SAILING : Soviet Entry Remains in Race Despite Death

Despite the suicide of its skipper, the Soviet entry Fazisi will continue in the Whitbread Round the World Race when the 23 boats start the second leg from Punta Del Este, Uruguay, to Fremantle, Australia, on Oct. 28.

His crew and rivals were stunned last week when Alexei Gryshenko, 43, was found hanging in a tree. He had been missing for two days after his boat’s arrival from England in sixth place. “They thought maybe he’d defected,” said John Jourdane of Long Beach, navigator on New Zealand’s third-place Fisher & Paykel entry.

Gryshenko left two notes but, according to Fazisi project manager Hamish Laird, nobody knows why he killed himself. He was scheduled to return home after the first leg for unexplained reasons, and before the race started there was doubt whether the boat, partially sponsored by Pepsico, would have sufficient funding to continue beyond Uruguay.

The only hint of Gryshenko’s motive was that he felt inadequate as the skipper alongside co-skipper Skip Novak, 37, of Chicago, who has considerable ocean racing experience.

Novak will continue with the boat.

The second of the six legs of the 32,932-nautical mile, nine-month event is expected to be the longest and most difficult--7,650 miles to the site of the 1986-87 America’s Cup competition.

Jourdane said: “We head down into the Southern Ocean--snow, ice, icebergs. We’re predicting 30 days. Whitbread’s saying 35, but they said 35 for the first leg and we got in in 27.”

Jourdane sailed the previous Whitbread on another New Zealand boat in ’87 and has made 28 Pacific crossings. But the Atlantic showed its own personality on the first leg, snapping off the mizzen mast of the 83-foot Bruce Farr ketch in heavy winds off Brazil. The boat had no chance of catching New Zealand’s Steinlager 2 but, because of the mishap, lost second place to Switzerland’s Merit.

“It was supposed to be an easy leg, but it turned out to be tactically very hard,” Jourdane said. “ . . . You had to make a decision on which jibe or tack to go on to get into favorable winds in the future.

“We had a lot of wind in Spain with gusts up to 50 knots. Then it lightened off to trade-wind sailing off the Canaries. South of the Equator we didn’t get the southeast trades we were expecting . . .

“Then it turned around and we got a high-speed run. We were carrying a full chute, full main, full mizzen and full mizzen gennaker in about 40 knots of wind . . . off Rio, really flying steadily at about 20 knots to surfing to 27, and it just couldn’t take the load. That’s when we lost our mizzen mast.”

At the start, Steinlager 2 took a flyer from the fleet by going west, well north of the rhumb (direct) line to Uruguay, but was able to stay in good wind longer than the others to build an insurmountable lead.

The sailing has not been fun yet.

“It got very hot in the doldrums,” Jourdane said. “There’s not enough ventilation, and it’s going to get very cold on the next leg. The food’s terrible. We have no freezer or refrigerator, so it’s freeze-dried food. It all tastes the same. Our cook is a great sail maker, but he’s a terrible cook. He has all these spices to spice up the food, and he puts all the spices in every meal, so they all taste the same.”

There is no American entry in the most important ocean race--never has been in five Whitbreads now--but several other boats have Americans as crewmen, including Jim Lutz of Los Angeles, who has taught social studies at Taft High School in Woodland Hills. Lutz is the medic and part-time helmsman on British entry Liverpool Enterprise, in 16th place.

“The boat itself is quite fast, but the project is very under-funded, and we have a lot of old sails and old gear,” Lutz said. “The crew is pretty inexperienced in big boat sailing, so we’re going a lot slower than we’re capable of.”

Lutz said the Whitbread doesn’t attract sponsorship in the United States because of America’s diversification of interests.

“A lot of the smaller countries, if they get an entry in any national event, the team becomes national heroes overnight,” Lutz said. “That doesn’t happen in the States.”

Jourdane, 45, is the oldest crewman and the only American among 15 Kiwis and one Australian on the New Zealand boat. His age isn’t a problem.

“They give me a harder time about being an American, especially since the last America’s Cup ruling,” he said.

Sailing Notes

George Tompkins Jr., the New York lawyer who represents Michael Fay’s New Zealand America’s Cup syndicate, isn’t concerned about San Diegans claiming he’s dragging his feet in the appeal process because he waited until the last day to file for a rehearing before the Appellate Division of the New York Court of Appeals. The court last month overturned Judge Carmen Ciparick’s ruling that San Diego’s catamaran was illegal in last year’s defense and gave the Cup back to San Diego. “We haven’t been waiting,” Tompkins said. “This has to be right, because if it isn’t it’s the end of the ballgame.”

Meanwhile, impatient prospective challengers were scheduled to meet in Venice, Italy, at the behest of Italian businessman Raul Gardini to discuss an alternative event to replace the Cup, which has been bogged down in court for more than two years. Gardini paid Danny Ferry, the Clippers’ No. 1 draft choice, a reported $2 million to play in Rome this season. Tompkins is not impressed. “I’m not involved in the machinations of the yachting community and their worries about having a race,” he said. San Diego’s America’s Cup Organizing Committee hoped to head off a revolt by faxing a questionnaire to the challengers last week, stressing: “We are progressing rapidly with planning for a May, 1991 International America’s Cup Class World Championship in San Diego and for America’s Cup XXVIII in May, 1992.”

Southern California’s largest sailboat show--it also includes power boats now--is running at the Long Beach Convention Center through Oct. 29. Show hours are 3-10 p.m. weekdays, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturdays and 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sundays. Admission prices are adults $5, children $2, under 6 free. . . . Peter Isler has added Ted Turner and race car owner Rick Galles to the advisory board of his America’s Cup campaign, and Roy Disney is on the steering committee. . . . Two of the Newport Ocean Sailing Assn.’s major annual events are the 14-Mile Bank Race Saturday and the CHOC Regatta to benefit the Children’s Hospital of Orange County Oct. 28. Details: (714) 640-1351.