ON THE WAY TO MANZANILLO : Beneath Everything Else Is a Demanding Yacht Race

It is, perhaps, the perfect marriage of mariachis, margaritas and all things maritime. There is music at the start and the finish. There are 1,100 miles of hard sailing in between.

Over the course of the week, there are danger, intrigue, ribaldry, high technology, hard drinking, international diplomacy and international relations.

The biennial San Diego-Manzanillo extravaganza has all the elements of a mini-series. To be sure, it is a show. But for the record, it is a yacht race.

It began Saturday under clear skies on easy seas off the Point Loma shore base of the San Diego Yacht Club. Twenty-nine boats, ranging in length from Roark Ludwig’s 36-foot Smaug to crusty Jake Wood’s 82-foot Sorcery (first to finish in 1986), ran off downwind and, if you like to look at maps this way, downhill.

In fact, the intimidating Sorcery almost ran over several smaller boats moments after the starting gun. Smaug barely got out of the way, but not before it was jostled by another boat. It was a rough beginning for a race that will conclude late next week at Las Hadas, the cream-colored, dreamlike Mexican coastal resort built for the jet set by a Bolivian tin magnate, Antinor Patino.

Las Hadas, Spanish for “the Fairies,” is the same resort where Dudley Moore hot-footed after braided Bo Derek in the Blake Edwards movie “10.”

“Las Hadas is the Disneyland of the Caribbean,” said Kathmandu crew member Mike Eldred after the 1986 race.

Las Hadas is the kind of place where even the cabana boys dismiss “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” as a documentary.

The seventh biennial San Diego-Manzanillo yacht race is, according to one publicity release, “a yachting race that can capture the attention of the nation.” But it is more important to know that the seventh biennial San Diego-Manzanillo yacht race--despite the fact that Stars & Stripes skipper Dennis Conner has sailed in it--couldn’t care less if it captured the attention of the nation.

“It’s a good downwind race that usually has enough wind to have you going but not so much that you’re out of control of the thing,” says Swiftsure III crew member Morey Blackman. “There’s the sunshine. You’re headed for Mexico. In the middle of winter. On a fast, competitive boat. And that’s it for coats and heavy sweaters.” Swiftsure was first to finish in this race in 1984.

“The main thing is who you’re sailing against,” says Bruce Nelson. Nelson is a crew member for Maverick, the 69-foot ultra-light displacement Nelson-Marek boat he began designing for owner Les Crouch last April. “The competition is the main thing.”

Maverick is the first all-aluminum ultra-light ever built. (An ultra-light displacement boat, or ULDB, means the boat rides higher in the water and goes faster in higher winds.) On the Thursday before the race, owner Crouch sat in the cockpit, surveyed the various solderers, drillers and sawyers swarming across his deck and talked about the challenge of sailing a boat that was nothing more than a concept a year ago.

“There is no question that people are watching to see how we do in this race,” he says. “We’re always concerned that it’s going to have good boat speed. The designer says it will. It certainly should on paper. But you never know. On the other hand, it might be faster than all the other boats.”

“It’s interesting,” said Blackman, who wandered by from the Swiftsure berth at E dock to check out Maverick at the head of the next row. “It could wipe us all out. It could do not so well.”

Meanwhile, workmen continued adjusting Maverick’s tracks in an 11th-hour attempt to correct problematical sheeting angles.

The advantages of an aluminum ultra-light are several. Cost is one. Depending on the deal an owner can cut with a designer and a builder, an aluminum ultra-light in the 68-foot range will vary in price from $750,000 to $1.2 million, comparatively inexpensive in this game. In this case, Crouch was dealing with one of the best. Nelson, 35, and a graduate of the University of Michigan school of Naval Architecture, was one of three designers for Stars & Stripes, the most recent America’s Cup winner.

Aluminum boats also last longer. And, says Crouch, they are stiffer, which means “we can bend the mast more.” Despite its slow start Saturday, everybody in the race feared the speed potential of Maverick.

“Just how fast we can go depends on how hard the wind blows,” Nelson says. “It if blows 80 (knots), we’ll go 60. There’s no limit per se. The limit is more in the people and in the gear. The whole thing will just explode at some point. Or we’ll cartwheel.”

Maverick’s design is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Nelson has added a little length and shaved away a little displacement from the boat’s original prototype. The net effect is a longer, lighter and, they hope, faster boat.

The maroon-colored Maverick has most of the latest technical advances, including a Zenith personal computer equipped with a 10-megabyte hard disc. The computer is hooked into all the boat’s instruments. It will record all the performance data during the race--such as how well Maverick does at various wind angles and wind speeds.

Crouch then takes that data, sends it to his “software people” who “make us an update.” Eventually, Crouch says, “we’ll know if we’re sailing the maximum speed toward the mark for a particular wind.”

If all that sounds complicated, it’s because it is. These are technological advances that haven’t waited for traditional sailors to catch up. “It’s got the latest of everything on it,” Blackman says of Maverick. “But others might say, ‘Geez, there’s no wood on this boat--there’s no tradition to it.’ ”

And, concedes Crouch, the computer “doesn’t take into account the waves and what an individual helmsman can do. It’s still a feel.”

Blackman, of the Swiftsure crew, grew up in West Los Angeles and started sailing in high school but later moved to Colorado. He was surprised to find an active sailing community in and around Denver, where there are lakes with shifty winds and highly changeable weather conditions. The best regatta competition there was among Hobie Cats.

Blackman lives in San Diego now, having recently sold his horse business in Colorado. He concedes that the idea of an aluminum ultra-light is foreign to him. “It’s the ultimate high-performance boat,” he says. “But they sail like a great big dinghy. They go like hell. But they bounce some, too. They heel over a lot more than they would if they had more of their weight down below.”

San Diego’s Crouch, on the other hand, didn’t get into sailing until about eight years ago, when his longtime law partner, Bill Bannasch, talked him into crewing on a race to Ensenada. Crouch got the bug. Not much later, Crouch and Bannasch successfully purchased Easy Eight Motels. Crouch has sailed more than 25,000 miles. He has crewed on Swiftsure and Eclipse, which is owned by Bannasch.

Crouch’s sailing background is less steeped in tradition than Blackman’s. He is 51 and wants to get the most out of the rest of his sailing life. Hence Maverick.

“Sailing is the only sport that I know of that somebody can be out of the normal range of being an athlete and still be highly competitive,” Crouch says. “And that makes it a lot of fun. I’m certainly not able to play competitive basketball, but I can be a competitive sailor.”

The common bond between Crouch, Blackman, Nelson and an overwhelming majority of the rest of the participants in this race is a desire to have fun. It’s just that they define “fun” differently.

Says Nelson: “To get some good seas running and get some good winds behind you and to start having 25,000 pounds of boat sliding down waves at 25 knots of boat speed is real exciting.”

“At times you’re cold, and at times you’re miserable,” Crouch says. “But you feel awfully good at the end of the race just having done it. To go 1,100 miles with no engine just like people did 5,000 years ago--just you and the elements--is a terribly rewarding thing for an individual.”

And then there’s the camaraderie among the crew. The criteria for crew selection on Maverick, according to Crouch, is “one, to be a good sailor and, two, to be a lot of fun. The latter is more important than the former.”

Before Maverick left for Manzanillo, wives and girlfriends of crew members stowed a raunchy bundle of X-rated materials on board. Crouch euphemistically referred to it as “mail call.” Halfway through the race, he will distribute the letters. The contents, he says, are mostly purchased at the F Street Bookstore.

There is also time for the finer things en route. That includes wine at the appropriate time at the end of the day. “Certainly when you’re bracing in high winds, nobody drinks more than one glass of wine,” Crouch says. “But having a glass of fine wine in the evening is a very enjoyable, civilized thing to do.”

Danger, however, is never far from a sailor’s thoughts on a long-distance race. “I wouldn’t equate it to race-car driving,” Blackman says. “But I think of it as kind of close to living on the edge. It’s safer staying home.”

Simply put, sailors have been known to fall off their boats. It doesn’t happen often, particularly when the best crews are sailing the top boats. But it does happen. And when it happens at night, on heavy seas in rough weather, there’s no guarantee that the helmsman will be able to bring the boat around in time to find the man overboard.

“Being a man overboard and watching the boat sail away without you, or watching it looking for you in the wrong place . . . I think that would be spooky as hell,” Blackman says.

Nelson adds: “If you fall off one of these things, zooming through the darkness, in the middle of the night, you may never see the boat again. That’s a risk we’re very aware of.”

Another risk is having to abandon ship. Again, a rare occurrence in major races. But everybody in this event must confirm to safety inspectors that they have gone through an abandon-ship drill. Drills and real circumstances are vastly different.

“It gets you to thinking,” Blackman says. “You wonder, ‘What would this be like . . . a stormy night . . . you’ve got a hole in the boat or whatever . . . you’ve got to get your provisions together fast . . . you hope you have the time to throw them in a life raft and get a radio signal off.’ ”

To that end, all boats are required to pass strict safety inspections before the race begins. Man-overboard safety equipment includes a pole with a flag on it and a flashing light. In the case of an abandoned ship, all boats must have an emergency radio beacon they can toss into the water. The beacon automatically flips face up, allowing a satellite to pick up the signal.

During the 1984 Manzanillo race, tragedy struck crewman Patrick Moniz aboard the yacht Acey Deucey. Moniz, 62, was serving under skipper Herman Moniz, his son, when the elder Moniz reportedly suffered a diabetes attack. By the time they transferred him to the Dul Sea, an escort vessel, doctors were unable to bring him back to consciousness. He died and was buried at sea near Cabo San Lucas off the southwest tip of Baja California.

In the 1986 race, Typhoon, a 45-foot Long Beach-based boat pulled into port at Cabo approximately two-thirds of the way into the race because owner John Olsen had back pains. That same year Encore, a 39-foot Diva that ended up winning the first-overall title on corrected time, lost crew member Arnold Swagmaker for the race when a wayward boom knocked him unconscious. Doctors needed 16 stitches to close the nasty gash on his head.

Often the most vulnerable crew member is the one up front working with the spinnaker pole or muscling the headsails around. “If the guys in the back screw up and don’t handle the sheets properly, they can seriously hurt or even kill that guy,” Nelson says. “Fortunately, that’s something that doesn’t happen very often.”

Nevertheless, says Blackman, “Anytime I go to Mexico, I just try to get my affairs in order before I leave. It might be a dismal way of looking at it. But I feel more comfortable knowing that if something happens, my kids will be taken care of.”

Still, Blackman says, “this is the fun race.”

It began in 1951 with the boats sailing the 1,400 miles from San Diego to Acapulco. According to the official version of race history, winds were often “fickle” the last 300 miles. So in 1976, organizers changed the destination to Manzanillo.

A cannon blast will greet each boat when it arrives at Las Hadas. And a mariachi band will scurry out to a jetty where it will meet and play for the sailors. Anytime night or day.

Nelson offers these instructions on how to unwind: “You jump in the pool at Las Hadas and swim up to the pool bar, have a nice cool margarita and float around. That’s how I unwind. It really takes about a day to get the race out of your system.”

The fun racers were already more than an hour to the south.

Long after yesterday’s rocky start, a press boat heading back to Point Loma shifted course suddenly when it spotted two 12-meter yachts to the north. Their names: Liberty and Stars & Stripes. The press boat chugged over for a peek. It was an impressive sight watching Conner direct his crew. But it looked suspiciously like hard work.