CHASING STARS : A New Name Has Been Added to SDYC’s Long List of World-Caliber Yachtsmen: Mark Reynolds

Activity at the San Diego Yacht Club was a study in contrast this dank and drizzly spring morning.

Inside the warm clubhouse, a handful of patrons sipped coffee and discussed the change in weather.

But this was race day and the action was outside.

The skippers and crew of 20 boats entered in this week’s Star Spring Championships of the Western Hemisphere have been working quickly and quietly to prepare their 22-foot, 10-inch, 1,485-pound, two-man keel boats.

In the midst of the scuttle and in the midst of this competition is San Diego Star sailor Mark Reynolds, the winner last year off Nassau. Reynolds and his crew, Hal Haenel of Hollywood, hope to repeat this year in their home waters for their home club.

However, with two days to go, they will have to come from behind. They won Wednesday’s race to move up to third place.

For these guys, that might not be too far back to rally.

For almost three years, in fact, Reynolds and Haenel have sailed together with considerable success and growing acclaim. They have won a variety of championships, including most recently the Bacardi Cup off Miami in March. But it was the second-place finish in the world Star class championship last year in Argentina--with their new $30,000 Folli, a boat by Italian designer Daniello Folli--that helped establish them as a force in Star sailing.

Follis, the Lamborghinis of the Star world, have won six of the past seven world championships.

“We were seeing that his boats were doing better than the rest,” Reynolds said. “Once we started using it, that was a turning point.”

Located at Lake Como in Northern Italy, the Italian manufacturer builds 14 or 15 boats a year. Sailors have been known to wait up to three years for delivery.

“As you get better,” Reynolds said, “you get your boats faster.”

En route from Miami, Reynolds and Haenel’s Folli boat was damaged, forcing them to borrow a boat for the ongoing spring championships.

“This boat does things a little different,” Reynolds said, “but a little difference can be very important.”

Said Haenel: “You can tell it’s a different boat. Our (regular boat) is a great boat.”

Reynolds and Haenel experienced the heights of satisfaction and the depths of disappointment during last summer’s Olympic Trials and the subsequent Summer Games in Pusan, South Korea.

To qualify for the Olympics, they had to win the trials against a field which included the last four Star world champions. They did it.

However, in the Olympics, they were leading the overall standings going into last race, when a gust of wind broke their mast and forced them to be towed into port. A British team finished first and took the gold.

“It was really disappointing,” Reynolds said. “We had a good chance to win, and we didn’t.”

Still, he is nearer than he was a year ago to reaching the two sailing goals he has set.

“One was to go to the Olympics and the other to win the world championship,” Reynolds said.

He will have a chance to realize the second goal when he travels to Sardinia, Italy, for the world Star championships in September.

Reynolds has enjoyed sailing success, in part, because he is a fierce competitor.

“I enjoy sailing,” he said, “but the competition is what I really enjoy.”

Jim Reynolds, a former Star class world champion as Dennis Conner’s crew in 1971, said his son is successful because he likes to win.

“He was brought up around very competitive people,” his father said. “He was exposed to the best and he wants to be the best.”

And this team keeps the competitive fires under control.

“We don’t argue,” Haenel said. “That’s the first thing that’s important. I’ve been on boats when I started taking swipes at the other guy. That can get you in trouble. And we both like to win. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t do well. The drive to succeed is important.”

Reynolds was a typical teen-ager in some ways--he played Little League for four years--but was atypical in others. For Christmas, at age 8, he got a boat.

“I wasn’t too excited about it,” he said. “I probably wanted some kind of toy instead.”

When he realized that baseball might not be the career to pursue, Reynolds decided to follow in the steps of his father and grandfather before him.

He joined the junior sailing program at the SDYC. Before long, he decided that shagging sails, not fly balls, was more his forte.

“He prefered baseball at first,” his mother, Joan Reynolds said, “but he wasn’t much of a baseball player. Then he realized that he was really good at sailing.”

Said Reynolds: “When I stopped playing Little League, I was 12. I did real well (in sailing) right away. I was never that good in baseball.”

Reynolds learned the finer points of sailing from the likes of his father, Malin Burnham, Ash Bown and Conner.

While Bown and his father taught him sailing, Conner, with his insatiable competitive spirit, taught him how to win.

“Dennis is the best sailor in the world,” Reynolds said. “There’s no one person that I’ve learned more from. Dennis knows more about winning than anyone else, what effort it takes to win. His thing is to work harder than anyone else and be single-minded in what you do.”

By the time he was 15, Reynolds was the junior commodore at the yacht club and, at 17, he won his first Laser class race.

In the meantime, he has logged more nautical miles than a migrating school of porpoises. One of his first voyages of any length came when he and three of his buddies bought a boat and sailed to Catalina. He was 15.

The boys pooled their resources and bought a Star boat at an auction.

“We got it for $10,” Reynolds said. “Over the course of the summer, we put about $200 into plexiglass, wood and paint to refurbish it.”

Joan Reynolds remembers she and the other boys’ parents thought of it as nothing more than a summer project.

“They decided they wanted to get it in good enough condition to sail it to Catalina,” Joan Reynolds said. “We didn’t think they’d finish it. Well, they did.”

When it was seaworthy, the parents had no choice but to let them go. They reached Catalina in three days.

“Some of us made a trip to Catalina,” Joan Reynolds said. “Of course it was to see how they were. We ended up giving them a tow all the way back to San Diego.”

Said Reynolds: “We were a little concerned when we couldn’t see land on either side, but it was kinda fun.”

Stars have been raced for 72 years and Reynolds has been sailing them intermittently since the early 1970s. He competed in the Snipe class from 1977 to 1983, then returned his attention to the Star class.

There are four reasons why he prefers this racing class:

--Popularity and prestige.

“They’re the most popular boat in San Diego and we’ve had good results in it internationally for a long time,” he said. “Prestige wise, it’s the biggest class in the world. Here, Star goes back many years and the San Diego Yacht Club has more world champions and Olympic medals than any other club.”

--Performance.

“The Star class has produced some of the best sailors in the world and the best races are drawn from the Star class,” he said. “The Star is the most competitive one-design in the world.”

--Purity.

“America’s Cup is more of a designer’s game,” Reynolds said. “Stars and Snipes are a little less of an engineering class of boat. I like the engineering stuff, but I like being out there on the water just racing.”

--Regatta format.

“The best guy may not win in one race,” he said, “but, in a period of six races, the best sailor will probably come out ahead.”

Reynolds, who owns a Sobstad sail making loft in Point Loma, said success has also helped his business.

“It’s important for my business that I do well in races because I sell more sails when I win,” he said, but added: “People are in the industry because they like to sail, not because they make a lot of money.”