Thistle Midwinters West Regatta : A Race of Tactics, Not Technology

This is a big weekend for the San Diego sailing community, and not simply because of Dennis Conner’s efforts off the Australian coast.

Through Sunday, the Mission Bay Yacht Club is playing host to the 16th annual Thistle Midwinters West, the top regatta in the western United States for an unpretentious class of sailboat that emphasizes teamwork and tactics over technological innovation.

The Midwinters, which continues today with a race off the coast of Mission Beach and concludes Sunday with races on Mission Bay, is a world apart from big-name sailing in more ways than just geography. While costly modifications to boat design often determine success and failure in many classes of sailing, they are prohibited in “one-design” classes such as the Thistles.

The 17-foot, three-man Thistle is not the kind of racing boat that becomes obsolete months after leaving the factory. The 35 Thistles competing this weekend are all virtual replicas of the prototype built in 1946, although boat builders in the last few years have substituted fiberglass for the traditional mahogany hull.

“It’s probably one of the strictest classes,” said Fred Nagel, the regatta’s co-chairman. “They keep it real strict in order to maintain the integrity of the class and keep the cost down.”

The impact of the stringent design standards was evident last summer at the Thistle National Championship in Pensacola, Fla., where the first Thistle built finished third in a fleet of 71 boats. This resistance to change is fine with Thistle sailors, who say they prefer to see skippering--not engineering--decide races.

“It causes all the boats to be fairly equal, and by producing a fairly equal boat that doesn’t cost too much, it makes tactics more important,” sailor Dean Iwahashi said. “In the America’s Cup, you’re concerned more with boat speed. Here, you’re concerned more with the tactical things.”

As is the case with many amateur sailing regattas, the Midwinters West exudes the easy camaraderie of a fishing trip or company picnic.

“It’s pretty informal,” said Jack Christiansen, 25, of Seattle. “You’re just meeting a lot of good people. It’s really fun. I haven’t been down to this regatta for five years and already I’ve seen a lot of people I know from last time.”

But the laid-back demeanor of the participants belies the stiff competition among the sport’s top sailors. Although there are about 2,000 active Thistle sailors nationwide, the elite of Thistle racing consists of a few dozen sailors who have the time, money and dedication to master the sport.

A handful of these heavyweights are entered in the Midwinters West, which is one of the top three regattas in the Thistle class, the others being next month’s Midwinters East in St. Petersburg, Fla., and the national championship, to be held this August in Sandusky, Ohio.

Leading the pack Friday was 1976 National Champion Mark Gilliland, who won all three of his races with a crew of Cory Smith and Mark Reynolds, winner of last year’s Midwinters West.

Other top-ranked sailors include Dave Keran, who placed 10th at the 1986 Nationals; Iwahashi, winner of the High Sierra Regatta in Huntington Lake, Calif.; and Christiansen, who won the 1986 Mallory Cup, a sailing championship that features a different class of boats each year. But after this top group, the level of competition drops off precipitously, since many of the weekend sailors rarely compete at the national level.

“It’s like there’s two fleets,” Gilliland said. “There’s a group of really top-notch sailors and there’s a group that’s not quite as good. I think even in the championship round there’s going to be about six to 10 top boats, and everybody else will be kind of equal. One of my tacks is to make sure I don’t get back in that (second) pack and have to fight out with that group and try to pass them one at a time.”

The major factor that divides the top competitors from the weekend sailors is the time required to compete at the national level.

“For the average Joe Blow picking up this sport at 20, it would take about five years to really start picking it up,” said Keran, a 26-year veteran of the sport. “That’s competing in about 30 regattas a year and practicing two to three times a week.”

Many of the top Thistle sailors hold jobs in the boating industry, making it easier for them to ask the boss for a few days off to compete in a regatta. For example, Reynolds and Christiansen make sails and Iwahashi owns a boat dealership in Fresno.

Recently, some members of the Thistle Class of America have complained of the creeping professionalism represented by these “full-time” sailors and have sought to establish a separate category for them. However, that idea was not popular among the top sailors at Midwinters West.

“There’s a whole lot of discussion about professionalism in sailing because the people who make the sails and work on boats have much more opportunity to be in the water,” said Keran, who juggles his participation in yachting with a full-time job. “I say if you’re going up against sailors who’re good, you go uphill and you learn from them.”