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Week of September 3, 2002 |
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STARDANCER CASINO
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ST. JOHN'S PASS VILLAGE, Fla.-- It's a
misty gray afternoon on Tampa Bay, and I'm sitting on a high
narrow cockeyed boardwalk that juts out over the water like the
parapet of a Scottish castle. Edward Hopper should paint this:
lazy pelicans flapping through a squall, python wallets and toy
lighthouses in the window of an empty shop, dozens of purple and
turquoise Wave Runners lined up in lonely ranks.
If you could film "Wuthering Heights" on a beach, this is
where you'd do it. A drawbridge rises at the end of the pass, and
in lumbers the gambling ship Stardancer, inching sidewise up to
the tiny dock as its passengers--all 23 of them--bunch toward the
first deck exit while the lounge musicians finish their final
set. It's humid and stormy and yet the air seems perfectly still,
like the lull before a tornado. It's a day good for drinking
under the thatched-hut bars and staring out to sea at the
breaching dolphins and very little else. It's one of those days
when the chirruping sea birds sound so distant and isolated that
it starts to creep you out.
"We're kind of between seasons here," says Les Gross, the
affable director of sales and marketing, as we wait for the
captain's permission to go aboard. "School starts so early these
days. The tourists leave by mid-August."
As gambling ships go, the Stardancer is pretty much the end
of the line. They don't get much smaller or narrower--capacity is
listed as a wildly optimistic 439 people--and the ceilings are so
low that you feel like you're navigating through the interior of
the Space Shuttle. The poker room is the tiniest in the world--
one table, with just enough space left over for a liquor cabinet.
The sports book has one TV screen. When I mention the Stardancer
to a competitor, he says, "Oh, you mean the old Europa Sky? They
call that boat the Vomit Comet."
I loved it, of course. The Stardancer is one of the last
ships left over from the wild and crazy days of cruises-to-
nowhere--late eighties and early nineties--when the vessels flew
foreign flags and stayed one jump ahead of the law. Thanks to a
Congressional amendment to the Johnson Act in 1992, the business
stabilized a bit, and now there are about 40 more or less
permanent gambling ships sailing from Texas, South Carolina, New
York, Massachusetts, and, of course, Florida, the world capital
of the gambling-ship business.
Not that the Stardancer hasn't had its problems. Small
gambling ships are under constant pressure from environmental
regulators, the Coast Guard and local cops who occasionally try
to enforce old laws against possession of "gambling
paraphernalia." Stardancer Cruises also operates ships in Myrtle
Beach, South Carolina, as well as the Florida ports of Port
Richey, Tarpon Springs and Fernandina Beach. And besides the
usual local political battles, the company's assets were frozen
by the FBI earlier this year after one of the principal investors
was arrested in Ohio for embezzlement. (Mark Steven Miller,
former CEO of Oakwood Deposit Bank near Toledo, is charged with
stealing $40 million from his bank and diverting much of it to
Stardancer.)
Hubbard's Marina, where the Stardancer docks, is not really
built for gambling ships. The great thing about the 1992
Congressional amendment is that it allowed ships to dock at
places that weren't really ports, so they could be closer to the
three-mile international limit. (The Stardancer still requires an
hour to get out to the legal waters, but that's much better than
the three hours it used to take from the Port of Tampa.)
The short cruise time is the main reason the Stardancer
ended up in the down-at-the-heels tourist town of Madeira Beach,
lined with time-share condos, motels that are unchanged since the
sixties, and small excursion boats like the "Royal Conquest
Pirate Cruise," during which kids don paper pirate hats and
engage in water-gun battles, treasure hunts and limbo contests.
There are a couple of dolphin-watching boats, a sport-fishing
vessel, and the constant putt-putt of crabbers going back and
forth with their rusty traps.
The "downtown" part of Madeira Beach suffered a devastating
fire three years ago, but has been rebuilt as a shopping area
specializing in the usual nautical gewgaws and Cracker-Barrel-
type knick-knacks found in vacation spots everywhere (yes, they
have flamingo yard ornaments), with a smattering of T-shirt and
swimwear shops featuring fashions suitable for emerging from a
burning building.
Stardancer bought its current vessel for $5.2 million from
Europa Sea Cruises in August 2000 after Europa abandoned the
gambling-boat business entirely and devoted itself to building a
destination gambling resort in Diamondhead, Mississippi. One
reason Europa got out of the market is that ships had gotten
bigger and fancier, especially on the west coast of Florida,
where the humongous Sterling Casino sails from Port Canaveral
every day. The SunCruz line also has a ship sailing from St.
John's Pass, but from the other side of the drawbridge, in the
beach town of Treasure Island.
What all this means is that a small boat like Stardancer
relies almost entirely on local retirees and word of mouth. There
are virtually no signs directing you to the marina, which is a
good half hour from downtown St. Petersburg, and the only
advertising the ship does is in the phone book and on pizza
boxes. With competing SunCruz starting to dominate the market,
Sundancer is poised to start running buses and concentrating on
weekend group sales to build up the number of passengers--but the
economics are tough.
Gaming experts say that most small ships average only about
$85 per passenger on day cruises, with the number going up to
perhaps $130 on weekends, so trips with 23 aboard are obviously
not making much of a dent in that $5.2 million investment. After
a while, you start to wonder just how tight they're setting those
slot-machine payouts. (Since the boats are unregulated, they
don't have to report their percentages.)
Having said all that, I would still recommend the
Stardancer, if for nothing more than nostalgia value. This is the
same type of small gambling boat they used in Mississippi in the
early nineties, and if you get it cranking, it can be a very
intense gambling atmosphere, especially if the seas are swelling
and the players are stumbling more than usual. (I've always
wondered how they keep the roulette wheel level and the craps
players from getting perturbed when the dice fly in nine
different directions before coming to a stop.)
The ship has three decks, with all the table games on the
second deck, the first deck devoted to a 65-seat dining area and
tiny lounge, and the third open-air deck mostly used for relaxing
at the bar. They do have a VIP Room for their better players, but
they don't really restrict access to it. It's just a couple of
blackjack tables with high betting minimums, a small bar, and a
cozier atmosphere.
Of course, the whole boat is cozy. You WILL get to know your
neighbors on these five-and-a-half-hour cruises, which cost $10
to board and $10 for the buffet, although it's easy to find free
coupons and they'll honor the coupons of any other gambling ship.
Drinks are free, but only while the gambling is in progress. The
cash bar kicks in during the hour out and the hour back, as
Stardancer hits its top speed . . . of 11 knots.
There's a small parking facility next to the St. John's Pass
Village Boardwalk, and there are several Margaritaville-type
seafood restaurants where you can down a few Gulf oysters and
knock back some lagers when you get tired of looking at carved
walri in the gift shops.
"It's a tourist trap," says Les Gross, who runs things at
St. John's Pass for Stardancer CEO Sam Gray Jr. "But whenever we
have friends from out of town, that's where we go."
Gross grew up in Utica, New York, where he played on the
football team with fellow casino manager Steve Wynn. Wynn is
currently building the biggest resort in the history of Las
Vegas, called Le Reve, while Gross is trying to figure out how to
squeeze a few extra nickels out of the weekenders from Tampa on
one of the tiniest gaming floors in the world. It would help if
he could get a little more coverage in the local paper, the Beach
Beacon, but it's a fast news week. On the front page is a picture
of a guy holding up a 25-pound blackfin tuna. They have
priorities in Madeira Beach. Have another margarita.
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© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs
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