LONG SLEEVE Albion Inn Tee

There was a time—before fiberglass hulls, before fish finders and bilge alarms—that the storms blew harder, the fish bit deeper, and the stories swelled taller with each pour of The Albion Inn Keep's home brew.

You’d hear them there, those men of salt and bone, bellied up to long-dead cypress tables, sleeves rolled, hands nicked and calloused from net and gaff. They’d howl with laughter and slap each other’s backs with enough force to shake barnacles off a piling. “She was twelve foot long, red as a barn fire, and meaner than my ex-wife!” someone would shout, talking about a grouper like it was a demon outta the Gulf. And nobody’d question it—not because they believed it, but because Cortez ain’t a place that punishes liars, only boring ones.

The Albion Inn had a smell to it—stone crab legs boiled in seawater, Gulf breeze through open shutters, and that bootlegged brew Joe cooked up in the ’20s that could damn near power a shrimp boat. The place had the first telephone in town, but word still traveled faster on the breeze. And the girls? They came not for the fish, but for the music crackling out of the Guthries’ radio—the first radio in Cortez. They danced barefoot on pine floors still damp from salt-footed fishermen tracking in stories.

Twenty-four rooms, all filled with fishhooks, ambition, and the laughter of men who braved the sea and came back to lie about it. Joe’s boats would take ‘em out to chase tarpon, kingfish, and whatever monster the tide coughed up that week. And when they returned, sunbitten and half-drunk on adrenaline, they’d sit on that veranda, twist open a beer or whatever Joe had bottled in the shed, and talk like gods returned from war.

This shirt—this briny relic—was forged in honor of that place. It smells of salt, old wood, and half-true tales that’ll outlive the men who told ’em. The Albion Inn may be gone, but its spirit hasn’t shut up. It lives on in every back-slapping tale told at dock’s edge, every red-eyed morning on the Gulf, and every Cortez soul with sea legs and a taste for the fantastic.