LARGO, Fla. – — Tall masts angle skyward at Table Marina. Sailboats nestle in a turquoise cove beside charter boats, trawlers, shrimp boats and double-decker party boats. Time has bleached and bent the masts and outriggers, all made of soda straws, beaded kebab skewers and plastic swizzle sticks.
Grovie Dalzell began building Table Marina and every boat in it 35 years ago. Each vessel has a whimsical name painted crookedly on its weathered stern: Salty Dawg, Ocean Spray, Blow Tail, Lady Love.
By their looks, they’ve all ridden a blow or two. So has their maker.
He has just built a new dinner boat, the Show Queen II. Its twin hulls are kelly green; its dining cabin is white. He built it on commission for the captain of the Show Queen I, which is also docked at Table Marina. The captain was a nervous wreck. He couldn’t believe Grovie Dalzell would build a boat so big with no drawings.
Quarrelsome captains are the bane of Grovie Dalzell’s crowded day. They disregard the departure schedules, ignore the drawbridge openings timed to the tides. There’s only one way to keep them happy. “I just let them pay what they want to dock in the slips.”
It doesn’t take long to fall in sync with Grovie Dalzell: to believe that Table Marina is a bustling, crowded complex of sea vessels, drawbridges, dry docks, truck bays and restaurants that really exists at water’s edge, not just in this two-and-a- half-car garage.
Grovie is the son of Clearwater architect Whitney Dalzell. He was the youngest of three, and the only boy. As a toddler, he couldn’t hold up his head or talk. He was diagnosed as mentally retarded on his fourth birthday.
“The doctor told us to never put him in a place with walls around it,” Whitney Dalzell says. “We adhered to that.”
Grovie and his dad sailed everything from day sailers to yachts.
Framed photos in the architect’s Belle air condo show Grovie madly grinning through white foam, pouring over the tilted lee side of a racer. He learned to sail almost as well as his father, except when they’d come to bridges, he’d forget the mast was too high.
As Grovie grew up, the Dalzells tried renting an apartment for him, but he couldn’t handle the details. He has no concept of money, or at least the kind of money exchanged outside the boundaries of Table Marina.
“If Grovie had been born 150 years ago, we’d have lived on a farm and Grovie would have collected the eggs,” says his father. “We live in a world altogether too complicated.”
Yet his son could comprehend lines and numbers on blueprints for boats. He had an innate understanding of design.
“A mind superior in some ways to yours or mine,” his dad says, “but with hollow spots.”
Table Marina began on a plywood board, just 2 feet by 4 feet. On Sundays, father and son went shopping for wood, nails, string, paint. One topic father and son never discussed: the reality or unreality of Table Marina. When Grovie went on to training schools and group homes, he took the marina with him.
Grovie moved to the Dryer Avenue Group Home in Largo about a year ago. It’s operated by Upper Pinellas Association for Retarded Citizens, the large training center for developmentally disabled adults in Clearwater. A doctor prescribed Table Marina as essential to Grovie’s mental health, so UPARC let him take over the garage at the group home. Table Marina became a megalopolis.
It consists of three sections, each about 10 feet long.
Trawlers, shrimpers and lobster boats occupy the forward area, near the dry docks and cranes, the ice cream shop/yacht club and two dinner boats. (The dinner boats accommodate people “who don’t like fish.”) Most of the sailboats and speedboats occupy the middle section, beside the pink Coast Guard station, where Grovie recently put in a new glass elevator, and the parking deck with the helicopter pad on the roof.
There’s a pirate boat, too, but not to worry, “the pirates don’t really go out much.” The far section is taken up by loading docks for semitrailer trucks and an enormous Animal World Zoo, primarily occupied primarily by elephants. At the very end is the latest addition, the municipal airport, accessible by crossing a bridge to a card table.
The entire complex is 30 feet long, resting on stacks of concrete blocks. It looks built to last forever.
When Grovie’s father hears that Table Marina looks impregnable, he asks, “Why would you think that?”
Whitney Dalzell is 92. Grovie is 59.
The architect pores over Grovie’s finances at least once a month. He has secured his son’s future about three ways.
But markets turn bull to bear overnight. Medical costs rise every year. Who knows what will happen? Grovie’s dad can’t convince himself his son will ever be secure.
While sailing through a heavy chop off Clearwater Beach, Grovie once asked, “Dad, what would happen to me if you had a heart attack right now?” Whitney Dalzell replied, “I guess you would drown.”
Grovie shares a group home with about 10 other people. He operates on the group-home schedule. Everyone gets up at the same time, takes turns at the bathrooms. Everyone eats what’s served, when it’s served. They share the living room TV in the afternoons when Grovie’s favorite show, Judge Judy, comes on.
It all looks safe and predictable, but it has never been Grovie’s to control. All his life, he has been at the beck and call of others.
In the mid ’80s, he worked as a stock boy at Morton Plant Hospital. He was conscientious to a fault. He took 10 minutes to do a job the others could do in a minute. Co-workers hazed him ruthlessly.
Grovie never was a big talker. No one noticed much as he grew more quiet at work, at his group home. As he shut down, the silences mushroomed into an unreachable depression. He ended up in Morton Plant’s psychiatric ward.
Grovie lay in bed under heavy medication for a month. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, speak, even to his father.
Until an afternoon: Sitting at Grovie’s bedside, Whitney Dalzell held up a clipping, just 3 inches square, from a yachting magazine.
The clipping was an aerial photo of Manasquan, N.J., where the Dalzells had summered during Grovie’s childhood.
It showed the Manasquan Inlet as it streams below two old railroad bridges, then rolls past the breakwater into a roiling ocean. It’s an incredibly beautiful gateway; you can almost smell the brine, just looking at photos of it. This was where Grovie and his dad had followed the fishing boats out to sea on summer mornings.
Whitney Dalzell held up the picture. “Do you know what this is?” Grovie took the photo.
He spoke: “Where we went fishing.”
Behind the garage doors at the Dryer Avenue Group Home, Grovie becomes his own master. He is bridge tender. He is dock master. He is police chief and fire chief. He is CEO and mayor. In all things, his word is the absolute last.
