Every yacht club has a home port. Ours started as a single cove, a family, and a question we couldn’t stop asking — one that grew into a name for a community that had been out there all along, just waiting for a flag.
A Story That Stuck
In June 2014, on our annual trip to the beaches of Highway 30A, a relative who’d managed the Spinnaker Beach Club in Panama City told us the story of how country star John Rich built his company, Redneck Riviera, on a Gulf Coast nickname. He simply asked the question, “Who owns Redneck Riviera?” The answer was simple: nobody ever owned it. The story stuck with us.
Our Own Cove
We already had a cove of our own. Just outside of Annapolis, boaters have called it “Cocktail Cove” for as long as anyone can remember — boat access only, where friends raft up as the afternoon burns to evening. One afternoon the question surfaced: who owns “Cocktail Cove”? We already knew — nobody.
The Coincidence That Sealed It
That might have stayed a nice thought if not for a 2017 trip to Lake Champlain. We headed out on a friend’s boat for the afternoon. I asked where we were off to... the captain said, “It’s like Cocktail Cove in Annapolis. This is our Cocktail Cove.” Hundreds of miles from home, someone had landed on the exact same name — proof, not coincidence. That week, we filed a federal EIN and began pursuing trademark protection.
Flying the Flag
By late July 2017, we had a flag made, carried it to the British Virgin Islands, flew it on the bow of our 51-foot power catamaran, and packed hats, shirts, and tumblers to match. It felt less like marketing and more like instinct — the idea was born on the water, so that’s where we took it first.
Putting the Brand to the Test
We didn’t stop there. In the years after, we flew the flag through the U.S. Virgin Islands, Block Island, Newport, the Chesapeake, and southern Florida. The reaction was always the same: someone would ask the common question, “Where’s Cocktail Cove?” Our reply was simple: “It’s everywhere. Where’s yours?” The replies were consistent: “Oh yeah... I get it.” By 2025, one family had grown into a full crew — eighteen of us returned to the BVIs for the “Cocktail Cove BVI Invasion,” eight years after flying the flag there first.
A Feeling Bigger Than One Shoreline
We kept telling the story because it kept proving true. “Cocktail Cove” is one of the most naturally recurring names on the water, some officially but most locally adopted. They are everywhere: Annapolis, MD on the Chesapeake; Great Mystery Island and The Spit in Massachusetts; Lake Champlain; Jewell Island in Maine; and Lake Lanier in Georgia has one too, well-known enough that the Zac Brown Band named it in their 2024 single “Tie Up.”1 Songwriters have chased the same feeling for decades, from Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”2 to Alan Jackson and Buffett’s “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”3 to Kenny Chesney’s “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems.”4 Different artists, different coves — always the same instinct. This was never just our nickname; it was already something bigger. Those songs and that vibe resonate with so many who cherish their time on the water, and those are the people who make up the Cocktail Cove Yacht Club.
Owning the rights to a phrase so widely and independently loved turned out to be its own fight — the same one John Rich waged over “Redneck Riviera.”5 So the brand grew into something that fits better: we became the Cocktail Cove Yacht Club. This was never about one cove or one lake — it was always about the people, a scattered community who tie up and raft up the same way whether in Annapolis, on Lake Lanier, or wherever the anchor drops next. In 2026, we moved the company from Maryland to Florida — a fitting home for a brand never about one shoreline. This website is our platform for bringing that community together.
Where We’re Headed
Our growth model starts with people, not products. The gear in this story was never an afterthought — the tumblers and koozies at that first cove, the hats and shirts we packed for the BVIs, the towels drying on the rail. Every cove encounter feels like its own college gameday. It’s the same gear we build now, just made official: drinkware and barware for the raft-up, towels and blankets for the sandbar, apparel to fly the flag on, and even gear for those best-in-class dock bars.
Down the road, members will share their own cove photos and videos and run friendly competitions — best cocktail recipe, best-decorated boat, biggest raft-up — with the community watching and joining in.
We started this because a question stuck with us after that 2014 trip: who owns this feeling? Nobody does. It belongs to everyone who’s ever tied up and stayed a while.