Midwinter Regatta Still On Despite Spill
Larry Lewis’ contingency plans for the giant Midwinter sailing regatta this weekend off the Orange County coast included everything--except an oil spill.
As chairman of the largest sailing regatta in the country, Lewis thought he had developed a strategy to deal with every foreseeable problem--from gale-force winds to pea soup fog.
“I just did not think of an oil spill,” says Lewis.
Despite the spill, Lewis says the 61st Annual Midwinter Regatta, a series of races from San Diego to Ventura, will not be canceled. “We will be monitoring the oil spill just as we will be monitoring the weather,” he says. “And we will be in contact with the Coast Guard and will see what they recommend.”
Any decision to cancel individual sailing events will not be made until the final hours before the racing begins this morning, Lewis says. The spill of about 300,000 gallons off Huntington Beach should have no effect on the races scheduled for inside Newport Harbor, Lewis points out.
As for the outside races, Lewis says that racecourses can be selected in different parts of the ocean to avoid the oil spill area. “If you get that kind of oil on your vessel, you can’t get it off,” he says. “It’s terrible.”
Nearly 300 Orange County sailors are expected to compete in races inside and outside Newport Harbor and in Dana Point. Overall, the regatta is expected to draw 1,000 Southern California sailors--ranging from kids in sabots to Olympic hopefuls in oceangoing yachts. The regatta is sponsored by the Southern California Yachting Assn., an organization of 87 yacht clubs.
This year, five of the 21 Midwinter events will be held in Orange County. “The regatta is done at multiple sites,” Lewis says. “So you have simultaneous races taking place from Ventura to San Diego.”
The regatta began in the Los Angeles area and, over the years, spread along the entire Southern California coast, growing in popularity and size until it became the largest regatta in the country, according to vice chairman Doug Wall of Newport Beach. “This year we even have an SCYA club--the Arizona Yacht Club--involved in Arizona,” Wall says. “They’ll be racing on a lake near the Phoenix area.”
Also this year for the first time in Orange County, the American Legion Yacht Club in Newport Beach will be offering sailboard competition, according to Wall. “This is the first sailboarding outside the San Diego area,” Wall says. “The regatta runs the whole gamut of boats from sailboards, sabots, Lasers and Lidos to 75-footers. And sailors range in age from kids to senior citizens.”
Orange County sailor Graham Gibbons, 54, says his entire family has sailed the Midwinters, including his wife, mother, sister and stepson, Olympic hopeful Nick Scandone, 23, who started out in sabots as a child.
How did an off-season sailing event become the largest regatta in the country?
Doug Wall believes that the Midwinters grew because winter is the only time of year when you can get so many sailors from so many different Southern California ports together at one time. “The racing calendar is so crowded that winter is the best opportunity,” he says. “There are too many events on the calendar during the summer. Besides, in Southern California we have an opportunity to sail and race all year round.”
But even in Southern California, winter sailing can present some unpleasant challenges--especially when the weather turns bad. “I can remember some really cold, miserable sails,” says Graham Gibbons. “Often it will be quite stormy. I like summer better because the wind is more predictable.”
Newport Beach sailor Jack Baillie, who figures that he has raced in about 40 of the 61 Midwinter Regattas, remembers one year when it was so windy he decided that it was too dangerous to race so he dropped out just before crossing the starting line. By the time the race was over, Baillie knew he had made the right decision. “Two of my friends lost their masts,” he says, “and one boat went on the rocks.”
The weather--rather than racing tactics--is a frequent topic of discussion among Midwinter veterans such as Baillie. “A friend of mine told me once that the toughest part of the racing was paddling the hail off the decks,” Baillie says. “Sometimes it can get really cold out there.”
For Gil Knudson, a veteran of 15 regattas, it is neither the cold nor the wind that he remembers best--it is the fog. “Once in the early ‘60s we raced the whole thing in the fog,” says Knudson, who runs a marine hardware manufacturing company in Costa Mesa. “You couldn’t even see the marks.”
Despite such memorable weather problems--and despite this week’s oil spill--Jack Baillie expects to be racing in this year’s Midwinters.
“I was concerned at first,” Baillie says. “I thought the races would be canceled (because of the spill). But it’s just a yacht race.”
As for getting crude oil on the varnished hull of Newsboy, his classic 65-foot sailboat, he says: “It is hard to get (crude) oil off a boat, but it is even harder to get it off a bird.”
For information on whether or not any events are being canceled because of the oil spill, Doug Wall recommends calling the individual yacht clubs hosting each race. The first of today’s racing begins at 10:50 a.m. at the Capistrano Bay Yacht Club in Dana Point. The second event, sponsored by the Newport Harbor Yacht Club and Lido Isle Yacht Club, begins at 11:30 p.m. today.
Other Orange County races are sponsored by the American Legion Yacht Club, Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club and Balboa Yacht Club. All three events get under way today at 11:50 a.m. Activities continue through Sunday, when awards ceremonies will be held at all 21 regatta sites.