BELLEAIR Photo: Vaughn Halyard Belleair’s natural, meandering streams (as can be seen in Ross’s 1915 blueprints) have been restored, coming into play on eleven holes, including the third in any case, the project was delayed for two years, finally getting under way in March 2022. Florida-based contractor Clarke Construction handled the build. The speed at which projects in warm season grass areas can be executed never ceases to amaze me: the course reopened last November, only eight months after it closed for the work. In that time, though, Straka and his team completely transformed it. More than a thousand trees were removed, returning the West to what it had been originally, a seaside course. The two large ponds were removed and the natural, meandering streams which they had replaced were put back. These streams are a massive influence on the course, coming into play on eleven of the eighteen holes, and they already look good. Bearing in mind the difficulty of constructing natural-looking watercourses, I am sure they will improve by the week, and in a year or two will look as though they had never been removed in the first place. One of the streams widens slightly behind the tenth green to form what could perhaps be called a small pond, but the water is still moving. This must make Belleair one of very few courses in Florida without pond features. Some greens have been lowered by as much as twenty feet to their original grade, removing much of the construction that blocked the water views. Although it does not have a water view, the fourteenth green is perhaps the most dramatic of these, as during reconstruction the team found the original railway bed installed by Morton Plant to bring visitors to the original hotel on site; the green now sits right on Image: Belleair CC 76
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