2 for Olympics : Landlocked Yacht Club Rates High

Marge Musick, an effervescent white-haired grandmother, has done just about everything since joining the Westlake Yacht Club, from timing regattas to barbecuing chicken. What she hasn’t gotten around to is sailing, but that didn’t stop the members from electing her the first woman commodore in the club’s 19-year history.

Right now she’s conducting a tour of the clubhouse, a massive rotunda in Westlake Village that once housed a sailboat sales office. When Musick gets to an oak trophy case, she stops and gazes up at a bank of flagpoles protruding from a wall. Hanging limply are dozens of colorful, emblematic pennants representing famous yacht clubs.

In the middle of the cluster is the red, white and blue pennant of the distinguished San Diego Yacht Club, current home of the America’s Cup and the celebrated Dennis Conner, who goes to sea on vessels as large as apartment buildings. Next to the San Diego pennant is the red, white and blue standard of the Westlake Yacht Club, where members are limited to dinghies no larger than 15 feet on their 150-acre man-made lake.

‘We’ve Earned Our Place’

What’s this? Landlocked dinghy sailors flying their colors with yachting’s elite? Have they gone off the deep end?

“Oh, no, no,” Musick says. “We’ve earned our place among the best. Our pennant hangs in their clubs, too.”

Westlake Yacht Club, a big fish with a small pond.

In the sport of sailing, clubs aren’t judged on size, money and location but on regional involvement, youth development programs and worldwide racing success. On that basis, “Westlake ranks right up there,” says Jim Clark, secretary of the Southern California Yachting Assn., to which Westlake and 83 other clubs belong. “Their youth program alone,” he says, has no peer except “maybe for San Diego’s.”

The club--with 225 memberships--has been the breeding ground for dozens of international and national dinghy champions who learned sailing on the narrow, mile-long lake and won most of their titles on the ocean.

“And don’t forget the girls,” Musick says.

Going to Olympics

The girls are Allison Jolly of Valencia and her crew--Lynne Jewell. Jolly, a Westlake member, and Jewell, who sailed on the lake as a child, will be going to Seoul, South Korea, for the Olympics--which is allowing women sailors to compete for the first time. The historical footnote makes great cocktail party conversation for club members, who can also take pride in having raised about $5,000 for the women by selling drinking glasses, T-shirts and autographed prints.

“But it’s not enough,” Musick says almost apologetically. “The Olympic campaign has been very expensive for the girls, but they have never swerved.”

Musick heads for the stairs and begins trudging upward in the 30-foot-high room. “We take a lot of steps and then we get to a BIG door,” she says, puffing. After passing a “Race Committee Only” sign, she reaches a large trapdoor leading to the roof. “One of the most important things I learned when I became commodore,” she says, “was how to open this door.” Heaving, she pushes it up slowly and then walks outside to a wooden observation tower.

From her perch, she has an unobstructed 360-degree view. To the west, the Santa Monica Mountains roll down to the shore. The lake--which straddles the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties--is the nucleus of a Spanish-style residential development and a marina with retail stores and offices. Nine miles of shoreline include graceful willows and slivers of inlets with small docks attached to homeowners’ front yards. Some houses stand on a long, narrow island that is joined to the mainland by a bridge.

Panoramic View

Looking down, Musick can see couples picnicking beside the club’s 40-foot crow’s nest, a local landmark. Next door in the glass atrium at Boccaccio’s restaurant, diners are served duck terrine with pistachio by tuxedoed waiters. Directly in front of the club is a part of the lake called Greenwich Bay. Because the island divides the lake into two river-like channels, the bay is the largest stretch of open water, making it a natural setting for the club’s regattas.

“We run the regattas up here on the tower,” more than 20 a year, she says, then sighs. “You’d think, with all the interest in racing because of the America’s Cup we’d have an increase in participation, but it’s actually down in recent years. As a rule we have only 10 or 20 boats in a regatta now.”

Youngsters Instructed

Musick looks toward the dock, drawn by a commotion. The club’s nine Sabots--8-foot sailboats--are being readied by youngsters noisy with anticipation. Wearing orange life preservers, they’re taking lessons from Christian VandenBerg, a 21-year-old member and the club’s Junior Skipper of the Year. In a few minutes, bowed sails are propelling the tiny boats across the flat surface.

There are a lot of factors leading to Westlake’s emergence as a hot yachting club with great sailors, and one of them is the wind. Every day around noon, the prevailing winds come from a northerly direction through Camarillo and the Conejo grade. “You can almost set your clock by it,” says Vic Pollard, a charter member of the club. But winds can also blow from the west, funneling through depressions in the mountains. The mix creates ideal learning situations for student sailors.

“As you sail up the lake you get wind shifts,” Pollard says. “That requires a skipper to make adjustments. It’s tricky. But the upshot is, you have to be skilled. That’s why we like to get kids when they’re young and fearless and adaptable. It takes real talent to handle quick shifts and beat conditions.

“But if you can sail on Westlake, you can sail anywhere.”

Musick’s attention switches from the young sailors to a patrol boat. “That’s the only boat allowed on the lake with a gas motor,” she says. “It belongs to the lake management company. All boats either have to be electric or sail.”

Everything at Westlake seems so ordered and pristine, but it wasn’t always so. In 1967, Pollard, a sailing buff who always had to trailer his boat, moved from the San Fernando Valley to Westlake Village, buying a house for under $30,000, on the gamble that the developer was going to create a lake where nothing existed but 1,200 acres of scrub pastureland and an arroyo fed by runoff from nearby Lake Sherwood.

Developer Fulfills Promise

“My friends warned me that the lake was going to be a swamp,” he says.

But the developer, American Hawaiian Steamship Co., made good on its promise. By 1969, the Los Angeles County side of the lake was finished and Pollard, along with 19 other residents, formed the Westlake Yacht Club, wrote the bylaws and elected the late Dick Bear as the first commodore. Their meetings were held at the present clubhouse, which at that time was a showroom for boat maker Frank Butler. The room, rustic cedar supported by dark-stained telephone poles, was big enough to display large sailboats with their masts up and sails raised.

“We’d actually sit inside some of those boats during meetings,” says Pollard, the club’s current vice commodore.

Building a Bargain

In 1974, Butler outgrew the building and sold it to the club for $90,000, Pollard says, adding, “He could have sold it for more.” The members were assessed $100 apiece for the down payment, and are still paying off the mortgage, Pollard says. Today, the building, according to realtors, is worth an estimated $1 million, the $30,000 houses are upward of $500,000, and Westlake Village has grown into an upscale community.

But the club remains a bargain. Members--most of whom are middle- to upper-income families living in Westlake--had no ambition to create another San Diego Yacht Club in terms of luxury, size and amenities. The initiation fee at the San Diego club, which has 1,750 memberships, ranges up to $10,000, and annual dues are $840, but membership is closed and the club won’t even send an application until two years after one is requested.

Few Memberships Remain

Westlake’s charges: Initiation is $150, a year’s dues are $260 and the one-time “equity membership” fee, making the member a partner in the club, is $350. Musick says she doesn’t like to advertise the figures because they’re “embarrassingly” low. Only 34 memberships are still available, she adds.

But the differences between a club such as San Diego and Westlake go further than money. San Diego and other majors in Southern California are like posh country clubs, serving lunches and dinners every day, offering full bars and locker rooms.

Westlake is only open on weekends and doesn’t serve drinks except at parties, of which there are many. “We have a very strong social program,” Musick says. She’s downstairs in the rotunda again, facing a calendar on the wall. In a couple of weeks the club would be having its annual Luau Party. Parties, some disguised as membership meetings, some on party boats, are held almost every weekend of the year, and there’s a happy hour every Friday. Members do the work.

Strictly Volunteer Group

“This is a strictly volunteer club,” Musick says with emphasis, noting that members are responsible for things like finance, publicity, maintenance and publishing the club newspaper, TellTales.

A quarter of the members, Musick estimates, are “traveling sailors” who do a lot of sailing on the ocean. About 30%, like their commodore, don’t own boats but joined primarily for the social whirl. That--and the enchantment of sailing--is what enticed Musick. In 1981, friends who were members invited her to a regatta. She didn’t sail, didn’t even have the urge. But when she stood on the observation deck as pennants flapped on halyards and fleets of sleek boats raced around brightly colored buoys, she was hooked.

“I had always been involved in civic things,” says Musick, former executive director of the Conejo Youth Employment Service and past president of the Westlake Women’s Club, “but the sport was so inviting.”

She took sailing lessons once, but decided to remain a landlubber. “I found a camaraderie here and developed great respect for sailors. I admire people who go out on the water with nothing but themselves and the elements and a boat.”

Then she smiled and added, “Even though I’m not among them.”