Yachts of Luck : Misfortune, Foul-Ups Frustrate Efforts to Sink Santa Barbara’s Bid to Retain Ventura Cup

Unless the improbable happens--this being sailboat racing, don’t count that out--it looks as though Santa Barbara sailors once again have humbled their seafaring counterparts from Ventura and Oxnard, winning last weekend’s Ventura Cup, the biggest racing event in the region.

Their 10th win in the past 12 years, of course, gave the Santa Barbarans an opportunity to be cocky, and they took advantage of it.

“We could have stayed tied up at the dock and still won,” said Jim Yabsley, the helmsman on Roller, one of the five sailboats on the victorious Santa Barbara Yacht Club team. “No wonder everybody hates Santa Barbara--we win all the time.”

Which isn’t as easy as it sounds. Not only must the SBYC beat the best sailors from seven other yacht clubs, it has to survive the protests, foul-ups and capricious winds that inevitably surface in sailboat racing.

“There is skill involved on a day like this, but a lot of luck too,” Yabsley said.

A year ago, the Santa Barbarans went home without the trophy after the Ventura Sailing Club apparently ended their reign. But two weeks later, red-faced cup officials announced that a scorer’s mistake had been discovered, giving SBYC the victory.

“A lot of people didn’t like to see us win again, but it was a fair deal,” Yabsley said.

By all accounts, the Ventura Yacht Club should have won last year’s cup. The VYC, which has played host to the event for 22 years, thought it had won the first leg of the three-race series, but the results were thrown out because half the fleet mistakenly sailed the wrong course.

“It was a big fiasco last year,” head judge Chuck Fuller said.

Protests almost always drag out the suspense--this year’s trophy presentation was held up for three hours to resolve protests. And even though protests are the nature of the game in racing, the Ventura Cup seems to have more than its share.

“There are no protests in most other races,” VYC sailor Jeff Thorpe said, “but this one usually has them.” And the reason, Fuller said, “is because the races are so hotly contested.”

Tempers apparently have gone off the deep end. A few years ago, according to Roller crewman David Young, “I was on the phone while we waited for the outcome of a protest, and a trophy flew across the room.” However, VYC staff manager Lee Larkin said “I’ve never heard that particular story.”

But even at the parties, there is an undercurrent of competition. When Thorpe was cornered by Yabsley at the post-race chili-and-pasta bash in the VYC clubhouse, Young whispered sardonically, “Here’s where the fistfight starts.” But Yabsley, a head shorter and many pounds lighter than Thorpe, and other SBYC crew members merely wanted to give Thorpe the needle about Saturday’s first race.

Thorpe, an Olympic hopeful, was the skipper aboard Marishana, which won the four-mile opening race but later was ruled to have been across the starting line too early and was dropped to last place. It appeared to be a huge penalty when he won the eight-mile second race. By Sunday, however, his win in the first race had been reinstated by the judges after Thorpe came up with a witness in a another boat who said Marishana had been on-side. Santa Barbara sailors, however, were not convinced of Thorpe’s innocence. “A lot of guys saw him leave early,” said Doug Harlow, 26-year-old owner-skipper of Abduction, the top overall boat this year. “Something political got him back in there. But he did sail a good race.”

Thorpe’s performance gave Ventura County sailors something to cheer about. At 25, he represents the youth movement among area clubs. If anything gives Santa Barbara the edge, insiders say, it is a strong youth program and a membership plan that enables young sailors to join without paying much money. SBYC’s strategy only recently has been adopted by other clubs.

“Three or four years ago,” said Jim Modlin, VYC rear commodore, “the largest age group at our club was 70-year-olds. Santa Barbara pushes to get young racers. We’ve been lax in that. . . . But we realized if we didn’t do something, we’d literally die as a club.”

Santa Barbara’s success also is because of its “organization,” Harlow said. And although learning to sail is not difficult, racing requires practice, which crews do at the SBYC. “We raced for a month in Santa Barbara to get ready,” Yabsley said.

The Ventura Cup is especially difficult to prepare for because of “plenty of rules,” Thorpe said. One rule prevented the Ventura Sailing Club from using a swift J-22 this year because it didn’t have lifelines, a requirement of the VYC. Rules are always being modified. At a skippers’ meeting the morning of the first race, the PRO--principal race officer--went over a couple of new amendments and reminded the sailors about “the around-the-ends rule.”

Amendments 9.2 and 10.2 had been posted all around the VYC. “We put them in the heads and in the bar,” Fuller said. “But basically sailors are lazy and don’t read. That’s why we have the skippers’ meeting.”

It wouldn’t be a regatta, of course, without pomp and parties. Accompanying the boats out of the harbor was Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” thundering from speakers. On Saturday night, a catered barbecue and a dance with a live band drew about 600 or 700 people. VYC members put in a lot of work to pull it off. “The club starts in January,” said Modlin, a member of the cup committee. “It’s a tremendous undertaking.”

Although Marishana swept both races Saturday, Abduction and Roller were right behind, giving SBYC a slim lead over the Pacific Corinthian Yacht Club going into Sunday’s eight-mile finale. PCYC, in fact, might have been leading--and might have won the cup--were it not for the exceedingly low handicap of its fastest boat. Foxfire, an Andrews 44, was given a 9 rating by the Southern California ratings board. The next lowest-rated boat was Abduction, a Frers 43, which had a 42 rating, meaning that Foxfire had to give away 33 seconds a mile to Abduction.

“With such gross (rating) inequities among boats, we weren’t given a chance to win,” Foxfire owner Dennis Howarth said.

Extremely lights winds, however, helped Foxfire on Sunday and slowed the other boats. On corrected time, Foxfire completed the course in 2 hours 37 minutes 52 seconds, finishing second about six minutes behind Abduction. Marishana came in 12th, dooming its chances for top-boat honors. Roller assured the SBYC win by passing about 15 boats in the last few minutes and finishing sixth. “The wind changed, which made us look like geniuses,” said Kevin Connelly, Roller’s tactician.

A few written protests were filed after the race, delaying the official results. Nobody knew how long the three judges would confer on the Serenity, which was docked behind the VYC. “They can keep us here all night or let us go home,” said Cornel Greer, a VYC member who wrote the computer program that tabulated the results.

David Young, however, was confident that the walnut-and-silver trophy would return to Santa Barbara. “Even with the protests, we’re still OK,” he said at the postrace party.

But just to be on the safe side, the SBYC should wait a little while before having the trophy engraved.