SMYTH IN THE FAST LANE : Speed Attracts Sailor, but Gold in ’88 Is Real Lure

It’s not for Randy Smyth to stand at the wheel of a great yacht and shout directions to his crew, nor is it for Randy Smyth to cruise along leisurely with a breeze, laid back and mellow.

Speed. That’s for Randy Smyth, speed and the action it brings, which often is as much as he can handle.

He has had masts fall down, hulls shatter and sails shred. You don’t get to be one of the world’s hottest catamaran sailors without mishaps.

Last month, Smyth was sailing Rudy Choy’s 62-foot Aikane X-5 in the Transpac race from off the Palos Verdes peninsula to Hawaii. As he was passing Santa Catalina Island, the spinnaker halyard fell down to the deck. The odd part was that the spinnaker wasn’t even up at the time.

“We couldn’t figure it out,” Smyth said. “But it turned out there was a bolt inside the top of the mast with a cap nut that was just sharp enough to cut through both spinnaker halyards.”

Smyth and his crew didn’t know that until they finished and could drop the mast. Meanwhile, guess who was hauled up the mast 18 times to re-rig the device?

“No one else even had a clue that it would be possible to go up an 82-foot mast in the middle of the ocean. I was up there at midnight sometimes, (wearing) a miner’s cap with a little light,” Smyth said.

“But it was either get the sails up somehow or be stranded 1,500 miles from Hawaii, so you figure out how to do it.”

Never a dull moment, but Smyth would have it no other way.

“I did two Transpacs with my family back in ’69 and ‘71,” he said. “We had a Cal 36 (a monohull). Things have changed a lot since then. The crossing in ’71 took 14 1/2 days, and this year it was less than half that. It’s a whole different way of crossing the ocean.

“The cat is obviously the way to go. Even with the problems we had, limping along as slow as we could possibly go, we still beat all the sleds (ultralight monohulls).

“It’s a world of sailing that, once it gets your attention and you’ve seen what it’s like, no, you can’t go back. At least I can’t.”

Smyth’s regular crew on two-man cats is Jay Glaser, who works for him at his Huntington Beach sail loft, which supplies many of his rivals. They won two world championships before they took the Tornado class silver medal in the 1984 Olympics at Long Beach.

Smyth has also won the two major catamaran marathon races--the Worrell 1000 on the East Coast and the Pacific 1000 in Southern California--as well as the first Formula 40 series championship in Europe last year.

But the most significant breakthrough on behalf of all multihull sailors was when he won the Rolex Yachtsman of the Year award in 1982--the first multihull sailor to be so recognized.

“Even more than that,” he added, “it was (presented at) the New York Yacht Club, which is often thought of as the pinnacle of stuffiness. It opened their eyes somewhat.”

Smyth, 33, was about 11 when he had his first catamaran encounter.

“It was at the Long Beach sailboat show in ‘65, a low-priced boat called the Aquacat. They had some demonstrations on the beach and I thought, that’s pretty neat.”

About a month later, Smyth had his first catamaran.

“(We) put it down at my grandparents’ house in Naples. We’d go down on weekends and during the summer and race that little Aquacat up and down the bay, flying the hulls, crashing into buoys. It was real exciting.”

And the obvious advantages over a monohull, Smyth said, were “high speed, light weight, easy to transport. A monohull catered more toward the person that likes a dinette, stove, head and interior comforts of home out on the water.

“But what really converted me over was when the Tornado was chosen for the ’76 Olympics. I started crewing with a fellow named Rick Taylor in Newport Beach and doing some international traveling.”

Smyth is highly nationalistic when it comes to the Olympics. A silver medal in ’84 was pretty good, but a year earlier he and Glaser had been favored to win the gold. Then Australia’s Chris Cairns took charge with a radical rig, and Smyth was caught in a technological gap.

“In December of ‘83, we finished fifth in the worlds and were quite off the pace,” Smyth said. “We kept working right up to the Olympics to where we did get back to a gold-medal possibility.”

But Rex Sellers of New Zealand won the gold and shocked Smyth and Cairns, who finished third.

“It turned out that Long Beach that year was lighter wind than expected,” Smyth said. “The New Zealanders had a sail that was old, blown-out, full and powered for the light stuff. We always beat ‘em when it was windy, but it wasn’t a windy regatta. They had the right rig for those conditions. They deserved to win the Olympics.”

The silver may have been a larger disappointment than Smyth will admit, because he is firmly focused on Pusan, South Korea, and the ’88 Games.

“That’s a real pinnacle to work toward. It really does mean something to me. It’s hard to put anything above the Olympics.”

Still, he isn’t going to test the waters in the pre-Olympic regatta at Pusan next month and has been spending most of his time sailing boats other than the Tornado.

“I find I learn most by racing against the best people,” Smyth said. “This year, there are hardly any people going (to Pusan). It’s much more productive, if you’re trying to learn how you’re doing and how to go faster, to go to the European championship or the world championship with 60, 70, 80 boats.

“We have some really good weathermen on the team, and I’ll be reading the reports of the competitors that go this year. But we’re going to spend enough time in Pusan before the regatta to learn the idiosyncrasies of the currents and things, but I don’t feel that’s gonna win or lose the Olympics. If you have boat speed when you go there, you’ll have a good chance, and you get boat speed by racing fast people.

“Also, there are some amazing lessons you learn by being diversified, new ideas that you can take back to the Tornados--sail shapes for various sea conditions, navigational and weather knowledge.

“When I used to sail just the Tornados, it was a high-speed, crazy, scary, out-of-control boat. Now we run the boat. You can only get that (attitude) by going one level above it and backing up.”