Boaters’ Waterloo : Expense and Scarcity of Slips at County’s Marinas Take the Wind Out of Seafarers’ Sails

Chuck Bender can laugh about it now, but there was a time when he wondered if he hadn’t gone off the deep end.

“It seemed pretty silly at times, waiting two years for a boat slip,” the San Clemente resident said as he touched up the trim recently on his 32-foot pleasure boat in Dana Point Harbor. “I mean, you can go out and buy a boat and trailer and be in the water the same afternoon.”

But Bender didn’t want the hassle of towing a boat to a marina every time he wanted to cruise the coast. And where would he store a boat? How could he throw a dockside party if his boat was parked in a storage yard?

“No, I wanted my own slip,” said Bender, 44, who finally secured a slip a year ago at Dana Point. “And in this county, that means you have to wait and wait and wait. . . .”

It helps to be a bit lucky. It also helps if you can afford to pay upward of $500 a month in some prime Orange County marinas to lease a slip for a 30-foot boat.

Although some anchorage operators are reporting slip vacancies for the first time in years, waits of two years or more, particularly for boats over 40 feet long, are still common in the county’s three major harbors--Dana Point, Newport and Huntington Harbour.

Nine Times Too Many Boats

It is simply a matter of supply and demand: Roughly 60,000 boats are registered in Orange County, nine times the number of rentable slips in the county’s three harbors, according to a 1988 study by the state Department of Boating and Waterways. The vacancy rate in Orange County marinas is less than 3%, compared to 5.5% elsewhere on the Southern California coast, the report said.

For different reasons, the demand is greatest in Dana Point and Newport Harbor.

Slip costs in Dana Point are among the lowest in Southern California, while Newport Beach has a showy image that attracts boaters who want to be seen while they sit and sip slip-side.

Because Huntington Harbour is more difficult to reach and not as well known, slip openings usually occur there first when demand along the county’s coast softens. In recent months, those searching for a slip have found openings in Huntington Harbour, in part because of the opening of several new marinas in the Long Beach-San Pedro area.

But even so, finding the right one at the right price can be a tricky tack, whether for a sailboat, power boat or trawler.

“Timing. It’s all timing,” said Susan Liebergesell, manager of Peter’s Landing Marina in Huntington Harbour, which has 325 slips. “Unlike eight or nine months ago, slips are available. But you’ve got to hunt for them.”

For years, shortages of slips along the Southern California coast forced boaters to motor far and wide to find a suitable anchorage. But marina operators and industry experts say recent openings of new marinas in San Diego, Long Beach and Ventura have eased the crunch in some areas.

Long Local Wait

However, they add, that has had little effect locally, especially at Dana Point and Newport Harbor.

“About all it has done is reduce our waiting lists a bit,” said Jack Bollander, owner of the 995-slip Dana West Marina, one of two marinas at Dana Point. “Nothing here is going to change much until more slips are built in Orange County. And I don’t see that happening in my lifetime.”

Prospects of any large new marinas being built in Orange County are remote, at best.

Signal Landmark Properties Inc. has proposed a 1,300-slip marina as part of its $1.4-billion commercial and residential development planned for the Bolsa Chica area. But environmentalists bitterly oppose the project and have threatened to block it in court even if the Army Corps of Engineers determines that the marina is feasible to build.

A second and more far-flung concept is construction of a 2,500-slip marina near the mouth of the Santa Ana River. It is an idea that has bounced around for nearly two decades and is again under consideration, this time by Costa Mesa officials. They believe that such a facility would be a moneymaker for Costa Mesa and give the city the kind of prestige that neighboring Newport Beach has reaped from its renowned harbor.

But like the Bolsa Chica wetlands, the Santa Ana river mouth is sacred turf in the eyes of environmentalists, who say the area’s value as one of the last remaining saltwater wetlands outweighs the needs of boaters.

“It’s a pipe dream,” environmentalist Dick Kust, former president of a local Audubon Society chapter, said of the Santa Ana River marina plan. ‘It’s a boondoggle waiting to happen.”

‘We Need More Marinas’

Costa Mesa Mayor Donn Hall, a marina proponent who has successfully lobbied for a new study of the issue, acknowledged that chances are slim that a marina will ever be built on the river. Twenty years ago, he said, such an idea could have sailed through the approval process in two years or less. Now, he said, it takes three times as long.

“We need more marinas in this county,” Hall said. “They afford great recreational opportunities. The only recreational opportunities in the Santa Ana River now are for (California) least terns and coyotes.”

Without new marinas, pressure on existing anchorages at Dana Point, Newport and Huntington Harbour is expected to increase.

Newport, overall, has the county’s most expensive monthly slip rates, ranging from $10.50 to $15.50 a foot. That compares to the monthly charge of about $11.50 a foot at Huntington Harbour’s three marinas and $7.80 a foot at the two marinas in Dana Point.

The average slip rate in Southern California is about $9.30, according to a recent survey by the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors.

The high price to dock in Newport has apparently done little to deter demand in the county’s only natural harbor. City officials estimate that roughly 2,200 commercial slips are controlled by about 60 operators. There are several thousand more private docks and slips attached to homes on the bay and its inlets.

In total, about 8,500 boats are in the harbor, said Orange County Sheriff’s Capt. Harry Gage, who heads the county’s harbor patrol in Newport.

“Boating isn’t cheap,” Newport yacht salesman Gordon Barienbock said, “and a lot of people figure if they’re going to spend a lot of money, they might as well do it where they can be seen. And people figure there’s no better place to be seen than Newport.”

Bob Winston, a Tustin shoe salesman who has moored his 20-foot sailboat in Newport for 12 years, agreed: “Some people cruise Sunset Boulevard looking for stars. I spend my weekends putting around the bay looking at the beautiful people. . . . It’s a lot healthier than sitting at home on the couch watching golf.”

Based on statistics from the state department of boating, the average California boater owns a 16-foot boat, parks it in the driveway and has a family income of $30,000 to $35,000. The average boat in California costs $4,000.

‘It’s Just Too Expensive’

Indeed, boating enthusiasts like Mel Thomas of Fullerton are the rule rather than the exception in Orange County.

Thomas, a carpenter, owns an 18-foot sailboat that he keeps in the side yard of his hillside home. From time to time, he has called local marinas about slips. But the “horror stories” about two-year waits, along with the high cost of maintaining a boat in the water, have always discouraged him from pursuing the idea.

“Some people who boat have all the money in the world, and it makes no difference how much the slip costs,” Thomas said. “But for others, like me, who pinch pennies, it’s just too expensive to keep a boat in the water full time. It’s like pouring money down a hole.”

Not everybody who boats in Orange County is rich or a recent Lotto winner.

Bob Winston, 33, has sailed since he was 5. “It’s in my blood,” he says. He acknowledges that keeping a boat at Newport Harbor is an “economic stretch.” He gets around the slip scarcity and expense by leasing one of the 1,200 offshore moorings in Newport Bay.

At $14 per foot a year, it’s cheaper than a slip. But it doesn’t include the amenities of a slip, said Gage of the Sheriff’s harbor patrol.

“Since it’s offshore,” he said, “there is no place to park a car, wash or load a boat. And you’ve got to find a way out to your boat.”

Winston uses a rubber dinghy to reach his sailboat.

“Sure, it’s a bit awkward,” he said. “But this is Newport. Who would want to be anywhere else?”

Newport Avoided

Not everybody thrills to Newport’s bow-to-bow congestion.

Former Santa Ana Councilman Bob Luxembourger, a longtime boater, has avoided Newport Harbor “like the plague.”

Since 1978, he has kept his 45-foot, twin-engine sport fishing boat in San Pedro Harbor rather than deal with the crowds in Newport Bay. He said it is cheaper--$5.60 per foot a month--and he can get from his slip to the harbor entrance in about 10 minutes.

“In Newport it can take 45 minutes on weekdays, and on the weekends an hour or more,” he said. “We all spend too much time in traffic on the freeways. Who needs it on the water?”

Convenience is the overriding attraction at Dana Point, where boaters can reach the open ocean from their slips in minutes.

Since the harbor opened in the early 1970s, the waiting lists have been long at its two anchorages, Dana West Marina and Dana Point Marina Co.

Chuck Ebbert, a retired concrete block salesman, docks his 32-foot sportfishing boat, Mi Toi, in the harbor. He oftens takes weeklong fishing trips, stopping over in other marinas on the coast. Ebbert said nothing compares to Dana Point.

“It’s a five-star facility in a business where there are an awful lot of one-stars,” he said as he washed down his boat. “This place is clean and safe, and the people on this dock are like family.”

Trend to Smaller Boats

Industry experts say, however, that the cost of maintaining a boat at a “wet slip” is driving many people to buy smaller boats that they can haul back and forth to marinas on trailers.

This trend may explain, in part, why most slip vacancies occur in the 35-foot-and-under range.

“People are either buying big boats, 40 feet and up, or they seem to be going smaller to something they can (put in) dry storage,” said Harry Monahan of the Southern California Marine Assn., a boating trade group.

“Those who can afford the big boats don’t worry about slip costs, but the little guy who has to scratch to buy a 30-footer sometimes can’t handle the maintenance and slip costs,” he said. “It’s pure economics, and with uncertainty over the economy, some people are going smaller.”

Finding boat storage close to the water, however, is no easy sail these days.

In Dana Point at the Embarcadero Marina storage yard, there is a three-year wait for a space in what amounts to an asphalt parking lot. Once a boat is accepted, storage costs $72 a month. That’s about a third of what Chuck Bender pays for his 33-foot slip in the harbor about a mile away.

The Los Angeles County fire captain contends that there’s no comparison to being in a slip.

“Some people go to the desert, others to the mountains,” he said. “I come here to my boat. I can arrive here all knotted up inside, and within a half hour I’m like a puppy dog.”

Bender put his name on the waiting list at Dana West Marina in the summer of 1985, and two years later had a slip.

“My boat is my refuge. . . . There’s no better place to putt than on my boat.”