Sailing’s Breeziest Braced for a Race

Leaning back in a deck chair aboard the Prospector, Dwight Pate peered over the top of his book, a nautical history of the discovery of the California coast, and surveyed the competition.

Up and down the Newport Harbor shoreline, double-parked alongside the hometown yachts nestled in their slips, a veritable fleet of sloops and schooners was assembling.

By sunrise today, from as far away as San Francisco there will have gathered 556 sailing craft with crews numbering into the thousands. They will also have attracted at least as many more boats and sailing aficionados to send them off when the fleet embarks at noon on the 39th annual Newport-to-Ensenada International Yacht Race.

But this was still Friday morning, and Pate pondered strategy.

Only a few years ago at the start of the race, Pate and his fellow crewmen, wearing their traditional white tie and tails, shorts and deck shoes, startled the competition by assembling a chamber group atop the bow, complete with viola.

One year a topless woman stood there in place of the musicians.

“Their strategy is to distract the other boats,” suggested Michael Kirby of the Corona del Mar Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club, himself a veteran of several Newport-to-Ensenada races.

“Our strategy,” said Pate, whose entry has never won a trophy, “is to have the most fun.”

Sailed Past End of Race

Another year, Pate and his half dozen or so sailing partners from San Francisco, including “a couple lawyers and a beer distributor,” sailed right on past the end of the race at Ensenada in pursuit of preferred, but undisclosed destinations farther south.

This year, Pate said with a conspiratorial squint into the sunlight, the crew of the Prospector has yet another surprise up its sleeve. But he wouldn’t tip his hand.

“I can tell you we’ll be serving mai tais and I have an insight that we’re going to have a big palm tree out here,” he said, nodding at the bow.

Not everyone is as cavalier about the Newport-to-Ensenada race. But almost.

“There will be as many spectator boats (as boats entered in the race),” Kirby said. “Last year there were a few collisions. One boat ran into the press boat and punched a hole into it. It didn’t sink, but it had a big hole.”

That was before the race even began.

It has been written that the Newport-Ensenada race can be traced by its wake of floating beer cans. Race documents also recorded that in 1965 a “navigational error” caused one skipper to mistakenly steer his 32-foot sloop to Avalon on Santa Catalina Island.

But somehow, mere words fall short of describing the 125-mile seagoing party that is also the largest international boat race.

Words, for example, seem inadequate for the Lawrence family of San Diego in describing the near-tragedy when son Carey disappeared overboard in pitch dark about 3 a.m.

Different Perspectives

“Listening to him talk, (one would believe) there were sharks all around,” his father, attorney Peter Lawrence, recalled.

How long was son Carey, a copy machine sales manager, adrift in the drink?

“That depends on whether you ask him or us,” the father conceded. “He says he was in there three hours. I think it was about three minutes.”

Race organizers can recall no one ever being lost in the competition. But Carey Lawrence wasn’t the only sailor to have gone overboard during the race.

“My worst experience” is how Orange Coast College drafting instructor Dave Price remembers it.

“We had a crewman fall overboard halfway to Ensenada,” he said. “It was very frightening. We were going 10 or 12 knots downwind under full spinnaker and it’s pretty hard to get (the sail) down and turn it around . . . to save somebody.”

But turn the craft around they did and plucked the unfortunate seaman from the jaws of a watery death.

“He was heavy with his . . . clothes and shoes soaked,” Price said. “We asked him: ‘Why didn’t you take your shoes off?’

“He said: ‘I just paid $35 for these new Topsiders.’ ”