Patrick Mansell

After graduating from the University of Miami in 1968, for a while I split my time between my career in business and service in the Marine Corps Reserve. The Marines had me for six years, the business world captured me for forty-two. I began writing full length books in about 1998 as a hobby and then turned it into a full time project when I retired in 2012.

While I always wrote for my business, contracts, business proposals, and the million other things a CEO has to do, I never really got to write for pleasure very much. Since 1998 I have been writing novels and non fiction pieces. Just as so many people of my generation grew up, I was fed a diet of some pretty boring stuff that made me shy away from reading at all. So I decided to see if I could inspire people to read by supplying them with literature that has quick moving action and adventure, but with none of the gratuitous violence, profanity, or sexual situations. I started by writing a series of adventure novels set in the Bahamas, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Florida Keys entitled The Bimini Twist Adventures. There are six books in that series that has become very poplar, and many thousands of those books have been sold. I created these books that are wholesome reading, books that you do not have to be shy about lending to a child or a grandparent. And that's the reputation that The Bimini Twist Adventures enjoys. I have categorized all my sport fishing books in a group I all the Bimini Twist library.

After those adventure books were published I got more serious about my writing and began writing strictly non-fiction. I wrote a collection of exciting stories as told by some of the greatest big game fishermen in the world (Living Legends of Big Game Fishing), and five books on the biography of a giant in the sport fishing world, The Bouncer Smith Chronicles. A recent addition to this library is the story of the history of Bud n' Mary's Marina in Islamorada, Florida Keys. Bud n' Mary's is the center of the universe for sport fishing in what has been called The Sport Fishing Capitol of the World. In a similar vein, I have recently completed what I believe may be one of my best non-fiction books. I spent two years writing the history of Enrique's Dock in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Isla Mujeres lies off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula and is in the path of one of the greatest migrations of pelagic fish in the world. Sportsmen and women from all over the world come to Isla because the waters are so fertile with big game fish. And an interesting aspect of fishing in Isla is how well protected the waters are. As the Lima family developed that island, it did so with conservation in mind. Thus the fishery has been preserved which gives the sportsmen and women who come so many more chances to hook up (and release) their catches.

I have also written three books in the genre of criminal justice. Readers' feedback about these books has been excellent and I'm not certain that there won't be more of these books to follow. The characters I have written about have done time in prison and been through the criminal justice system from beginning to end. And some of their stories are real eye openers with a view into that world that many may have a hard time understanding or believing. But the stories are true based on hundreds of hours of research and interviews with men who have gone through the system. And the conclusion is that the US criminal system is flawed and badly in need of an overhaul.

I am translating a number of my books into Spanish. I want to increase by books' exposure while at the same time practice new languages. It keeps my mind healthy and alert. After I have done perhaps ten or a dozen translations, I think I might try to do it again in French. We'll have to see about that.