castine yacht club

Castine Classic Yacht Race

1 august 2024, about the race.

Please join us for the 25th annual Castine Classic Yacht Race, sponsored by the Castine Yacht Club.

On Thursday, August 1st, an impressive fleet of classic yachts will race a 19.4nm course from Castine to Camden, followed by the Camden to Brooklin race on Friday, August 2, and the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta on Saturday, August 3.

Cocktail Reception On Wednesday, July 31st, the Castine Yacht Club will host a cocktail reception from 1830 to 2000 hrs.

For Race Notice, Registration and other information, please refer to other website pages.

Please note that all yachts need a current CRF rating, which may be obtained online at https://classicyachts.org/ratings .

Please contact us if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing you in Castine this summer.

Fred Doane Commodore, Castine Yacht Club [email protected]

Kevin Coady Race Committee Chair [email protected]

Adult Programs

 -We offer private sailing lessons, taught in a Colgate 26 or your own sail boat. 

$80/1hr class  ($110 non-member) – up to 3 persons

Contact: 207-326-8844 or [email protected]

Youth Programs

Youth Sailing Weekly Schedule

Members Novice: $60/week Apprentice: $80/week Helmsman/Navigator: $85/week

7-9 years of age

Designed for children just beginning to sail and spend time on the water. This class meets two mornings (possibility of a third mid summer) a week and will include nautical games, hands on outdoor class lessons and time on-the-water in powerboats and rowboats.

8-11 years of age

For children who may or may not have a summer of previous class time. This class is on-the-water in Turnabouts, Optis, powerboats, larger sailboats, our Castine Class sailboat and rowboats. The class meets four mornings a week and will focus on basic boating skills as well as the finer art of sail trim, knots and dead-reckoning navigation.

11-13 years of age

The Helmsman class is held three afternoons a week mostly in Optimists “Optis.” This single handed sprit rigged dinghy is a wonderful teacher as well as a tutor in humility. ‘If one can sail an Optimist well, one can sail any boat he/she steps aboard.’ In addition to the Opti, students are on-the-water in our Castine Class sailboat, powerboats, rowboats and larger sailboats. Class time will concentrate on advanced rigging and line techniques, charting, general nautical awareness and the Racing Rules of Sailing. We will introduce racing. In addition to the three afternoon classes, the Helmsman level participates in a Wednesday picnic cruise.

14-18 years of age

Older sailors will have the opportunity to participate in 420’s, Colgates or Mercuries for lessons in short course racing, general navigation and team racing as well as classroom discussions. The class meets each Monday, Tuesday and Thursday in the afternoons. On Wednesday, the class will participate in the picnic cruise. Inter-club regattas in 420’s will be held several times throughout the summer.

Weekly Races

Each week, CYC offers regularly scheduled racing open to the community in the Mercury and Colgate fleets. A set schedule of Castine Class races is also available. 

Castine Class

Castine Class Schedule – first gun at 1355 unless otherwise noted. Competitors meeting 1305. 

• Tues, July 4 (Robinson Cup)
• Sat, July 8
• Sat, July 15
• Sat, July 22
• Sat, July 29
• Sat, Aug 12 (Eaton Cup and Lobster Stew Dinner)
• Sun, Aug 20
• Sat, Aug 26 (Labor Day Race)

Castine Class Rules Castine Classic Nor Castine Class Boat List

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The Castine Class Endures

These sloops still grace the harbor where they were born.

Photographs by Kathy Mansfield

There was a time when nearly every part of the New England coast claimed a sailboat built to suit the particular needs of the people who sailed them and the unique conditions of the local waters.

Around Cape Cod, builders such as Crosby in Osterville, Bigelow in Monument Beach and, later, Manuel Swartz Roberts on Martha’s Vineyard, perfected the wide, shoal-draft centerboard catboat.

In Maine, builders developed handy deep-keel boats with clipper bows and long bowsprits that were good for every kind of deep-water fishing from handlining for cod to trapping lobsters. The boats were built in shops all along the midcoast, especially in Wilbur Morse’s boatshop in the town that gave the Friendship sloop its name.

Despite their differences, both types of small vessels were designed to meet the working sailor’s universal needs: ease of handling by a small, often singlehanded, crew; plenty of room for nets, trawl tubs, or lobster traps; and enough speed to get the day’s catch to market while still fresh and, most importantly, ahead of competing fishermen.

Around the turn of the 20th century, fast, handy boats were also attractive to a growing number of summertime sailors. Naval architects famous for their large yachts were commissioned to draw small, one-design boats suitable for yacht club members to race in areas with similar conditions. Many of those boats were named for the harbor where they first sailed or the yacht club that commissioned the design.

Probably the earliest such boat commissioned by Maine rusticators was the Winter Harbor 21, designed and built by Alpheus Packard and W. Starling Burgess in 1906 for yachtsmen in that downeast town’s Grindstone Neck summer community. Nine of the boats, seven launched in 1907 and two in the 1920s, have been restored and are still racing in their home waters.

Two years after Burgess drew the Winter Harbor knockabouts, B.B. Crowinshield designed a 25-foot LOA boat that came to be known as the Dark Harbor 17½. The first version was designed for sailors in Manchester, Massachusetts, the second for sailors summering in North Haven on the Fox Islands Thorofare in Penobscot Bay. The design is now known as the Dark Harbor 17, in honor of the eponymous summer community on Islesboro that was the third to adapt Crowninshield’s design. A little less than three decades later, Sparkman & Stephens designed a larger boat that bears that community’s name: the 30-foot Dark Harbor 20.

A class is born in Castine

While those one-designs were the product of a collaboration between a designer and a boatbuilder, there is a classic, wooden one-design still sailing on Penobscot Bay that is truly the product of one man’s art—the 18-foot centerboard Castine Class sloop designed by Mace Eaton and built at Eaton’s Boat Yard on Castine Harbor.

Between the winter of 1950-1951 and 1967, Eaton’s built 20 boats in the class—19 of them are still sailing. The first six or seven boats, launched between 1951 and 1954, were built by Mace Eaton himself, assisted by his son Alonzo. After Mace “retired,” Alonzo—known to all as “Lonnie”—built about a dozen more boats, the last in 1967, using the original molds. Almost 20 years later, in 1984, Joel White of Brooklin Boat Yard built two more boats using those same molds loaned to him by Lonnie Eaton.

Although nominally a one-design boat, the Castine Class sloops show a certain amount of individuality. That’s hardly surprising since Mace Eaton drew no plans for the boat; instead he carved a pine half-model to get the lines and the Eatons built the boats by eye rather than by measure.

Summer resident and Castine Yacht Club race committee chairman David Bicks owns the Castine Class sloop Caroline B , that was launched in 1966 as the J&B II for John Simons. Writing to mark the 100th anniversary of the Castine Golf Club—the parent of the Castine Yacht Club—Bicks described the boats as measuring “approximately 18' 3 ½" overall, 16' 1" on the waterline and 7' on the beam.” Draft is 10" board up, 28" with the board down. Four of the boats were built with keels and later converted to centerboard configuration.

Eaton built the hulls with cedar planking on oak frames and most had mahogany transoms, painted rather than bright. The first three boats had steam-bent oak coamings; on most later boats the V-shaped coamings are mahogany. On one boat— Hoppie , built for Edward O. Miller in 1960, and still sailed by the Miller family—the coamings are straight because, Lonnie Eaton said, “we ran out of wood.”

A design with local roots

Few boats spring spontaneously in final form from their designer’s brow, and the Castine Class was no exception.

Early in the last century, Mace Eaton learned the boatbuilder’s trade from his grandfather and father on Deer Isle and in 1924, the story goes, he rowed a dory to Castine with his family to take a job enlarging a sardine carrier. He later started building boats on the beach near the present site of the Castine Yacht Club, which did not yet exist. In 1939, he bought a former salt shed, once used by the town’s Grand Banks fishing fleet, that is still the Eaton’s Boat Yard building.

About a year later, Eaton built a 16-foot sailboat for David Hall of Castine and, in 1942, built a 14-footer for a Nahant, Massachusetts, family. Those boats eventually became the prototypes for the Castine Class.

According to David Austin, whose son Donald still sails the Fanny G , the first of the class, in the winter of 1950-1951 his and two other Castine summer families, the Robinsons and the Brownells, “committed themselves to building three identical boats” they hoped would “become a one-design day sailing and racing class.”

The families sought a boat beamy enough for “five or six people with picnic gear,” shoal enough to be beached, “yet handy enough to be raced competitively” and agreed that a stretched version of the two earlier Eaton boats would fit the bill.

That winter, while Eaton began work on the first boat, Austin took its measurements from the molds and asked Connecticut yacht designer Winthrop Warner to draw a modern rig to replace the stubby wooden pole masts of the prototypes. It turned out that the dimensions were close enough to those of the Rhodes 18 dinghy (designed by Philip Rhodes in 1948 and still built in fiberglass by the Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co.) to use the same rig design. The result was a tall Marconi rig flying 183 square feet of working sail (spinnakers were a later addition) balanced by enough inside ballast, added to the boats after their first adventures in the spring of 1951, “to make them stiffer,” Austin said.

The design clearly was a success. After the first three boats were launched, Eaton’s built four more during the 1950s and a dozen during the 1960s. The last, the Dorothy B , was launched in 1967 for Henry E. Erhard and is still sailed by the Erhard family out of the Castine Yacht Club, as are the two boats that White built almost 20 years later.

So too, for that matter, is the 14-footer Mace Eaton built for that Massachusetts family almost 80 years ago. In 1988, Bicks found the boat in Amesbury, Massachusetts, restored it, and now keeps it on a mooring off his Castine boathouse.

“These boats have been a source of great joy, friendly competition, and camaraderie for almost 60 years,” Donald Austin said of the centerboarders, which are still sailed—as racing boats and youth trainers as well as just for fun—at the Castine Yacht Club. “They are the foundation of that yacht club, for the whole enterprise that is the Castine Yacht Club.”

Hopes for the future

Class races that brought just a handful of boats to the starting line just a few years ago now draw larger fleets and “the quality of the racing has gotten better,” Austin said. Still, the question of whether the enthusiasm to maintain a fleet of old wooden boats in sailing, let alone racing, condition remains.

“I have great affection for the Castine Class boats, but I’m nervous about what lies ahead,” Bicks said.

Austin talked about how more entertainment options and shorter summer vacations, among other factors, have reduced interest in the boats. Like him, Bicks is unsure whether “generations to come will be prepared to invest the time and money necessary to keep these old gals sailing.”

According to Bicks, while the hulls have held up well, like virtually any wooden boats of their age that are still active, most of them have already been refastened at least once. As many of them near 70, more refastening is probably just over the horizon. And there are other issues.

“The frequent breakdowns on the race course are discouraging,” Bicks said. “The old bronze spreaders, iron centerboard fittings, and rudder gudgeons and pintles are soft spots” that can be difficult and expensive to repair or replace.

That said, this past summer 19 of the Eaton-built boats—including all three launched in 1951—and both Joel White boats were still active on Castine Harbor, sometimes with teenage crews, sometimes with their parents or grandparents contentedly at the tillers. Austin hoped that will continue.

“It’s my wish that we can interest new people to celebrate a wonderful tradition,” he said. “It means a lot to me. 

Stephen Rappaport is the Waterfront Editor at  The Ellsworth American , has lived in Maine for more than 30 years and is a lifelong sailor.

Castine Class Specifications

LOA  18' 3½"

LWL  16' 1"

Draft  10" board up,

28" board down

Sail Area 183 sq. ft.

Designer: Mace Eaton

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Castine by Pentagoet

Summertime is in full, bright swing along a deep harbor where old salts, young sailors, and world travelers gather—on boats, at the yacht club, and sometimes in a late-1800s inn with a cozy, fascinating pub..

Both are i n linen garb. His, white and straw-colored. Hers, a slate- gray tunic. The handsome couple could be actors in the movie Out of Africa in all that linen, I think, as I watch them for a few moments as they move about greeting guests.

It’s a sweet summer night, and we’ve just walked up the steep hill from Castine’s harbor. From across Main Street, I can see the busy innkeepers of the Pentagoet Inn. It’s the building with a tall, six-sided turret that’s on the second block uphill from the town wharf. The couple, Jack Burke and Julie Van de Graaf, is deep into their seventeenth season as owners and innkeepers of the landmark lodging in Castine.

I’m eager to go inside the Victorian-era manse with gabled rooflines rising up from the corner lot planted in woodland-style gardens. I’ve visited this village on the Blue Hill Peninsula before, when friends owned the Compass Rose Bookstore just down the street, but until this trip I’ve never spent the  night in town. And I’ve long been intrigued by the Pentagoet and, particularly, its appealing first-floor pub. Photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I have dinner reservations  at the inn’s restaurant and arrive early to settle in on a settee with velvet cushions. Small lamps and sconces add soft light, and as we sip wine from Cinque Terre and wait for an order of Taunton Bay oysters, I focus on who’s around us—figuratively, at least. Throughout this parlor room that’s now named the Baron Pub, nearly every square inch of wall space is filled with vintage framed portraits of world leaders, dictators, and thinkers.

Peter Frank and I begin trying to name, or at least recognize, the faces all around us from the Americas, old Russia, Europe, colonial Britain, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. I see Einstein, Castro, Queen Victoria, Gandhi, Lenin, Somoza from Nicaragua, and a likeness of Gorbachev (with slimmer cheeks and without his large birthmark). One prominent portrait is of a bearded man with a cap who Burke explains was a seventeenth- century French baron who became the Castine namesake, Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin. While Burke pours the wine, I can’t help but notice a resemblance between him and the portrait.

The innkeeper is an interesting sort in this town of about 1,370 residents. He spent much of his career in the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service, and he explains that many of the framed pictures are prints of photographs, painted portraits, or propaganda posters that he gathered while on assignments to far-flung places. I imagine much intrigue and adventure, and we point and ask about various pictures. “Oman was beautiful,” he tells us, “and then Kenya where [Daniel arap] Moi was protecting the elephants. But in Kuwait we found no beer and no fun for four days.”

I notice that every time I type the name Pentagoet, the auto-correct changes it to “Pentagon.” Coincidence? Burke has a good sense of humor about such questions, but the truth behind the name is that it was the French settlers who called this area between the Penobscot River and the Bagaduce “Pentagoet” after an Abenaki word for “where the waters meet.”

Meanwhile, we see Van de Graaf in motion, moving between the dining room, porches, parlors, and pub. She adds service, organization, and softer elements, like cushions from Laos, a fringed pillow from France, and delicate teacups from the Pink Rose Pastry Shop, which she owned in Philadelphia for many years. That was before she met Burke while on vacation in his home state of Massachusetts. They fell in love and traveled together in Africa; married in Venice, Italy; and in 2000, just after returning from the wedding trip, the pair finalized their purchase of the inn and moved to Castine.

Ever since, they’ve been hosting guests seasonally at the Pentagoet. It’s Van de Graaf who manages the kitchen and menus that include produce from a half-dozen nearby farms and local seafood. Our order of roasted  oysters is brought to our table on vintage porcelain plates that are dainty, almost. With bits of bacon and a squeeze of lemon, the oysters are exceptional. Peter Frank and I clink our glasses and decide to remain in this room for the rest of dinner talking  of explorers, elites, scientists, czars, and scoundrels.

We’re staying for a couple of nights at the 16-room Pentagoet, and the next morning after breakfast, Van de Graaf mentions that she’s often struck by the depth of interesting people who visit, or stay for the season or year-round in Castine.

David Bicks is one of those people. Wearing a Castine Yacht Club hat, polo shirt, and salmon-pink shorts, he happens to stop by the inn while we’re finishing coffees. A securities attorney in New York City, he’s owned a waterfront summer house here for decades, and when we meet he’s talking excitedly about the Castine Classic Yacht Race that was held a few days earlier. (This  summer’s event is set for August 2-3.)

He says the annual gathering attracts a fleet of impressive vessels to race about 20 miles across Penobscot Bay to Camden. The 2016 edition included the 52-foot yawl Dorade, a restored, circa-1929 transatlantic racing yacht. Preeminent yacht designer Olin Stephens, who lived in Hanover, Maine, in his retirement, designed the vessel, and Bicks recalls that Stephens sometimes attended the Castine festivities, including on his hundredth birthday in 2008.

“The greatest asset Castine has is the deep- water harbor,” Bicks says. “All the way from Newport, boats come here for safe harbor when there’s a hurricane—Smith Cove is a hurricane hole.”

Bicks insists it’s essential to see Castine from the water to understand the town, and graciously offers to take us out on his boat. I grab my hat before we start walking down to the water in the August sunshine. The water around the Castine Yacht Club is busy with children zigging and zagging about in dinghy sailboats, and we catch a ride on a club tender to where he keeps the Marian B. on a mooring (the comfortable cruiser with a wooden deck is named for his wife). Along the way, Bicks shares some of Castine’s history, from the first European settlers in the 1600s to the twentieth-century visitors and residents, including Eleanor Roosevelt and the poets Robert Lowell and Philip Booth.

Once underway, we pass Holbrook Island, where he notes the ledges are often full of seals. He points out Dyce Head Lighthouse and the tidal pool at Wadsworth Cove, a community gathering place for summer swimming. We’re fortunate to get such a personal tour. His own family has long been connected to the yacht club and Castine’s town life, including his daughter, Jenny Bicks, a writer and producer who also lives part-time here, and whose credits include more than a dozen episodes of the television series Sex and the City .

I’m struck by the natural beauty, the stately homes, and the green of trees on the shoreline. The whole town feels like a  yacht club, an enclave. The houses, stately and upright, look even more so from the water. “The thing that saved Castine [from overdevelopment],” Bicks notes, “is that you don’t get here by accident.”

The Boatyard

Castine is about a three-hour drive from Portland, and it’s located on the point of a peninsula. By land, it’s not on the way to anywhere else, so visitors arrive on purpose. The sheltered harbor is also home to the iconic, rustic Eaton’s Boatyard. Built on wharf pilings in the early 1800s, the boatyard’s main building is a tall wooden structure full of marine gear and engine parts. It’s all attached to the boatyard dock, where locals still service boats and bring in lobsters.

It’s here, through an introduction by David Bicks, that we meet Kenny Eaton himself. He’s sitting inside and has just opened a can of beer. He’s a third-generation boatyard man who has a white beard and an old-salt, Ernest Hemingway look. He invites us to sit down, and we find chairs amid the hulls, tools, wood pieces, and workbenches. I ask about his grandfather, Mace Eaton, and father, Alonzo

Eaton, who were both well-known downeast boat builders. The 20 or so Mace Eaton sailboats they built in the 1950s and 1960s are still in use around Castine and Brooklin, including one owned by the Bicks family, the Caroline B. , that we’d seen earlier on a mooring while tooling around the harbor.

The afternoon goes on with a few stories. Eaton and Bicks are old friends and launch into a wild tale about the two of them rescuing a boat that had gotten stuck on a ledge, and another story that leads to Eaton pulling from his office a black-and-white framed photo of a day when Ted Kennedy sailed in and met him on the very dock where we are standing.

The Village

The views of Castine from the water have been so striking, Peter Frank and I decide to board the Guildive the next afternoon for one of its daily summertime sails. Zander Parker is the captain of the handsome, 56-foot sailing yacht built in 1934, and once underway, we take in even wider views of the deep harbor, passing the massive hull of the State of Maine , the working educational ship of Maine Maritime Academy.

Once the engine is cut and the sails are hoisted we hear only the whoosh of wind and water and truly see the surroundings near and distant—Cape Rosier, the mouth of the Bagaduce, Smith Cove, and the squat Dyce Head Lighthouse, which one of the other four passengers notes is worth locating by land so you can follow the paths to the shore below it. It’s a gorgeous, two-hour sail and another terrific introduction to the history and beauty of Castine.

We do walk by the lighthouse later—it’s privately owned and not open to the public, but the seaside pathway gives a high vantage point above the water. Elsewhere in town, we stop alongside the golf course, which was established in the 1890s and then redesigned in the 1920s by the famous Scottish golf architect, Willie Park, Jr. Pride in history is a living thing in Castine, I’ve noticed, and so is art.

Each summer the local art association hosts the popular Castine Plein Air Festival, and there are several active galleries. We stop in at the light-filled restored horse barn that’s  the Adam Gallery up on Battle Avenue. Joshua Adam shows us around and explains that he and his wife, Susan Parish Adam, both show their work here—sailboats and the waterfront are often subjects. After the two had earned fine arts degrees and begun painting careers, he explains, they moved east from California because of her family’s roots in Castine that date back to the 1940s.

The Baron and the Pub

Yes, one more time. Before we leave Castine and the Pentagoet this trip, we return for a last visit to the Baron Pub. “It’s a world room,” Burke says as he notices us again studying the walls. “I pepper in good, bad, and indifferent leaders.”

If the innkeepers’ intent is to spur conversation, it’s working. For Burke, the fodder for his own worldly tales began early when he and his four brothers would help his father deliver boats up and down the Atlantic coast. That’s how he first saw Castine, he tells us, and I can almost see him flashing  back to long-ago stopovers when the boys would collect mussels on nearby Nautilus Island.

With that, the yarns begin again on a summer night in a cozy pub in this town of yachtsmen, artists, seals, and sailboats—a place Bicks had lauded earlier as “a little off the beaten track, at the very end of Maine.”

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• Santana takes Castine Classic race
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• August 24, 2021

Outlier (USA 151), winner of the Spirit of Tradition/ Photo courtesy of Tricia Ladd

Castine, ME - The 22nd annual Castine Classic 19.6 nm race to Camden, sponsored by the Castine Yacht Club, was sailed on August 5, 2021 on Penobscot Bay.

This race was the first of a three-race Penobscot Bay series, followed by the Camden to Brooklin feeder race and the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta. The race was sailed in less than ideal conditions: little wind and fog. But most of the thirty-two yacht fleet persevered, according to David Bicks, event chairman.

Santana , a 55' Sparkman & Stephens design built in 1935 for Humphrey Bogart, and now owned and skippered by Wendy Schmidt, took Classic A honors and won the Ames Cup as overall winner of the Classic A, B and C fleets.

The Ames Cup is awarded in memory of the Ames family which hailed from Castine. Their two sons were lost south of the Grand Banks in an unsuccessful effort to save their father who was washed overboard in the 1935 Newport to Bergen, Norway, race.  Santana  also won the Sparkman & Stephens trophy as top S&S yacht in the race.

Class B honors went to  The Hawk , a 37' Tripp design built in 1968, skippered by Oivend Lorentzen.  Thora , a 36' Ted Hood design built in 1960 and skippered by Vince Todd, took the top spot in Class C.

Otter , a 41' Concordia yawl sailed by Bob Keefer, won the Phalarope trophy as the top Concordia in the race.

The Spirit of Tradition fleet was led by  Outlier , a 55' Botin design, sailed by Harvey Jones.

The Race Committee, headed by Kevin Coady, took special note of the deck dance of appreciation performed by the crew of the NY-32  Vitesse  as it crossed the finish line.

Pictures by Tricia Ladd, and fine versions of these and other race pictures are available for purchase. Please contact Tricia at  [email protected]

Castine Classic Yacht Race 2021 results

• View / Download full race results

Complete race results are available at castineclassic.com.

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Castine Yacht Club To Honor Concordia Yachts

Sailing between the moon and the stars, Concordia Yachts iconic trademark, designed by Waldo, son of Llewellyn Howland, founder of Concordia Yachts, partnered with C. Raymond Hunt in 1932. In 1938 Llewellyn Howland commissioned the pair to design and build a racing, cruising sailboat that could withstand the choppy seas and stiff breezes of Buzzards Bay, the rest is history. With a total of 103 yachts built, 99 were constructed by the famous German Shipyard Abeking & Rasmussen. Making the Concordias the biggest class of large wooden sailboats ever constructed.

On July 31st at 1600 hrs at the Delano Auditorium, Maine Maritime Academy , 54 Pleasant St, Castine, ME, the Castine Yacht Club will honor the “Concordias” through a symposium including Doug Adkins, author of the definitive biography of Dorade (with foreword by Llewellyn Howland), who brought back from the ashes his Concordia, Coriolis; Queene Foster, author of Chapman Boating Etiquette, who now skippers Concordia Misty; Ben Mendlowitz, noted marine photographer and owner of Concordia Starlight; and Giffy Full, renowned wooden boat surveyor.

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Do you know where I can find construction drawings for the Concordia and how many are still in use? I have a small wooden model of the Concordia and like to learn more about it. You can send me an email at [email protected] Thanks. Karel

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New Cape Coral Yacht Club designs: Most on council like a coastal, Key West vibe

Given three different design options for the new Yacht Club Community Center , most of the Cape Coral City Council is leaning toward a coastal, Key West-flavor architecture.

At a committee of the whole meeting on Wednesday, the city sought direction from the council on a design direction for the outside of the community building.

"It's a concept, just like we do with anything else, and as we are designing, things may come up that we want to shift and be nimble (on)," said Cape Coral City Manager Michael Ilczyszyn.

James Pankonin with Kimley Horn, a consulting firm focusing on public and private developments, presented the information about the look of the community building.

Cape Coral's Yacht Club Community Park, which includes a yacht basin, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a ballroom, and a beach, has been a popular attraction and staple for the city since the 1960s but is set to undergo major renovations after Hurricane Ian delayed the original plans .

The current plans include a new two-story community center to replace the ballroom, removing the tennis courts, rearranging the area to accommodate a four-story parking garage, a new restaurant, and a new resort-style pool.

The city is also preparing for the demolition of the Yacht Club and its facilities in April as it awaits permits.

No estimates could be provided for the price of the new building.

"It will really come into how much of certain materials are needed and construction methods," Ilczyszyn said.

The city will have that information once they have 30% of the construction design.

Two public meetings for the designs are planned for April 2 and May 7.

After getting public input, the city will vote to amend its contract with Kimley Horn to approve all these changes.

The plan is to have these changes approved or introduced before the summer hiatus.

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New Designs for the Yacht Club building

John Bryant with Sweet Sparkman Architecture and Interiors, a Sarasota-based design firm, said the goal with the new designs was to maintain the experience of the original Yacht Club.

The majority of the council preferred option one.

Design one:

Bryant described the first option as "coastal vernacular" and similar to the park buildings at Lake Kennedy and Yellow Fever Creek.

"So it's sort of informed by the current architectural work in 2024," Bryant said. "Kinda Key West."

Councilmember Dan Sheppard and Mayor John Gunter preferred option one.

Gunter said the design was the most pleasing for him.

Councilmember Keith Long liked option one and said he liked the Key West aesthetic.

Councilmember Tom Hayden liked option one.

Design two:

Option two is more informed by the current Yacht Club and would have a stone base and mid-century feel to it, according to Bryant.

"There's certainly opportunity to kind of further develop this option to have even more of the existing Yacht Club feel, but a different vibe, feel than option one," Bryant said.

He also said option two might be more expressive the closer they try to recreate the aesthetic of the old ballroom building.

Councilmember Jessica Cosden liked design two as it incorporated design elements of the old building though she lamented how similar it looked to the first design.

"I wish we could have done more, but I know it's hard with a two-story building, to make it look the same as a very unique one-story building.

Councilmember Bill Steinke said two would be his choice as well, but was wary of additional maintenance of natural wood products used in the design.

"As long as we can bring that aesthetic and keep the maintenance down, number two would be my choice," Steinke said.

Councilmember Robert Welsh said he could go either way, but he liked the look of two.

Design three:

This would be more contemporary and modern.

"Even with a more contemporary language, you can still have warmth, incorporating some wood elements and stone elements," Bryant said.

None of the council members expressed any favorability for the third design.

Inside the new community center

The Community Center will have an additional 10,000 square feet for a total of 47,000 square feet, a history room to remember the first ballroom building on the first floor, and more rooms for civic and community use on the first floor.

Additionally, the new ballroom has shifted slightly as the balcony area on the second floor has been expanded to wrap around the top of the building.