If It Floats, It Can Win This Regatta

Did you tire of all the hype about America’s Cup?

All those months?

All that money?

I have a suggestion for the America’s Cup (Dis)Organizing Committee. Hire Jim Williams to run the damn thing. He’ll show up with a cooler, Hawaiian shorts and sandals. You might even catch him wearing a shirt, but not likely. He wears a shirt about as often as most people wear tuxedos.

Williams would gather the Bill Kochs, Paul Cayards and Dennis Conners together and say, “Strap ‘em together, folks. The gun goes off in 2 1/2 hours.”

Bang.

Thirty minutes or so later, that would be it.

Over and out, a total of three to four hours on one Saturday.

That is exactly how Williams has run an event called the Abalone Gulch Downwind Regatta for 15 years. He happens to be the Head Abalone at something called the Abalone Gulch Yacht Club. Membership is restricted--anyone who owns a yacht cannot be a member. You want to get into this annual regatta, you build a yacht . . . on the spot.

Bold-faced, under construction rules for the Downwind Regatta, is the following stipulation: “Only materials which are inventive and have nothing to do with the usual construction of boats will be acceptable.”

This is yachting anyone can afford. Not too many entries in the Downwind Regatta spend more money on material than they do on refreshments.

Seven yachts were “under construction” in Mariner’s Cove late Saturday morning when I arrived to check out the 15th annual event. A poll of the skippers indicated the total cost of all these “campaigns” was probably about the same as the Kiwis’ bar tab for one night on the town in Coronado.

“Cost?” said Big Foot, an entry from Costa Mesa. “Nothing really. When the race is over, I’m gonna take the boat apart and use the pieces to furnish my new apartment.”

The race was over very quickly for Big Foot and his crew. The course went from north to south, but his boat went from west to east and landed on Mariner’s Point. He could take heart, however. Columbus became famous for landing in the wrong place.

“Cost?” said Cherie Mix, co-captain of Windy Weenie. “We spent $29 for a parachute at a war surplus store downtown. With everything else, it probably cost us $40.”

“Plus alcohol,” said Robin Shannon, the co-captain.

With the parachute for a sail, Styrofoam for flotation and a wood platform from a water bed frame, they were ready. They made one adjustment. They added one more crew member to qualify for the three-person division, which had no other entries. Thus, the maidens were assured of a trophy on their maiden trip.

“Cost?” said Bob Cullmer, captain of a yacht-with-no-name. “Maybe $60 for plumbing supplies.”

Cullmer’s boat should have been called something like Road Kill, because it seemed like most of what he strapped together was picked up somewhere after being thrown away by someone. The bowsprit was a stair railing, the masts (yes, two) were old television antennas and a piece of Styrofoam came for $1 at a yard sale.

(It might be noted here that Styrofoam is to the Downwind Regatta what carbon fiber was to the America’s Cup, only considerably less expensive. Four of the seven boats had Styrofoam, and those were the only four to finish.)

In addition, Cullmer and his wife Pat were fitting two speed limit signs as keels and a no parking sign as a rudder.

“We didn’t steal them,” Cullmer said. “We only pick them up when they’ve been knocked down.”

Different gimmicks have been tried through the years, such as a paper mache submarine and a craft known as the Cardboard Catastrophe, and a good percentage of entries have gone down in ankle deep water only steps from where they were constructed.

“We were in our fifth year down here,” Cullmer said, “before we got onto the water and our boat didn’t sink. We didn’t know what to do, because no one knew how to sail . We’d never had to.”

For example, entries from the Beachcomber and Pennant, two South Mission Beach watering holes, lasted 25 feet each before they turned into flotsam. Their crews swam the course pushing the debris ahead of them. They looked like floating landfills rather than yachts.

The Cullmers obviously learned how to get a yacht together and how to sail it. They took off like they were late to lunch.

“The only problem we had,” he said, “was hitting a couple of danger signs.”

It’s a good thing the signs were standing, or they’d be next year’s deck. Their yacht was so sturdy and so maneuverable that they whipped it around and brought it back up the course before anyone else had finished. They might have taken the thing to Hawaii if they’d remembered supplies.

If Jim Williams ran America’s Cup, and I insist the idea has merit, you could forget all those big-money hired guns. I’d go to Las Vegas and get my money on Bob and Pat Cullmer.

Besides, I’d love to hear someone trying to explain to the snooty New York Yacht Club that America’s Cup is now in the possession of the Abalone Gulch Yacht Club, wherever and whatever that might be.