Competition is good,” Cohen said, because “if you are the only one on the strip, who is going to come to you?”
Greg Gordon
The ocean is Greg Gordon’s playground, his gym, his sanctuary.
So when casino boats began dumping sewage into his favorite place, he got mad.
As a member of the Sebastian Inlet chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, Gordon, 34, began protesting the gaming ships that, he says, release wastewater into the sea. Ocean pollution, experts say, is a byproduct of economic growth.
“Negligently dumping millions of gallons of sewage each year, even if it’s treated with chlorine, is a bad idea,” Gordon said. “It is bad for tourism, it is bad for divers, bad for surfers, bad for fishermen [and] bad for beachgoers.”
A surfer, Gordon spends a lot of time in the ocean. The Cocoa Beach teacher moved to Brevard County in 1994 from Virginia Beach.
“I could never live far from it [the ocean],” he said. “However, I want to teach those that don’t live anywhere near the ocean and that don’t care about the beach that it is still important to stop ocean polluters.”
Cruise ships and gaming boats dump sewage legally more than three miles offshore. The difference, Gordon said, is that many cruise ships have advanced treatment facilities that make sewage less harmful to the environment.
He’s trying to get gaming ships to upgrade their systems.
In September, the Surfriders protested the dumping by paddling out to the end of the jetty as the gaming boats left Port Canaveral.
“Kids may one day want to see a dolphin or sea turtle in the wild and not just at SeaWorld,” he said.
