Californian Finishes First : Tall Ships Set Sails but Fickle Winds Slow Down Race

“Slack the port tops’l!” barked the Pilgrim’s second mate, Doug Corey. “Now give me a pull on the starboard!”

Pulleys squealed as the crew tugged and made fast the thick lines, setting the Pilgrim’s square-rigged sails to Corey’s liking. But it was of little use. The wind, which only moments before had pushed the Pilgrim along at six or seven knots, was now only a whisper. The proud, double-masted Pilgrim, a replica of the trading ship Richard Henry Dana sailed on 151 years ago, was barely moving.

But neither were the other three entrants in the 1986 Southern California Tall Ships Race on Saturday. The Discovery and the Revolution, two smaller ships given half-hour head starts, were almost within range of the Pilgrim’s Civil War cannon--about 200 yards. And the Californian, the state’s official tall ship, which had demonstrated its speed in the first hour of the race by putting nearly a mile between itself and the Pilgrim, was no longer pulling away.

About an hour later, the wind finally did come up again. And the four tall ships, surrounded by a flotilla of pleasure craft that included windsurfers, rowboats and expensive yachts, were able to complete the 18-mile, downwind trip from the Balboa Pier to the Municipal Pier in San Clemente--averting a repeat of last year’s race, when the ships had to use their engines for lack of wind.

As expected, the Californian finished first, in about 3 1/2 hours. The Discovery, with the Pilgrim just a few yards behind her, followed about 45 minutes later. The Resolution, built in 1926 and the only tall ship in the race that is not a replica, finished last.

Show Off Skills

But the race really didn’t matter. More than anything else, it was a chance for the crews of the tall ships to show off their skills, and to recall an era when wooden ships with heavy canvas sails ruled the seas.

“She’s beautiful,” said Pilgrim Captain Ray Wallace, who lives in Palos Verdes. “She’s performing as well as she ever has, and this is the best crew I’ve ever sailed her with.” Wallace, 68, should know; he had the one-time cargo schooner refitted as a classic vessel in Portugal, and sailed the ship across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to California.

Wallace, dressed in white pants and a white captain’s shirt, spent most of the race standing on the poop deck, surveying the situation and giving orders to his mates.

Crew member Beth Shevlin, 26, of Costa Mesa had once thought that she could only be a cook on the Pilgrim. But since May, she has been an “ordinary seaman,” working the sheets and clambering up the masts to the yardarms high above the brig’s 98-foot-long deck.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Shevlin said. “But it’s also kind of sad. After this race, we put the Pilgrim away for another year.”