Idea Born After Ocean-Going Golfer Gets a Bit Teed Off

A guy goes on an ocean cruise and he deserves to have fun, right?

Shuffleboard, dining, dancing, suntanning and whacking a few hundred golf balls into the ocean off the fantail.

Is this possible? It is not.

Not since a United Nations fellow-traveler agency put the big kibosh on shipboard driving ranges a few years ago. Something about the plastic-coated balls not dissolving and thus being bad for marine life.

Enter now Patrick E. Kane of Bonita. He wants to set things right.

He was shocked when he and his irons took a cruise from Los Angeles to the Mexican Riveria and found that ocean-side driving was no more.

Rather than rant and rave and call Rush Limbaugh, Kane decided to investigate and innovate.

He found that some cruise ships were buying 30,000 balls a month before the environmental killjoys got their way. (Some ships now use nets like batting cages but that’s a sorry substitute, of course, since it eliminates the ego-boosting soar and splash.)

Kane did not quit his day job as a salesman for Newport Adhesives and Composites. But on his off-hours he set out to design a dissolvable ball and get a U. S. patent.

“I started developing this idea at home in my kitchen,” Kane explained. After a year’s effort, he has just been awarded patent No. 5,098,104.

Kane, whose background is in aerospace manufacturing, has invented a golf ball that looks like the real thing, dimples and all, but is made of cellulose and highly dissolvable materials such as sodium bicarbonate and diatomaceous earth (in the vulgate: fossilized bugs scrunched up very tight).

As Kane tells it, the ball holds its shape just fine, with the only downside being that it gets 20% less distance. But, since cruise ship golfers are hitting off the equivalent of a five-story building, who will notice?

Kane’s next step is finding a financial partner for his newly formed company, Bluwater Golf Products. After that: the marketplace.

“We’re going to make an attempt at it, come hell or high water.”

Right on Top of Things

Here and there.

* Some people say the new lobbying group called the Coalition for San Diego Business is needed because the Chamber of Commerce is out of date politically.

Maybe they’ve seen the chamber’s newly published Business Referral Directory for 1992.

It lists the City Council member from the 5th District as Linda Bernhardt, who was recalled a year ago and replaced by Tom Behr.

* Chasing after business?

Yes, a personal injury law office has just opened up directly across the street from where the ambulances arrive at the UC San Diego Medical Center emergency ward.

* Cathryn Chinn, one of county’s leading lawyers specializing in sex harassment and sex discrimination cases, is hosting a fund-raiser in La Jolla this month for ex-Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego).

She believes the accusations from female staffers that drove Bates from Congress did not constitute harassment and might have been politically inspired.

* When Borrego Springs freezes over . . .

A Susan Golding supporter who didn’t know any better tried to get Lynn Schenk to endorse Golding for mayor.

(For new arrivals: Schenk successfully sued Golding for libel and slander after their 1984 supervisorial race.)

* UC San Diego, as you know, has a reputation as a top-flight science school.

Maybe that explains bumper stickers spotted near campus: “Ban DNA” and “Stop Continental Drift.”

In the Nick of Time

Final exit, San Diego style.

A 28-year-old fellow decides to end it all, and so he drives to Coast Boulevard in La Jolla. Hey, why not have an ocean view as your final glimpse of this world?

He pops two dozen pills. But then he changes his mind.

He uses his car phone to call his psychologist. The psychologist calls the cops, who dispatch the paramedics.

The next view the fellow has is from the business end of a stomach pump at the emergency ward.

Figure it: Saved by cellular.