Gambling on ‘a Crapshoot’ off Point Loma : Lack of Wind Late Can Leave Marina del Rey-San Diego Race Up in Air

If history is a good barometer, Burt Benjamin will guide his 55-foot yacht toward the toe of Point Loma peninsula early Sunday morning with a good chance to win the 21st Marina del Rey-to-San Diego race.

In getting there, he and others from a group of about 200 skippers--who will set sail from Marina del Rey at about 11 a.m. Saturday--will have proceeded about 120 miles down the California coast. It probably will be dawn, a time when near-shore winds are often asthmatic. Those winds will determine who can go around the toe and up San Diego Bay about a mile to the finish.

“It’s a crapshoot,” said Benjamin, 54, a jeweler from San Diego who won the race last year and in 1985. “Three or four times, I’ve lost the race waiting for the breeze off of Point Loma. Just waiting, and waiting.”

And, he recalled with a wry laugh, cursing and cursing as the trailing boats approached.

Optimally, the first skipper to reach the point, whether by shrewd intuition or the grace of providence, would catch a nice breeze, sail around the point and glide to the finish, after which the fickle breeze would die, leaving the other yachts with nothing but the power of the tide to carry them.

That, too, has happened for Benjamin. But the wind is mysterious, and that is a joy of sailing, he says.

“Burt always seems to do well in this race. You would have to ask him how he does it,” said Ersin Konuk, owner of a 35-foot yacht and, as is Benjamin, a member of the San Diego-based Southwestern Yacht Club.

Said Benjamin: “There is sailing and real sailing. We’ve got some real sailors on our crew (which numbers six or seven).”

It is the idea of the crew, or pitching in, that seems to fire these folks, some of whom spend $3 million on their boats. That and a certain back-to-the-roots appeal of surviving the wind and ocean waters, if not conquering them.

Konuk, a Mercedes repairman, became hooked on sailing as a youngster, when he and his friends in his native city of Izmir, Turkey, would sail the Aegean Sea.

Benjamin began sailing about 10 years ago at the recommendation of his wife, Nancy, who grew up with sailing. He previously had raced powerboats about 11 years throughout Southern California.

“Powerboats,” Benjamin said. “I broke my legs. I also buried a few friends--they flipped over, crashed. But that’s not why I quit. I got burned out. One thing nice about sailing, you might get burnt out from racing, but never sailing. In powerboating, you hit the throttle and you’re there. In sailing, it’s different.

“I like the camaraderie. It’s like any team sport. It’s fun going out to sea, telling dirty jokes--the language gets terrible. Four hours on, four hours off. Everyone working their . . . off to advance, to win. It’s a great sport.”

It is not la-dee-da.

Many of the entrants, says John Henely, this weekend’s race coordinator and a member of Southwestern who has participated in several of the races, are hard-driven business people. Benjamin called the competition “cutthroat.”

“Ego, ego--you just want to be first,” Konuk said.

They get no money and spend at least $1,000 for the race. But money decides little because boats are handicapped after they have been in four or five races. Mike Roach of Southwestern won the 1987 performance handicap title for Southern California with a 13-year-old boat.

“It’s a very Corinthian activity,” Henely, a sales director for an electronics firm, said, “but it’s sort of like being back in school. Always there’s a great deal of camaraderie, whereas there also is a great deal of competition. Everyone wants to be the best.

“You’ll see a person who put $2 million into a boat get blown away by someone with just a $30,000 or $40,000 boat. Unless you’re talking America’s Cup type stuff, the average sailor can beat anyone else--that hope never dies. The person who makes the least amount of mistakes wins.”

Boats in this weekend’s race will range from 24 feet to 84 feet in length. The night sailing offers more dangers, but the race has been free of collisions, Henely said. Freighters present the greatest danger, although a yacht has been known to bump into a whale.

Benjamin indicated he probably will take a route farther from shore and aim for what he calls the slot, the gap between Santa Catalina and San Clemente islands. From there he will attempt to sail to Point Loma, angling past those riding the coastline.

“The idea is to go in a straight line,” Benjamin said. “That’s the idea. But you can expect things to change--some kind of law God made.”