TEQUILA RUN : Newport-to-Ensenada Is the World’s Biggest International Yacht Race--and for Many Sailors It’s the Best Party Too

Think of the evacuation from Dunkirk, with beer. Or the Oklahoma land rush, with top-siders. Imagine the Boston Marathon on water, with the contestants gulping tequila instead of Gatorade. Look at it as a sort of nautical cattle drive.

However you think of it, the annual Newport-to-Ensenada International Yacht Race is about as easy to ignore as the Spanish Armada, and just about as restrained. It’s the world’s largest international yacht race, an overnight dash to Mexico that begins at noon today off the Newport Beach jetty and officially ends at 11 a.m. Sunday in Ensenada, Baja California.

During its 40 years, the race has attracted yachting types of every stripe, from America’s Cup skipper Dennis Conner (who’s racing a catamaran today) to crews who consider it a major victory if their boat doesn’t sink. For the swiftest, the prize at the end may be a trophy. For the stragglers, there is the fine madness of Ensenada’s Bahia Hotel bar and the boozy haze of Hussong’s Cantina, the legendary Baja watering hole that will, for one weekend, contain more gringos per square inch than the Costa Mesa Freeway at 5 p.m.

It’s a tricky race--a headache to organize, a nail-biter to start and an accountant’s nightmare to keep track of. But it’s also a sailor’s test and a party-goer’s nirvana.

“It’s an institution, really,” said Ernie Minney, who skippered the wooden-hulled yacht Talthona to a win last year in the Ancient Mariner class. “If you don’t get in on the Ensenada race, the town (Newport Beach) just kind of dies around you. It’s like you’re left out.”

Minney, who owns a ship chandlery in Newport Beach, crewed in his first Newport-to-Ensenada race in the early 1950s, when he was in grammar school. Today, he’s a veteran who has sailed several different boats in the race, once with a crew that sported Napoleonic admirals’ uniforms. Although he called the race both “a crap-shoot” and “a tequila derby,” he guessed that probably 75% of the skippers and crews “are out there to try to win, to try to do the best they can.”

“The really elite ocean racers, a lot of them think (the race) is a joke,” Minney said. “But to the little people, this might be the only race they enter during the whole year.”

And then there’s that other 25%.

Perhaps the most eye-catching boat in the race, at least for the past 13 years, has been the one sailed by a group of professional men from San Francisco who call themselves the Prospectors. Taking their name from their original boat (they’ve chartered others over the years), the Prospectors manage each year to turn the start of the race into a kind of waterborne Doo Dah Parade.

“They always have a gag or a gimmick,” said Bob Kelly, a Corona del Mar real estate broker who regularly crews with the Prospectors. “One year on the bow they had a simulated grand piano, full size. Another year, they had a statue of a pink elephant, a big one.”

One year, said Kelly, the Prospectors arrived from San Francisco and docked in front of the Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club.

“Those dirty pups brought down two projection machines,” said Kelly. “And they ran up the mainsail and the jib in front of the club and one night they showed ‘Deep Throat’ on the main and ‘Bambi Falls in Love’ on the jib. Some of the old-timers at the club were a little upset.”

The next year, he said, the Prospectors atoned.

“They got these six charming ladies with stringed instruments and they had them playing classical music on the bow,” he said. “Those hooligans felt like they needed a little class after the previous year.”

Like many crews, the Prospectors start race day with a party--donning white tie and tails and cracking open the champagne around 9 a.m., said Kelly. However, he added, “once the race starts, man, they’re out of those tails and into their working clothes. They don’t put the tails back on again until they get to Ensenada.”

The ballyhoo of the start quickly gives way to the business of buckling down to a long day’s and night’s sail, Minney said.

“We take it real seriously,” he said. “If you do well, it’s no accident, but with 550 boats going in different directions there is a lot of luck involved.”

Luck and weather, for the deciding element in the race often is wind, or the lack of it. Because the racers must sail through the night, they are naturally confronted with winds that can die to nearly nothing after dark. And that is about the time when they must make the final decision whether to sail to the windward or leeward side of the Coronado Islands.

The Coronados lie off northern Baja California and can spell success or failure for the racers. By choosing to sail “inside” the islands, nearest the mainland, the boats cut the distance to Ensenada but may lose wind, which can be blocked by the islands. By sailing “outside,” toward the ocean, they may find more wind but there also is a greater distance to sail.

“We usually just head straight for the Coronados,” said Minney, “and the wind makes your decision for you once you get there. The hardest time is probably at night. There’s hardly any wind and it can be frustrating. Boats out there are always changing tacks, so you have to be on your toes. You start to get sleepy around 2 or 4 in the morning.”

At least two things make the night more bearable, Minney said. His crew, like many others, eats well.

“We put on things like prime rib and strawberry shortcake,” he said. “We try to make dinner a really special event, and I think we eat as well as anyone out there.”

A second reward materializes with the dawn.

“It’s a beautiful sight to see when you arrive” in Ensenada, Minney said. “You see at least a couple of hundred boats with spinnakers up, everywhere you look. It’s like a parade of boats.”

And so to shore, at least for the racers. But there is a small group of yacht enthusiasts who will remain awake, sober and vigilant for more than 24 hours after the first boat crosses the finish line: the race committee.

The race is organized and staged by the Newport Ocean Sailing Assn., a nonprofit group composed of yachting enthusiasts from Orange County who serve on the association’s race committee. Membership in NOSA is by invitation and, after serving on the race committee for perhaps two years, members are invited to “go through the chairs”--to take on jobs of increasing responsibility in connection with the race. After perhaps six or seven years, committee members may find themselves in the seat of chair of the race committee, as are Jerry and Betsy Moulton this year.

To the Moultons falls the task of keeping track of about 550 boats--making sure those who are signed up to start do so properly, keeping track of the no-shows, and, during the next 48 hours, accounting for all the finishers as well as those who abandon the race.

“I think the most crucial part,” said Jerry Moulton, “is knowing exactly who started and who didn’t start, so we can control it at the other end--so that we don’t lose anybody. It’s a real rote procedure, but if it doesn’t go off exactly as it’s supposed to, it can cause a lot of confusion.”

For instance, Betsy Moulton said, “if your husband was supposed to start the race and he didn’t and later you find out he was off with someone else. That has happened.”

Armed with the final start list, which may have been amended at the 11th hour, the committee members set out for the starting line in three boats, where they advise starters in the 16 different boat classes of their respective starting times. Those times are counted down on a particular radio frequency and, as the moment of each start approaches, the water around the starting line becomes more and more congested as skippers jockey for the best positions.

Once every boat is successfully started, the committee members dash back to their dock at the Balboa Yacht Club and drive--quickly--to Ensenada. For while some of the slower boats may not finish until the early hours of Sunday morning, the fastest boats--typically the multi-hulled craft--can finish early Saturday morning.

Speed on the committee’s part is essential, Jerry Moulton said, because during one race a catamaran named Double Bullet actually beat the committee to Ensenada.

“Dennis Conner is racing a catamaran this year,” he said, “and we don’t want to be late for that.”

In Ensenada, half of the committee sets up headquarters just inland in a second-floor room of the Bahia Hotel, while the other half motors out to the finish line in boats to record the sail number of each finisher. Those numbers are then relayed by radio to the room at the Bahia, where they’re entered into computers that have been programmed previously with each entrant’s racing data. Results are posted in the Bahia courtyard about every 20 minutes.

The trick, Jerry Moulton said, is to be invisible.

“We want to make it look easy for the contestants,” he told a meeting of the race committee more than a week before the race. “The best thing that could happen is if the contestants don’t know that there’s a race committee at all.”

But the co-chairs of the committee know. They, and other committee members, must wait out the finish of every boat.

“We’ll be absolutely beat,” Betsy Moulton said. “We probably won’t be sleeping for anywhere from 24 to 27 hours.”

Many of the racers may be nearly as tired, but it has become a kind of loopy tradition to finish the race and head not for bed, but for the nearest bar. Two saloons of choice are the Bahia Hotel bar and Hussong’s, both of which generally are in full swing by the time most racers arrive.

“Hussong’s is just ready to explode, practically,” Minney said. “And the Bahia--it gets a little gross in there from time to time.”

Betsy Moulton agreed.

“It gets a little randy,” she said. “The younger set proceed to get ashore as quickly as possible and get as drunk as possible. There’s a lot of pushing people into swimming pools and general carrying on. The whole town is just swinging.” But the committee members on the finish-line boats, Jerry Moulton said, “won’t get ashore until noon Sunday. Then we just go straight to bed.”