Instant Mariner: Just Add the Water : Sailing: An old salt and a novice from Westlake High team to place third in the youth division of the World Championships.

A year and a half ago, Kevin Carter Alfred--K. C. to his friends at Westlake High--was just another sophomore face in the crowd. Scrawny kid. Basically shy. Rode a skateboard. Nobody ever accused him of being a teen-age whiz in anything; he had a better chance of dating Madonna than winning any kind of national championship.

But life changes quickly during the Wonder Years.

Alfred was minding his business one day when a junior asked him if he wanted to go sailing. Alfred had never been in a sailboat--he thought anchors did the 6 o’clock news--but it is considered socially unacceptable to turn down an upperclassman. Besides, Ryan Cox was a skateboarding friend from the neighborhood in Thousand Oaks.

So Alfred went sailing with Cox in Ventura Harbor. Cox, an experienced sailor, skippered a 15-foot laser and Alfred was the crew. Sailing with Cox is like taking a spin with Mario Andretti. Cox is a racer, the ocean his race course. He expects his crew to take orders smartly and trapeze almost all the time. And as Cox did some flying runs, Alfred quickly got the hang of hanging over the side.

“It was different,” Alfred says.

It was also the start of something big. Six months after Alfred’s maiden voyage, he and Cox entered a regatta: Alfred’s first race turned out to be the U. S. Youth Sailing Championships, held on Mission Bay in San Diego. They finished eighth, which surprised them, but the important thing was that Alfred had earned his water wings. He saw himself as a sailor.

“We set our sights on winning a medal this year,” Alfred says.

Cox and Alfred were among 35 crews entered in the nationals last June at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich, Conn. After doing well in the first few races, Cox knew that any old medal wasn’t going to be good enough: “We knew we could win it,” he says.

Not only did they win the nationals--Cox also won the sportsmanship award--they qualified for the World Championships the following month in Montreal. They placed third among 13 competitors, making them the first U. S. team to medal in the worlds since the early 1980s.

So Alfred went from landlubber to mariner in less time than it takes most high school students to pass trigonometry. But that doesn’t mean his social life has improved.

“It’s like I’m still another kid,” he complains. “Sailing isn’t big here. If I lived in San Diego, maybe it’d be great.”

Alfred probably would still know nothing about sailboats had Cox gotten along with his former crew. In 1987, Cox and another boy finished 15th in the nationals, which were held on a lake in Texas. But they weren’t compatible, Cox says. “He didn’t want to sail with me anymore” and vice versa. “We were always fighting in the boat.”

Cox needed a crew for the ’88 nationals. He belonged to the Ventura Yacht Club, “but there was nobody at the club I wanted to sail with.” So he took a chance on Alfred. “I trained him,” Cox says.

Cox was certainly a qualified teacher. His parents, Ivan and Liz, began sailing years before Ryan was born. And when “Ryan was 2 weeks old we took him on our boat,” says Ivan, who now owns a 38-foot Catalina on which Ryan crews during races.

At 4 or 5, Ryan got his first boat, an eight-foot sabot. “We bought it at 11:30 in the morning,” Ivan says, “and he was in his first race at noon, asking me, ‘Dad, what do I do?’ I told him to follow the fastest boat.”

“I couldn’t wait to sail the sabot,” says Cox, who joined the club eight years ago and graduated to lasers two years later.

Cox, who attends Moorpark College, won’t be eligible for youth events next year, meaning that Alfred will be on his own. To prepare, he’s skippering his own laser at the Ventura Yacht Club, and looking for a crew. Who knows? Maybe there’s an unknown at Westlake High right now with a gold-medal future.