Picturesque Schooners to Hoist Sails in Races for Museum’s Benefit

Landlubbers who associate schooners with large glasses of beer might be disappointed, but San Diegans who link schooners with sailing will be smiling this weekend and next as San Diego turns into the schooner capital of North America.

The first of several schooner-only races will begin at 11 a.m. today outside Oceanside Harbor, when 18 of the ships glide down the San Diego County coast to a finish line off of Mission Bay. The Downwind Classic Schooner Race, part of the San Diego Spring Schooner Festival, which takes place this weekend, will benefit the San Diego Maritime Museum Assn.

The schooner fleet will rest on Saturday and return to racing Sunday, meeting off the Mission Bay Channel entrance for a 1 p.m. start. The Billy Bones Traditional Schooner Race will end at a finish line in San Diego Bay. Proceeds, again, will go to the San Diego Maritime Museum.

Most of those 18 boats--as well as six or seven additional schooners--will race again March 31 and April 1 in the America’s Schooner Cup race hosted by the Kona Kai Yacht Club. Next weekend’s races will benefit the Navy Relief Fund.

“The Kona Kai races will be very spectator-friendly,” said Joe Ditler, one of the organizers of the races. “You can see them from Shelter Island, Harbor Island, all around the bay.”

Schooners, picturesque boats that now carry mainly passengers on charter outings, once played an integral role in the West Coast’s sailing fleet, according to Ditler, whose Coronado-based media promotions firm is known as “Schooner or Later.”

“Old pictures from the 1800s showed San Diego Harbor filled with schooners,” Ditler said. “They carried everything you could imagine.” Schooners were preferred to other types of sailboats because they were fast and, unlike square-rigged sailboats, they could easily sail both up and down California’s coast.

“Square riggers would come around and land in San Francisco, and you could sail them down the coast in a fast reach,” Ditler said. “But, because of their square sails, they couldn’t go back upwind. They’d have to ride out half way to Hawaii and come back in, which is a long and not very practical route.”

“The vogue thing to do is refurbish old schooners or build new ones from old designs,” Ditler said. “They’re a complicated ship, they have a lot of canvas and they take a large crew to sail.”

San Diego is home to about 15 schooners, each of which has “a long, interesting history,” Ditler said. Although the schooner design originated in Holland in the 1600s, American designers refined the boats during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Two local schooners, Bagheera and Dauntless, were designed by John Alden, who “was to yacht designs what Porsche was to automobile racing,” Ditler said. “He designed many successful boats.”