Alamitos Bay Olympic Sailing Center Plan Gains Speed

Every weekday, Steve and Ron Rosenberg point the bow of their sleek Flying Dutchman-class sailboat toward open water.

The brothers already have invested two years in a quest for excellence that has taken them to regattas around the globe. They push themselves and their boat to the limit with a solitary goal of becoming Olympic champions.

“We’ve set this goal to win a gold medal and we’re not going to stop until it’s done,” said a confident Steve Rosenberg.

Despite long and exacting hours at sea, the Olympic sailing hopefuls said practicing by themselves is not enough. Like boxers in need of sparring partners, they said they cannot perfect their skills without competition from other boats. Stopwatches do not compare with the chance to match their skills and wits against other pairs of sailors.

That is why Steve, 24, and Ron, 21, along with other sailors and racing officials in Long Beach, endorse a move to establish a training center for Olympic-class and intercollegiate sailboat and sailboard racing at the site of an old dock on Alamitos Bay. They say the center would lure the world’s finest sailors to the area.

“There are a lot of very good sailors,” Steve said. “It would be heavily utilized.”

The proposal to establish the Long Beach Sailing Center on Alamitos Bay has been discussed in sailing circles for several years. Now, however, it appears the talk may translate into action.

On Sept. 29, the City Council approved a proposal “in concept” to lease the city-owned Naples Landing on Ocean Boulevard north of 55th Place as the site for the new center.

Executive Committee members of the Long Beach Regatta’s Organizing Committee, a group of sailboat racing enthusiasts promoting the project, said they would remove the old, unused dock area to make way for construction of an 8,500-square-foot building behind a seawall.

The center would include classrooms, lockers and boat storage areas. Besides Olympic hopefuls, other advanced sailors could use the center to perfect their techniques at the tiller. It could provide a base for the sailing teams of USC; California State University, Long Beach, and Long Beach City College, under the preliminary proposal presented to the city.

It would also serve as a training site for advanced sailing seminars conducted by the California International Sailing Assn., a nonprofit corporation that promotes development of amateur sailing competition, committee member Thomas Shadden said.

The city’s preliminary approval is contingent upon the committee being able to fund the project entirely through private donations by Dec. 31, 1989. Committee members said they have not yet figured out potential costs or set a fund-raising target.

Committee members said their next step will be to present design and fund-raising ideas for the sailing center to their board of directors in mid-November. They said the sailing center would be a boon not only to sailors, but also to the city’s international reputation.

“It’s a benefit to the community,” Shadden said. “Everybody wins in this case.”

Jim Gilchrist, the city’s development projects manager, said the terms of the lease have not yet been discussed with the committee. The city bought the 32-slip landing in 1983 to enhance its sailing programs. While some improvements are planned, Gilchrist said, the wooden deck area and a shack are no longer used but the slips are filled.

Four executive committee members--successful businessmen who devote much of their time to organizing sailboat competition--agree that Long Beach would be an outstanding site for a sailing center, given the near-perfect weather conditions for the sport that prevail year-round.

“Alamitos Bay is one of the best sailing (locales) because of the natural conditions God gave us out there,” said architect and committee member Charles Kober.

Shadden, a Long Beach investment firm executive, said the center would complement the city’s Leeway Sailing Center just a few hundred feet away along the sandy beach, where beginning and intermediate sailors learn basic sailing and sailboarding skills.

While Leeway has trained thousands of young sailors, they have no place to go to advance their skills when seeking to enter racing or advanced sailing, he said.

The idea of developing the center was first seriously considered about 1980 when the present-day committee was then called the Olympic Classes Regatta Organizing Committee, a group created to develop and train sailing course officials before the 1984 games. As the games approached, the group was merged into the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. It staged the Olympic sailing events in San Pedro Bay.

Saw Need for a Sailing Center

Kober said it was during this time that he and other sailing officials could see the need for a sailing center. Visiting competitors faced a host of daily hassles, including the simple inability to get their boats easily in and out of the water.

Committee member Barry R. Labow, a retired publisher, said the city had boat launch ramps, but no public hoist until the LAOOC had a hoist installed for the Olympic sailing events.

Also, visiting sailors had to impose on the yacht clubs. It was felt that a sailing center would better accommodate the athletes, but the Olympic period passed without securing the approval or funding to start a center.

Now, organizers say, the timing is right to get the project moving. Unprecedented cable television coverage of Dennis Conner’s victory this year in the America’s Cup races made the sport accessible for the first time to sports fans used to sailing no farther than the refrigerator during commercial breaks.

Long Beach is continuing to polish its reputation as one of the world’s top destinations for sailing competition. Besides the annual Congressional Cup, which attracts an international array of sailing stars, the city will play host next August to the first-ever World Cup of Match Race Sailing, a one-on-one sailing event involving eight countries, according to Shadden. He said the competition is listed as an official Long Beach centennial event.

“We’ve conducted international events here over the years. We’re recognized worldwide,” said Shadden, whose son, John, is considered one of the nation’s top competitive sailors.

While an Olympic classes training site was established 18 months ago in Florida, none exists on the West Coast, committee members said. The U.S. Yacht Racing Union opened the national sailing center in Miami, but also wants a site in the West as well.

Miami Seen as Model for Their Own

The members said they look upon the Miami center as a model for their own. They also praised Orange Coast College’s sailing center in Newport Beach and the intercollegiate Aquatic Center in San Diego’s Mission Bay.

“We’re going to take the best of each of them and put them into ours,” said committee member H. Donald Brown, a senior aerospace design engineer.

While local Olympic hopefuls praise the new center in Miami, they said it is too far away to serve them as a practical training site. Instead of merely plunking down a couple hundred dollars for an airline ticket, local sailboat racers said they have to tow their boats wherever they go, making Miami a long 3,000 drive.

Moreover, Shadden said Miami has far different weather conditions than are commonly found in Long Beach. The muggy summer, generally lighter and less predictable winds do not mirror West Coast race conditions.

He Trained Here for Olympics

Dave Perry, 33, of Milford, Conn., who trained in Long Beach to try to make the 1984 U.S. Olympic team, said a training center would have been of great value to him.

Instead of having a sailing center where he could seek out competitors and store his boat, Perry said he had to use the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club as his base of operations.

Dave Ullman, a Newport Beach sailmaker who coaches 1988 Olympic hopefuls in the 470 Class, said a sailing center in Long Beach would make it easier to organize clinics.

“Having a sailing center will allow them not to have to deal with the yacht clubs” which, he said, are stretched beyond reasonable limits providing for visiting sailors.

USC Team Gives Its Endorsement

Jim Eddy, coach of the 30-member USC sailing team based at Alamitos Bay Yacht Club, said that the sailing center is “definitely . . . something we would very much like to have.”

Currently, Eddy said, “We’re infringing on some of the (yacht) club’s space. We definitely feel very much a guest there and it creates problems. We can’t use it at all in the summer.”

With additional space, he said the team’s fleet could expand. Currently, Eddy said the team has six 14-foot Flying Juniors.

The Rosenbergs believe the sailing center would greatly improve the supply of qualified competitors by accommodating out-of-town sailors who might have trouble finding a place to keep their boats otherwise.

“Usually, they cannot just show up and walk into a (yacht club) and launch their boat,” Steve Rosenberg said. “You’ve got to know somebody or finagle your way in.”

Consequently, he said, “We’re begging people to come out here and sail.”