I got a note from Joe Quimby in Shell Pt. Juana's Pagodas on Navarre Beach are gone with the wind (and waves). Sad news about a very cool place. If you never went, it was a giant Tiki hut kind of thing on the causeway- maybe 4 stories tall with bar & restaurant. The perfect beach bar and regatta venue. They had many multihull races and more recently included boards. A great piece of water for racing- flat and good chance for wind. They rebuilt after big damage from a storm 3 or 4 years ago I think, but according to Joe, this time there's nothing left but the parking lot.
Shell Point got their share too. The "crackhouse" on the beach was damaged enough to need a bulldozer. (This might be good news if the county lets them rebuild something better... almost anything would be better). Apparently everybody right there is OK but "lots of damge to boats and property with the 4-6 ft storm surge".
cv
I have a regatta T-shirt with the Tiki hut on it, it kind of looked like a big Christmas Tree. Was that the ragatta where everyone got thrown out of the Go Cart track?
Gene
Gene Mathis
Hey Gene,
I've got one of those Tiki Hut T-shirts and it's from a Panama City regatta in the early 90's. I'm glad to hear that someone else has 15 year old T-shirts.
That could have been the same weekend as the Go-Cart "incident", but I seem to remember that it occurred at Ft. Walton Beach. My memory is a bit foggy about the details of the "incident" and the location. Perhaps a few too many celebratory adult beverages after racing on Saturday contributed to some rowdy driving behavior on the Go-Cart track that evening.
Those days of taking 6-8 hour road trips to race in the Tudor/Mistral regatta series were awesome.
Big Al
The go-cart "incident" ????
You mean the one where they stopped everyone, shut down the track, and made us all get out???
I didnt know there were any other still here that were part of that "event"
Those were the days..... or "man am I getting old"
Yes I think Ft Walton (Jack Stringfellow/Rogue Wave) was the place where we went so crazy on go-carts. "Go-cart Racing Rules" meant if you were ahead of everybody, you had to slow enough to get to the back of the pack, thus facilitating more crashes into each other. The proprietors were not very amused by this. But the thing that got us totally banned was somebody (was it Ashley that crazy Kiwi??) actually doing a 180 on the track and blasting though our group going in the wrong direction... it was a mess.