Sailors Versus Strollers : Beached Boats Raise Stormy Issue on Bay

A turf war is troubling a quiet corner of Mission Bay, dividing neighbor from neighbor and burgher from outlander over the knotty question of which members of the public call the shots on a public beach.

Martha King defines the public as people like herself--property owners and others in the northwestern corner of the bay who want to walk and loll about on the sand without negotiating a forest of catamarans.

Steve Forcucci defines the public as people like himself--apartment-dwellers and other sailors who like to spend an afternoon on the water without negotiating parking with a boat trailer in tow.

After all, this is Sail Bay.

Now the City Council is about to enter the fray.

Under a proposed ordinance pending before the council, overnight boat parking would be banned along the half-mile beach from Santa Clara Point north to Yarmouth Court. The only exceptions would be Friday and Saturday nights, and the nights before holidays.

Boat owners wanting to stay in the bay could rent space in a private marina or rent a mooring from the city to the tune of $285 a year. Or, they could pay $65 for space on a steel “beach bar,” if their boat is no longer than 14 feet.

“However, we don’t have any beach bars available,” Officer Lisa Lee of the Harbor Police explained Thursday. “That’s the catch.”

King, a realtor whose big house overlooks the bay at Verona Court, helped mount a petition drive for the ordinance earlier this spring after she said she noticed Hobie Cats proliferating over the past three years.

She said the boats take up space and prevent city workers from cleaning the beach. She says some boat owners even leave the rigging up all night, rattling in the wind and keeping homeowners from sleeping.

“I feel if people have boats, they should have a place to moor them,” she said. “When our son had a Hobie Cat, we rented a space for it.”

King figures that most of the two dozen homeowners directly affected either don’t have boats or, if they do, have their own places to store them. Everyone signed the petition except one man, she said, describing his house in unflattering terms.

But directly across the bay, other petitions have circulated, defending the right to park boats on the beach. Last summer, those petitions successfully blocked a baywide boat parking ban.

Forcucci, returning from an afternoon sail Thursday, insisted non-sailors rarely even use the beach north of Santa Clara Point. But for sailors, he said, the place is perfect: It’s sheltered, and motor boats are banned between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Bringing in boat trailers will take up double the parking spaces, so only half as many people could sail, he said. The added time it would take to unload and rig their boats would mean sailors would start arriving at 7 a.m.

“Most people that own these boats are family people. They respect this beach like their home. This is the cleanest beach around,” Forcucci said. “People who can afford $4,000 or $5,000 for a catamaran are not irresponsible.”

Along Bayside Walk Wednesday afternoon, word of the proposed ordinance set people to musing about civil liberties.

“These folks being down here unauthorized, I say it’s wrong,” said Jerry Darr, a carpenter working on a waterfront house. “Hell, I could park my jalopy down here, pop open the trunk, fill it with flowers, and call it art.”

But H.R. Smith, who said he had just moved in with his girlfriend to Seagirt Court and pointed out his orange catamaran lounging on the beach, railed, “I think it stinks. That’s why you have a place on the bay or beach.”

Asked about perhaps renting space, Smith countered, “It’s double taxation! Doesn’t the Constitution prohibit that?”

One man, a resident of the beach for 52 years, said Mission Bay Park was intended for the public and not for a makeshift marina. He said he could recall a time 10 years back when the Harbor Patrol “used to tow them away like little ducks.”

Leo Dumond, who had dropped over from Clairemont for a stroll, put down the pint of butter pecan ice cream he was eating and paused a moment to think.

“We don’t want to get like Russia, the way they are, you know,” he said. “They even tell you what kind of cheese to eat on Friday.”