Nowhere, and swiftly

JUST BEFORE NOON, THE CREW THROWS CHA-CHA-CHA’S lines and the boat eases from the dock, turning snout-first into the wind. The mainsail flashes 56 feet skyward with a fluid tug. Then the oversized jib. Screech, ker-thunk. The sails pillow into the hollow shape of an airplane wing. Cha-Cha-Cha awakens, leaning onto her side and bearing off in a glide.

Never mind that you’re still inside the harbor of Newport Bay, already the distance between you and the city is too vast to calibrate in feet or yards.

Cha-Cha-Cha is a 40-foot performance cruiser, part race boat and part play boat. The manufacturer is C&C; and the skipper is Larry Walter, whose home is at the other end of the boat’s dock on the Balboa Peninsula. The five men and five women crewing on this Sunday limber up by sailing nonchalantly back and forth along the narrow harbor.

Something about these faces: There are no daredevil looks here, no shows of gladiator aggression. They are confident faces, yes, tinged with anticipation and maybe a hint of obsession. But these adventurers don’t wear the expressions of people out to conquer nature, or even contest it. To the contrary, their countenance is serene. They are here to pursue harmony with their surroundings. Because to read the restless shifts of wind, to understand the pull of tide, to know the leeway of the unseen keel knifing through water is to advance faster.

And this, after all, is a race: 200-plus sailors and 41 boats, ranging from 20 to 48 feet in length have gathered in Newport’s crowded harbor for a dash offshore and back under handicap rules that will bestow on winners the grand prize of ... a bottle of wine.

The art of speed

His vocation is president of Regatta Gear, the Web-based apparel company. His avocation for 35 years has been to roam the sea and race sailboats. Along the way, Walter’s hair has taken on the shimmer-silver color of sunlight reflecting off saltwater. Because he is both a lively and pleasant skipper, one who competes hard without being hard, he gets his pick among Southern California’s elite crews. The result can be seen in degrees of precision, artistry and, no doubt, boat speed too -- although when it comes to sailing, speed is an entirely relative matter.

At 500 miles an hour in a jetliner, one can barely perceive forward progress. In a car on the freeway, 50 miles an hour is painfully slow. But a sailboat is alive and brisk, almost thrilling, when advancing just faster than a walk. And it becomes a bigger kick the closer one drives to the groove.

Once you appreciate that, you can account for people endlessly investing thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands, on the latest high-tech fabrics for sails and the most advanced gizmos to control them. The elevated heart rate that comes by moving forward 0.02% faster than anyone else is acquired slowly and is also habit-forming.

Aboard the Cha-Cha-Cha, the casual warm-up yields to concentration. The incoming tide is gauged against the breeze. The crew wants to be headed outbound at full speed, crossing the invisible starting line between the race committee boat and a distant buoy, or pin, at exactly the sound of the horn, and without any other competitors disrupting the way. Apart from that, the fleet must also thread through the everyday weekend traffic of the harbor -- the fishing boats with their distracted fishermen, the poky kayakers, the busy-busy Balboa ferry and the three-story-tall charter yacht that brings a wedding party into the middle of the channel to gawk.

Cha-Cha-Cha’s crew members synchronize their countdown watches. The blast of an air horn sounds a five-minute warning for class-A racers. Cha-Cha-Cha is scheduled to leave a few minutes later, with the mid-sized boats in class C.

Walter talks to two tacticians, Sonny Gibson, a toothy Newport Beach sailmaker, and Tony Stuart, a Long Beach semi-pro sailor with a laconic grin. The three agree to vie for the right-hand side of the starting line. Crew members begin calling out the remaining minutes until the start.

“Coming up on eight.”

Walter is sailing away from the starting line, hugging the windward edge of the channel.

“Stand by to tack!” he says, his voice now more earnest.

“Coming up on five,” says someone.

“Tacking!”

It is the simplest maneuver, and always startling. The wind has been coming at more or less 90 degrees from the port side. Walter spins the 48-inch, leather-covered wheel and the boat pivots in a smart about-face. The mainsail shifts with the wind. A winch screams as the crew pulls tight the oversized jib, as long as half the deck and made of stiff Kevlar. Then quiet.

“Three ... coming up on two.”

Walter zigzags to bleed off speed. Don’t want to overrun the starting line. The chaos of the sailing fleet has disappeared. The class-C boats are shoulder to shoulder, pointing to the harbor mouth.

“One-thirty,” says Molly McCloud, another tactician and a semi-pro sailor from Long Beach who is trimming the mainsail to draw with constant effect in the random inshore breeze. One more zigzag.

“Coming on one.”

Now the crew counts down seconds. Walter and his cockpit team calculate their speed, the distance to the starting line, the angle of attack by competitors.

“Ten ... seven ... three ...”

The horn. Cha-Cha-Cha’s bow crosses the unseen line. A perfect start.

Risk vs. romance

The dictionary provides a puzzling definition of adventure. It is said to be the embrace of risk but also the quest for a “stirring experience, often of a romantic nature.” Today, these ideas have become two extended branches off the same stalk, and they’ve grown so far apart that people on one lose sight of their kinship with those on the other.

The media spotlight shines brighter on those adventurers who seek risk. A breathless lexicon has grown up around the antics of those who pursue derring-do to the extreme, even to the point of goofiness.

Sailors, the original romantics, respond by circling their wagons. A few, those who brave the Southern oceans in small craft or perhaps those who venture through pirate-infested passages of Asia, stand apart, recognized as “extreme” sailors. The rest tell their stories and celebrate their adventures among themselves, in their own specialty periodicals: The Log, Santana, Latitude 38, 48° North.

Sailboat racing, one of our oldest and noblest encounters with the wild, exists within sight of millions of people, and mostly out of mind. Except for that occasional quizzical look sailors get from someone who is utterly sincere when asking, “What’s the point of going around in circles anyway?”

Southern California sailors long ago thought to mark their wandering paths with buoys and call them contests. Such events are simultaneously simple matches of boats against each other and individuals’ perpetual quests to align technology -- carbon fiber, Dacron, Kevlar, Pentex, Spectra, Vectran -- with the ever-changing play of wind, wave and water. When you achieve a union, it is very much like grace itself.

Moving fluidly so as not to send disrupting vibrations through the vessel -- not to rock the boat -- Cha-Cha-Cha’s crew gathers on the downwind, or leeward, rail. Their combined weight imperceptibly adds to the heel, putting the sails at a more favorable angle to this light wind, adding a fraction of a knot to the boat’s velocity.

Sailboat racing demands nothing so much as a keen appreciation of small gains in the face of large forces. Cha-Cha-Cha is second to reach open water. The challenge is to take advantage of a breeze that is perpetually shifting, fading and then gusting, although a newcomer might not be aware of it doing any of those things if others on the boat weren’t so absorbed with the certainty that it is, or soon will be.

To the racing sailor, “wind” is synonymous with “pressure,” and the tacticians call out the shifts by divining the wind as it approaches: “Pressure in five, four, three ... “ Two seconds later, sure enough the boat heels over a fraction of a degree farther and the digital knot meter shows a burst of acceleration from 6.45 to 7.03 knots per hour.

At 15 tons or so, Cha-Cha-Cha is among the heaviest boats in the class -- making her potentially the fastest in strong winds but rather sluggish in today’s light 6- to 8-knot breeze. She is third around the next buoy. Tacticians take in the scene and suspect that there is more wind to the right than to the left. She veers 45 degrees off the next marker, and away from most of the other boats, searching for wind.

The rhythms of sailing are agreeable: intervals of tranquillity interrupted by bursts of choreographed athleticism. The race has been underway for 80 minutes, and the nearest competing boats are now just specks on the horizon. The chit-chat, the sunbathing, the hypnotic surrender of self to surroundings, the rhythmic chanting, “pressure in three, two ... “ ends as Walter summons the crew: “Prepare to tack

Like rifle fire, the jib crackles and a winch screeches, and Cha-Cha-Cha takes aim at the rest of the fleet and the distant beacon of a navigational buoy. In 15 minutes, the crew will know whether its gamble to veer wide of the other boats has paid off.

Those minutes pass quickly and, yes, the strategy works: Cha-Cha-Cha goes farther but accomplishes it faster, and now vies for second place. If. If the boat can be put around the mark without having to tack upwind again. But. But the wind is working against her, pushing left when the buoy must be rounded to the right. Six knots an hour closes the distance between fragile sailboat and heavy steel buoy at an unnerving rate.

Overhead, the sky is dramatized by fair-weather cumulus clouds marching down from the Arctic. There is a touch of the season’s chill to the air and a glow of warmth from the sun. The swell that undulates through the hull, and from your feet through you, carries memories of distant lands, of the far-off havoc of storms, of the lure of vast space. The wind, as so often happens here, gains enthusiasm as the day lengthens -- sucked inland by heat rising off the land. You are not merely aware of nature in your surroundings, but engaged in it.

Look closely, you will see that sailors tend to favor the view to the west, away from the city -- and the more they sail, the more the empty “out there” accrues meaning. Primordial instincts awaken. The dictionary forgets to tell us that by taking us away, adventure also serves to bring us home -- to the present, the now, the moment. Only later will you remember that so much of our days are spent apart from the present -- looking over our shoulders at what we’ve done or what has been done to us, and then looking ahead and anticipating what we must do next. For the moment, you are aware again of the horizon and its portent.

And that answers the question: What are we seeking out here?

Intoxicating reward

Impossible. Can’t make it. Cha-Cha-Cha must turn away.

“We’ve got it made,” the tacticians decide.

The sea lions that crowd this bobbing offshore buoy object. They bark warnings.

Walter aims the wrong way, heading left of the marker. The boat gains a touch of speed by taking a more advantageous angle to the wind.

Then, entirely poised, he spins the helm in the other direction. The bow swings right, close enough to almost scrape the barnacled steel canister. Sails immediately lose power and begin to shiver as the boat heads into the wind. On momentum alone, Walter rounds the buoy with 18 inches to spare. “Shooting the mark.”

You count teeth in the mouths of the now-furious sea lions. The crew sends the balloon spinnaker, the color of lipstick and bigger than a frontyard, shooting aloft, held open by a pole and opposing guy lines, providing oomph for this downwind leg home. They peel the jib from behind it and fold it away. Then, another respite to contemplate the soar of clouds, to let the mind wander in this welcoming terrain of the present.

Reading the pressure shifts, the tacticians guide Walter back to the breakwater, then into the mouth of the harbor and on to the Balboa Yacht Club, sponsor of these Sunkist Series regattas at the start of each winter month. A horn sounds at the finish line. Rum-and-Cokes are poured. Cha-Cha-Cha noses to a dock. Crews gather at the clubhouse. Finish times are multiplied by handicaps.

The outcome: second place. Cha-Cha-Cha wins a bottle of Chardonnay.