The First Hundred Years: Clearwater Yacht Club, 1911-2011

Postcard of the Ben T. Davis Toll Causeway (now Courtney Campbell Causeway). Courtesy of the Fleming/ Green family.

Edgar, Esq., after making his fortune in real estate in the north, returned to his hometown of Clearwater at the helm of a forty-five and a half foot ocean racing schooner he had commissioned from the famous designer W. J. Roué. The schooner was built in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and named Haligonian. It wasn’t long before Edgar and Dick Driscoll, a well-known speedboat designer and builder who had moved to Dunedin, began to talk about reactivating the Clearwater Yacht Club. Lester Dicus owned a hotel (the Sunset Point Hotel) at the north end of Stevenson’s Creek. The hotel had a ballroom on the top floor. With her first ocean racing sailboat in port, lots of interest in speedboat racing in the waters off of Clearwater, and a ballroom in which to hold social functions, CYC reorganized with Buford Edgar as commodore, James (Jimmy) Davis as vice commodore, and Ted Kamensky as rear commodore. Clearwater Yacht Club

Caesar Irsch racing the “mahogany monster” Miss Tampa in 1926. Courtesy of the Fleming/Green family.

was off again and roared along with the times. In interviews with Ransom and Tracy, Jimmy Davis recalled: “We had ourselves a time…we danced, we partied, we raced everything from the seagoing yacht Haligonian , to a mullet net skiff with a two-horsepower outboard. We didn’t bother with annual elections or minutes or anything like that, we just had a lot of fun with no regrets” (Ransom and Tracy, 1961: 5).

Chapter 2: Boom, Bust, and Back Again 25