SETTING SAIL : The Longing Landlubbers Really Can Take to the Sea: No Treasure Chest Needed

Sail: To be impelled by the action of wind upon sails; to glide through the air without apparent exertion, as a bird; hence, to move in a stately manner, or arrogantly.

Yes, it’s probably true: There is a certain arrogance to sailing, a measure of smug satisfaction about moving in tune with nature’s forces, without mashing a throttle or working up a sweat.

Ol’ Webster must have been a salt himself. How else could he have known?

Sailors will rationalize their absence from church on Sunday by explaining that this is their religion. How could one be closer to God than when sailing on His water, under His glorious sky, in His fair wind?

Is there serenity more mellow than drifting off a warm breeze on a California summer evening? Is there greater exhilaration than slashing and splashing into the afternoon sou’wester through the spray?

Unhappily, it’s a privilege enjoyed by few, but not necessarily the privileged few. Working stiffs can do it, too. They just don’t know where to begin.

Bewitched from ashore, but bothered by the intimidating aura of yacht clubs and bewildered by the mysteries of making a boat move into the wind, they stroll past the marinas wistfully and wonder if they could do it, too.

“Sailing is easy,” the boat show brochures tell you. “It is affordable,” they insist.

True. But they don’t tell you that, in its way, the sport also is as addictive as cocaine. Most sailors, seeking that ultimate high, continuously reach beyond themselves. Bigger boats. Faster boats. Hopelessly hooked.

A warning: If you buy a sailboat, the paint will peel off your house, your lawn will go to seed, you’ll have dirty windows, dirty clothes in the laundry hamper, and your oil will never get changed. Those are weekend chores, and if you get into sailing, your weekends will be spent with your boat.

Not necessarily on your boat. Sometimes under it, cleaning the bottom, or within it, sopping up the bilge. A sailboat is a demanding mistress, and it will tolerate no neglect.

The house and the yard and the car can go to blazes, but the boat will be shipshape. Baby needs shoes, but the boat needs . . . something. Always something.

There is a better alternative: Make friends with somebody else who owns a sailboat. But not so close that he’ll ask you to help work on it. Just so close that he’ll ask you to go sailing.

Failing that, you could join one of the sailing clubs listed in the Yellow Pages but, of course, that’s not like owning your own boat and the joy of scrubbing your own deck.

So, where to begin?

This is where a lot of new sailors get mixed up. First they buy a boat. Then they take sailing lessons.

Wrong!

First . . . learn to sail.

When the elements of fear and the unexpected are added, sailing is a difficult sport to transfer from theory to practice.

In the peak summer months, Fletcher Olson graduates between 88 and 120 students per week from the classes she operates for the City of Newport Beach. The number includes a few who arrive loaded with sailing theory they have read.

“Those are the dangerous ones,” Olson said.

Paul Anctil, who heads the City of Long Beach’s Sailing Center at Alamitos Bay, said: “I see it all the time, people out there trying to sail on their own. Basically, I get the ones that get scared enough to want to get trained.”

But he would advise a prospective sailor to get trained first.

“It’s an easy way to do it,” he said. “If you decide you don’t like it, you don’t have a boat to sell.”

There are several excellent, private sailing schools around the marinas--again, check the Yellow Pages. The Sea Explorers have a good program, the Coast Guard Auxiliary offers free classroom instruction, and the current boat show in Long Beach sponsored by the Southern California Marine Assn. (ending Sunday) is giving free, half-hour introductory lessons in demonstration boats on a safe, quiet lagoon.

Bruce Brown, president of the SCMA, stresses the importance of some kind of lessons for beginners, from personal experience in his youth at Lake Arrowhead.

“I learned how to swim out of a boat before I learned how to sail it,” he said.

The most comprehensive and still inexpensive choice may be the public classes, which involve a limited commitment for the uncertain sailor.

The Alamitos Bay school, operating year-round on a small bay on the inland side of Ocean Blvd., offers 20 hours of instruction at a cost of $31 for children 8 to 18 and $41 for adults. Sabots may be rented at $50 for the course. During the summer, Anctil and his staff handle about 360 students every two weeks, divided evenly between children and adults.

“I like to stick with the cat-rigged (one sail) boats for beginners,” Anctil said. “It’s (the bay) probably the safest place on this stretch of coast to learn to sail. The water is very protected, but we have no buildings to block our wind, so there are no tricky shifts to worry about.”

Newport Beach offers similar programs at four locations, all on the bay, using Sabots, Lido 14s, sailboards and catamarans, all of which are provided at no charge. Ten hours of lessons cost from $29.50 to $39.50, depending on the type of boat. Children and adults usually are in the same class.

“We feel that a lot of parents and children like to take the classes together,” Olson said. “I was brought up through a yacht club program, and for the quality of instruction, this ranks with those.”

In both programs, classes usually are held in the morning when winds are light, and instructors go out in small power boats to keep an eye on the students like mother ducks.

Private boat operators are not required to have licenses in California, but Olson says she doesn’t turn anyone loose without issuing them a certificate of competency at graduation.

“And if they’re not competent, they don’t graduate,” she said. “Ninety percent of them have never been near a boat, but I’ve been doing this for 15 years and have had only two students that just didn’t get it and never will.”

But the ones who do are ready for the next step--buying a boat.

There are 568,602 boats registered in California, 71,543 (12.6%) of which are driven primarily by sail. Already you can see that you will be a member of a select minority.

Your choice of a boat should be determined by two factors: What do you plan to do with it? Where will you keep it?

The first rule is not to buy a boat too large for you and your most dedicated friends or family to sail. You’d be surprised at how many other things people would rather do on weekends. Sometimes you’ll be the only one interested in going sailing.

If you plan to race, get a boat that fits into one of the popular one-design (same model of boats) fleets in your area. Racing, by the way, is the best way to improve your skills, whether you win any trophies or not.

If you start small, it probably will be a dinghy, with a centerboard instead of a weighted keel. In strong winds those can be tricky, requiring you to time your maneuvers with shifting your weight to stay upright.

Catalina Yachts of Woodland Hills leads the nation in producing 3,000 sailboats a year, including all types from 8 to 46 feet. President Frank Butler was asked his advice for a starter boat.

“The bigger the boat the easier it is, up to a point,” he said. “A 25, 27 or 30 would be a lot easier to sail than the small dinghies. But when you start getting over 40 feet it takes more crew.”

Also, the larger and more expensive a boat you own, the more you’ll pay the state for it in personal property tax every year.

A good compromise for a family may be something like the Catalina 22, which can cost up to $10,000 depending on equipment. A Catalina 22 offers the bouncy feel of a small boat with the security of a keel.

“That’s why we’ve sold nearly 14,000 of them,” Butler said.

Some boats in the 20-to-25-foot range are kept in the water, others are trailered. Be resigned that there is no perfect place to keep a boat.

You may be lucky enough to acquire a slip in one of the major marinas. The waiting lists run from a few months for small boats to indefinite for large ones.

Suzette Hubiak of the Lido Yacht Achorage in Newport said: “Anything over 40 (feet) may never get in.”

It’s the same story all along the coast. Dick Miller, who runs Long Beach’s two marinas for 3,500 boats, said: “The (1983) opening of the Downtown Shoreline Marina really reduced our waiting list. There’s not a great demand now for the 20- to 25-foot slip. We get those turning over a little more rapidly.”

Having a boat in the water will cost you about $6 per foot per month or more in rent, on a constantly rising scale, in addition to the expense of hiring a guy in a frogman’s suit to scrape the algae off the bottom every few weeks--also charged by the foot.

Then, every couple of years you will want to have it hauled out at a commercial shipyard to apply new special bottom paint, which inhibits marine growth and costs from $50 up per gallon.

But don’t think about those things when you’re lazing around on the fantail on a Saturday afternoon. It could ruin your beautiful day.

The general alternative to having a slip is to have your boat on a trailer and keep it at home, if you have room.

But then you have to raise the mast and rig the lines every time you sail, plus suffer the salt water erosion of your trailer and fight the ongoing aggravation of erratic trailer lights.

Then there is the launching ramp. The fee at Dana Point will go from $4 to $5 this year, the same as the cost at the Long Beach ramps at Golden Avenue and Second Street, along with the sailboard-catamaran ramp on the beach at Claremont and Ocean in Belmont Shore.

Newport has only one launching ramp, and it’s not really suitable for sailboats because it’s behind a Pacific Coast Highway bridge that’s too low for most masts.

Five dollars isn’t bad when compared to slip rentals, but your first exposure to a weekend at the launching ramp can be more terrifying than your first stormy sail.

There are half a million boats in California that can be trailered, all of which seem to show up at a given launching ramp on Saturday morning. Worse, the power boats outnumber the state’s 42,681 trailered sailboats by about 10 to 1, and if you think they care about your problems, forget it.

Unfortunately, none of the sailing schools seem to offer much instruction on launching a boat, which involves backing a trailer downhill until it disappears into the drink, leaving the boat floating free.

It doesn’t sound easy, and without practice, it’s not even as easy as it sounds. A good idea might be to spend a few hours watching the weekend action at a busy launching ramp. You’ll learn some good techniques and probably enjoy a few laughs at somebody else’s expense.

The best compromise between a boat in the water and one on a trailer is a dry storage facility--no rigging, no bottom problems--but too few are available in the area.

The largest is the Embarcadero Marina in Dana Point, which rents 535 spaces for from $50 to $66 a month, with a $5 launching fee each time. They’ll even launch it for you for a total of $80 per month, but that also has a waiting list.

Whatever you buy, the boat dealer will be happy to see you. Times have not been good recently.

Brown, the SCMA president, said: “To be brutally honest, the sailing industry has gone through a major decline the last three years, (although) there seems to be a resurgence this year.”

Butler said that Catalina dealers have lost sales because of the lack of available slips.

Butler said: “It’s according to the area. But they always seem to be able to get a slip somehow. You may not go into the marina you want, but in time it works out. Long Beach and Marina Del Rey are hard to get into, Newport is really rough, but if you go up to Oxnard-Ventura it’s easier.”

Miller estimated that more than a third of the 1,500 sailboats in his two Long Beach marinas are owned by Orange County residents.

Like all the others, it seems, for that incomparable high and that enviable arrogance, they’re willing to pay the price.

MAJOR MARINAS

Marina Slips Fee* Wait** Alamitos Bay 1,800 $6.19+ 3 mos.+ Balboa Yacht Basin 175 9.50 6 mos.+ Calif. Recreation Co. (Newport) 565 7.50+ 2 mos.+ Dana Point 1,475 4.56 3 mos.+ Dana West 1,000 6.00+ 6 mos.+ Downtown Shoreline (L.B.) 1,700 6.19+ 1 yr.+ Lido Yacht Anchorage 300 8.25+ 3 mos.+ Marina Dunes 210 6.00 1-2 yrs. Sunset Aquatic Park 274 5.87+ 2-8 yrs.

*Per foot per month minimum for small boats; higher for larger boats. **Shorter for small boats.