Pensacola Rising
This century-old yacht club on Florida’s panhandle is rediscovering itself and calling out to sailors to come and experience its Southern hospitality
Potential. So much potential.
That’s what Tom Pace, the ponytailed vice commodore of Florida’s Pensacola YC sees as he scans the club’s vast 22 acres. The sun-parched front lawn stretches as far as the eye can see, dissected by a long driveway lined with tall, weathered and moss-covered trees. The estate-style property at the entrance of Bayou Chico Inlet dwarfs the diminutive white clubhouse with blue awnings. The converted house itself was built in the early 1900s, right about the time when the Pensacola Yacht and Motor Boat Club was formed on paper. Back when, according to club history, 75 charter members voted to pay $6 in annual dues.
“It’s a bunch,” Pace says of the club’s property where his family roots run deep. “We have 5 acres of pure green space, and we have to protect it like crazy.”
Pace’s family has been in Pensacola since the pre-Depression days. “My dad was always a water guy. As a kid, he’d come down to the port to see the sailing cargo ships come in—tall ships unloading ballast stones and that kind of stuff.”
Over time, Pace’s father built boats, ran ships and even raced sailboats to Cuba in the late 1940s. The clubhouse building was sourced by his grandfather for Pace’s greatuncle, a three-time commodore during the 1930s and 1940s, and his father wrote the club’s first PHRF scoring program. So yes, there’s some history there.
A 17-year sojourn to Maui “to chase wind” as a professional windsurfer ended when Pace came home to care for his ailing parents, and after they passed, he found himself diving back into the very club that shaped his early years as a Pensacola water rat. “It was time to jump in and make a difference,” he says. “It’s easy now to see how lucky I am to have this massive playground in my backyard.”
That playground, of course, is Pensacola Bay, a roughly 5-by-11-mile stretch of warm, flat water, 22 to 32 feet deep, with very little commercial traffic. For the past two years, it’s been the winter training ground for the New York YC’s America’s Cup Challenger, American Magic, which identified the location as an ideal and discrete venue to test its 75-footer Defiant straight off the team’s base in the guarded Port of Pensacola. The locals welcomed them with open arms and tight lips.
A barrier island to the south protects the bay from the vast Gulf of Mexico, and while it does get choppy from time to time,
the bay is ideal for running the dinghy and small keelboat events that are becoming the club’s claims to fame. Of late, they’ve run major Optimist regattas with hundreds of boats, parents and coaches; a Flying Scot North American Championship; a Kona windsurfing championship; and its new signature event in Melges 24s, the Bushwacker Cup. To note: A Bushwacker, the club’s signature drink, is like a creamy chocolate milkshake—with a lot of alcohol— and 43 gallons of it were served at the last running. The now-popular Melges 24 regatta is the brainchild of Pensacola transplant Hal Smith, a national race officer who has been instrumental in raising the club’s race administration bar over the past few years.
“Hal and his wife came down to run a regatta and fell in love with area,” Pace says. “They retired, moved from Atlanta, and built a house here. He’s one of those guys who could run sailboat races every day for the rest of eternity and get better at it every time. He is, hands down, one of the most complete race officers we’ve had here, and it’s made an incredible difference. Not being from here, he kept reminding us, ‘Y’all don’t know how good you’ve got it in terms of a sailable bay.’”
Smith, who ran circles at Key West and Charleston race weeks for a dozen years, brushes aside Pace’s accolades with an aw-shucks Southern drawl that oozes with modesty, and while he is comparatively new to the scene, his grasp of Pensacola’s sailing conditions is as if he’s been here forever.
As Pace and Smith provide a tour of the club grounds in early February, we pause near the beach and slipway, which will someday teem with hundreds of dinghies and dollies when the club hosts the US Sailing’s massive US Youth Sailing Championships (which are eventually canceled on account of COVID-19).
“Right there, on the other side of the channel, we have room for plenty of circles, and we can have kids off the water in 10 minutes if we need to,” Smith says as we look out across an empty bay. “A single tide a day is like 6 inches, and the current is more wind-generated than tidal.”
And the breeze? “We see a lot of 8 to 15,” Pace says. “It’s not gnarly, and because the conditions are so good and flat, we can get a good race going in as little as 4 knots.”
Resuming the tour, they point out the pool—what junior sailor doesn’t love a postrace dip? And the sprawling grassy acreage is there to accommodate a sea of trailers, cars and pop-up shade tents. When the big youth events are happening, the club is hopping, Pace says, but it’s the rest of the year that needs attention.
What does the membership sail?
“Not a lot,” Pace says.
“We’re rebuilding,” is Smith’s response. After recent hurricanes, many of the club’s older sailors got out of boats, Pace says, and of the club’s 725 members, only 100 or so are active sailors. “But they’re not really active. We’re building it from the ground up.”
Four years ago, Pensacola YC’s junior sailing program was practically dead, but in 2019, more than 300 students passed through the summer camp. The immediate goal is to double that and at the same time, continue to pitch Pensacola Bay as a venue worthy of not only an America’s Cup team, but one-design classes seeking a lower-cost winter alternative to places like Miami.
“We’re not as big as the high-level clubs around the country,” Pace says, “but we’ve got a good group of people in place who like the fun and excitement of running events.”
Like Hull No. 1 of the enduring and locally sourced one-design Fish class that sits rotting in a cradle outside the club’s front door, there’s a clear sense that Pace and Smith are intent on cutting away the old wood to make way for new growth. Call it a rebirth, a renewal of vows, or what have you, but this new energy down at the club is actually fueled by something much simpler: a realization.
“It’s easy to get complacent about your own backyard,” Pace says with big smile as he scans across the property. “You don’t see how amazing something is until you truly understand what you really have, and what we have here is something very special.”
A barrier island to the south protects the bay from the vast Gulf of Mexico, and while it does get choppy from time to time, the bay is ideal for running the dinghy and small keelboat events that are becoming the club’s claims to fame.