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Tropical Breeze photo by Sue Suby   Safety Harbor Museum Docent Ron Fekete, foreground, tells passengers about the history of Philippe Park, the original homestead of Pinellas County’s first settler, Odet Philippe. Safety Harbor resident Carl Speck points toward the Indian mound, which is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, as Fekete tells how Philippe’s family fled to the top of the mound to escape the floodwaters of an 18th century hurricane. The tours already are being booked into the fall. Call 727-726-1668 to make reservations.

by Floyd Egner
Publisher, Tropical Breeze

Dolphins leaping out of the water and boys jumping into it from the roof of the Safety Harbor Pier were among the highlights as staff members of the Safety Harbor Museum of Regional History kicked off a new venture offering pontoon boat tours of the city’s waterfront.

Sailing out of the marina aboard a pontoon boat from Safety Harbor Sailing Charters, guests are provided a unique vista on the oldest settlement in Pinellas County. Museum docent Ron Fekete offered a running commentary on the role the waterfront has played in the city’s development from a center of pre-Colombian native American culture to the home of world-famed mineral springs to a modern community in the center of the Tampa Bay metropolitan area.

Capt. Mark Smith guided the pontoon boat on a gentle, hour-long cruise from the marina north to Philippe Park and then kicked it up a notch to return to the docks before ever-present summer squalls could move in over the bay. Weather always is a consideration, but tours already are being booked into the fall. Smith operates the pontoon boat and charters “Pretty Girl,” a 30-ft. Watkins sailboat based in the Safety Harbor Marina for day sails or evening tours.

The museum’s initial venture, Safety Harbor History Tours, uses the pontoon boat because of its stability and ability to comfortably hold a half-dozen or more guests in addition to the captain and guide. Rates are $25 per person and reservations may be made by calling 727-726-1668.

Among the facts discussed on the tour is how the bay was an abundant source of food for the earliest residents of the area, who left enormous mounds of shells from the oysters they harvested from the bay. One intact mound is a centerpiece of Philippe Park and was a ceremonial mound, not used for burials, Fekete noted. The museum actually is located on a native burial site, he said.

Safety Harbor and a number of other Pinellas locations were dotted with mounds when Spanish explorers first arrived about 500 years ago. When permanent settlement began in the 18th and early 19th century, the shell from the mounds frequently was harvested for road-building material.

Safety Harbor is known as the home of Count Odet Philippe, first European settler in Pinellas County and an entrepreneur credited with being the first to cultivate citrus in Florida. Although his last name has disappeared, his daughters have left descendents among the local population. The city first emerged as word spread of the healing springs just south of Philippe’s homestead. Col. William J. Bailey was the first to own and commercialize the springs in the decade of the 1850s.

Several health resorts and retreats developed in the general area of today’s Safety Harbor Resort & Spa, which traces its lineage to an era more than 100 years ago when waters from its springs were bottled and shipped around the world. Commerce led to the need for a commercial pier. Today’s picturesque Safety Harbor Pier is the most recent of several piers that have been built on the city’s waterfront. Several earlier piers were destroyed by hurricanes, most recently by Hurricane Elena in 1985.

Fekete told tour participants about the Florida boom years of the 1920s, when narrow rail tracks ran along the pier for carts that were used to load commercial vessels and ferries that made regular stops at the Safety Harbor Pier. Nearly all the cross-bay commercial boat traffic disappeared in the 1930s after the construction of the Gandy Bridge and what today is called the Courtney Campbell Causeway.

Commercial and tourism uses have changed over the years, but the waterfront still teems with life. Dolphins or manatee are nearly always sighted on a pontoon trip along the bay and fish, crabs and shellfish still are present, even if not as abundant as they once were. Fekete could have added a cautionary tale or two about jumping off the pier. More than one incident has occurred over the years in which a diver found the bay shallower than expected and was seriously injured as a result. On this tour, however, the boys daringly climbed to the roof of the Pier and jumped over the railing into the bay, oblivious to the adults holding their breath in hopes no one would be hurt.