Cover Story : Life’s Snuggest Harbor : Those Who Call Boats Home Find Open Spaces Amid Tight Quarters

This is the life. Let other people go home and sit in dark living rooms or cramped patios, trying to escape the sounds of police sirens and the squabbling of the next-door neighbors.

When Frank and Jean Bennett get home from work, they stretch out in isolated comfort on the afterdeck of La Folie, a sleek 60-foot motor craft in one of the outer slips of Long Beach’s Downtown Marina, and ponder the city’s jeweled skyline across a moonlit harbor, hearing only the haunting hourly call of the Queen Mary’s foghorn.

“You leave all the street signs, the traffic lights, the white lines and the congestion behind,” Frank Bennett says, settling deeper into his chair. “You’re out on the edge of society.”

He gestures expansively at the boat he has lived in for the past 10 years. “There is no down side,” he says.

The good life, eh? Jean Bennett, who has just struggled up the gangplank with a couple of bags of groceries, gives her husband a flinty look.

“I’ll tell you, 10 years is way too long to live here,” she says, with rocklike conviction. “You just get tired of hauling things. I’d rather do something else.”

Boating clearly isn’t for everybody. It’s cramped and inconvenient; it’s increasingly expensive; and the plumbing is, in many cases, just a shade better than Tobacco Road.

“In the morning, you wet yourself down, turn off the water, soap up, then turn the water on again. That’s a shower,” says Hal Lane, referring to the limited water supplies on board. Lane, chairman of the city’s Marine Advisory Commission, recently returned to terra firma in search of more creature comforts after a Spartan five years on a boat.

But sacrifices and all, the boating life offers a kind of freedom that landlubbers can’t even conceive of, boat owners often say. Loosen those moorings that tie your boat to the marina, they say, and you’re in a vast, rolling world, out of the reach of bosses, bill collectors, traffic cops and nagging relatives.

Even if you never head for the open seas, just the gentle rocking of the boat, the calls of sea birds and the creaking of the lines is enough to transport you magically from the workaday world.

There are more than 300 people in Long Beach’s two marinas, claiming an assortment of about 200 yachts, schooners, windjammers and power boats as home. Long Beach live-aboards pay as much as $1,150 a month for the privilege of living in their tidy dockside forest of white masts and blue tarpaulins.

Because of the economy, that forest is a little thinner now than it used to be. After the recent defense and aerospace layoffs, many once-flush boaters in the Long Beach area are selling their beloved tubs.

Two years ago, the city’s two marinas, with more than 3,800 slips for recreational and live-aboard boaters, were almost 100% occupied. Now, there’s a vacancy rate of about 15% for the recreational boaters.

But the economy hasn’t taken the gloss off the live-aboard life.

“It’s an affordable solution for some people having economic problems,” says Joni Anderson, administrative analyst with the city’s Marine Bureau. “If a couple already has a boat, sometimes it’s less expensive to give up the house and become a live-aboard.”

In fact, there is a growing waiting list of people who want to convert their boats into residences. A limit of 10% live-aboards on most marina gangways--imposed by the state Lands Commission to prevent floating dockside “towns” that lock out casual boaters--has meant that some applicants have been waiting a decade or more.

“You have to wait for somebody else to die or sell their boat or move away,” says veteran live-aboard Russ Smith.

Many of those who are waiting are middle-aged or elderly boat hobbyists who, with their children grown, suddenly find themselves able both to fulfill a dream and to save money.

Richard and Carolyn Gardner waited 13 years to turn their 85-foot yacht Deerleap into their primary residence. “Nobody wanted to die on me,” says Richard, 53, the owner of an Orange County auto parts warehouse.

Finally, last October, with a live-aboard slot available, they were able to move from a four-acre ranch in Modjeska Canyon, near Lake Irvine, to their boat. The ranch, complete with pet possums, raccoons, cats and dogs, was turned over to a daughter, and the Gardners began a leaner, more economical life without mortgage payments.

“Economical to a point,” Gardner says. “If you’re buying a home, you’re gaining equity with your monthly payments. You don’t gain any equity by paying slip fees.”

Novices soon discover that life on a boat, with its constant round of painting, sanding, chipping and fixing, can be high on elbow grease and low on luxury.

Those tiny staterooms with little or no closet space can begin to close in on you, Lane says. “For a sit-down dinner, you seat four at the table and two others on the couch with TV tables,” Lane says. “It’s not bad, except the people on the couch are out in left field.”

And the costs of maintaining a boat--they just never seem to stop.

“Boats are horrible investments,” says movie producer Michael Lesner, who lives on a 92-foot yacht in the Alamitos Bay Marina. “It’s like taking a wheelbarrow full of money every month and dumping it overboard.”

Even the most committed boat owners respond with knowing laughs at the famous remark of a jaundiced ex-yachtsman, who said that the day he bought his boat was the second happiest in his life. And the happiest? “The day I sold it.”

Aside from monthly slip rental, $9.63 per foot, or $481.50 for a 50-foot boat, and live-aboard fees, $115 a month, most boat owners find they spend well over $200 a month for maintenance, insurance and property taxes. The rental fees go into a fund to run the marinas, including a Marine Bureau police force of two dozen officers who patrol around the clock and administer the rest of Long Beach’s waterfront.

On top of those fees, there are often the kinds of surprise expenses--engine parts, $200-a-gallon copper-based paint for the hull, new canvas--that car owners never encounter.

“Things just keep going up,” says Russ Smith, 68, a retired contractor who moved into the Alamitos Bay Marina 33 years ago. “When I first got here, it was 85 cents a foot.”

For some elderly slip renters, the boat can become a trap. With fixed incomes insufficient to cover the expenses and fees, they can find themselves living on floating wrecks with insufficient funds to cover even basic maintenance.

Karlice Cobb, 78, lives in a cluttered 44-foot power boat that she and her late husband built more than 20 years ago. Cobb, a cocker spaniel and a cat survive on a small pension and a Social Security check that is barely enough to cover her monthly slip fee of $547.

Cobb’s Castle, as she calls her boat, has clearly seen better times, though a group of volunteers recently painted it for her. “I haven’t had it hauled out (removed from the water so the hull can be repainted) in almost three years,” says Cobb, who tries to make ends meet by sewing and by handing out food samples in a supermarket.

Even just sitting in the marina, boats can molder into disrepair, boaters say.

“It’s an extremely harsh environment out here,” Lesner says. Wood-loving sea worms, corrosive salt water, dry rot from puddling rainwater--all of these have to be fought the way a homeowner fights vermin.

Neglect the haul-out every year or so, and you leave the hull vulnerable to worms and corrosion.

“When you least expect it, a plank will pop out on you and you’ve got a hole in your hull like this,” Lesner says, holding his hands far enough apart to fit a large cantaloupe between them.

Cobb, short and thin, with a mop of gray hair, has been living on a boat for more than 30 years, mostly, she says, because she gravitated instinctively to the sea. “I don’t think I could live on the shore now,” she says. “If the boat sinks, I’ll go down with it.”

Boat owners are obligated to keep their vessels in a navigable condition, Anderson says. But live-aboards like Cobb represent a dilemma for the city, which has the power to evict owners who don’t comply.

“The city obviously can’t afford to repair boats,” says Anderson, the Long Beach Marine Bureau official. “On the other hand, we don’t want to add another homeless person to the streets. It’s a gray area.”

The sink-or-swim devotion to life on the water that Cobb speaks to is widespread.

Russ and Donna Smith think sometimes about moving onto land.

“But look at the view we have,” Smith says, indicating a broad sweep of open water on Alamitos Bay, where a flock of geese is coming in for a landing. “For what I could sell the boat for, what would I get on land? A little tract house on some dingy street.”

The greatest challenge of living on a boat, Smith says, is fitting everything into the kinds of spaces where, if you stretch your arms too wide, you’ll skin your knuckles.

Most boats are like floating Swiss watches, with every little niche having a function. Smith shows you around his blocky-looking 51-foot power boat Tsunami. There are drawers under bunks, cabinets in walls, storage spaces hidden under the cushions of a couch, a hatch leading to a footlocker-size hollow for tools and spare engine parts. Odd-size spaces are stuffed with canned goods and extra rolls of paper towels.

The galley is a square yard of kitchen equipment, complete with microwave and oven, where Thanksgiving turkeys, carefully measured ahead of time, have been prepared.

“All the comforts of home--except a washer and dryer,” says Donna, who washes clothes at a local coin-operated laundry.

On jaunts to Catalina or Dana Point, Russ presides over the little wheelhouse, which is equipped with radar, citizen’s band and marine radios, depth sounder and electronic navigating equipment.

For all his sailorly confidence, Russ, 68, is an unlikely candidate for prime live-aboard booster. One of his earliest experiences of living aboard, as a 19-year-old Navy seaman, ended when he was dunked unceremoniously in the South Pacific after the aircraft carrier Princeton was sunk by a Japanese dive bomber in October, 1944, off the coast of Luzon in the Philippines.

“As far as I know, I’m the only survivor who’s living on a boat,” says Smith, who attends annual survivor reunions. Smith spent almost two hours in the ocean that day before a Navy destroyer picked him up.

The Smiths had a close call seven years ago, when a supertanker grazed the Tsunami in a fog just outside Long Beach Harbor. “It was going so fast, it sucked us in next to it, and we couldn’t veer away,” Donna says.

That encounter resulted in $16,000 worth of damage to the Tsunami’s port side, but it didn’t dampen the Smiths’ enthusiasm for the boating life.

They say the state-imposed limits on the number of live-aboards keep the marinas peaceful. “It’s like living in a little, isolated town,” Russ Smith says.

The ideal live-aboard is a putterer with a knack for mechanics and an affinity for the Spartan life. Someone like Robert Pard, retired Air Force pilot and firefighter.

Pard and his wife, Norma, both 70, have been living on boats for 30 years. In 1964, they sailed their first boat from Norway, across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal and up the Pacific coast of Central America and Mexico to Long Beach.

The Pards’ current boat is the Posh, a trim, Finnish-made motorized sailboat with a teak-lined cabin. Pard’s idea of a good time is tinkering with the boat’s motor. “I’m a putterer,” he says. “There’s always something to do. I can’t sit in the rocking chair.”

When he’s not fooling with the engine, he works on the teak trim. Sanding and varnishing. “There’s more of that than anything,” he says.

Pard would like to see less clutter in its elegant salon and cozy stateroom. He’s concerned about the accumulation of his wife’s art supplies. She’s into Japanese ink sketching at the moment, but there have been oil painting binges, with bulky framed canvases piling up in the staterooms.

Life on a boat tests a married couple’s compatibility, Norma Pard says. “Sure, there are little barbs now and then,” she says. “But the water is very soothing. You get over it very quickly.”

Few boaters have gone as whole-hog into the boating life as movie producer Lesner, who has turned the Dorsal, a 70-year-old yacht once owned by a breakfast cereal heiress, into home, production office and haven from the stresses of The Industry.

“Being in Hollywood, you deal with people from time to time who want to pay you with cocaine,” says Lesner, 45, who expects to go into production on his action feature “Balloon” later this year. “You meet lawyers who try to bilk you. Then you come out here where pretense does not exist.”

In the marina, Lesner says, he encounters mostly generous, unpretentious people. “Some of them are millionaires, but not your classic millionaires,” he says. “They have holes in their jeans, and they’ll come over and crawl around in the bilges of your boat just to help with a problem.”

Lesner’s “office” is the boat’s fantail, where he sprawls across an upholstered banquette and does business over a telephone. Sometimes he slips into a Jacuzzi in the middle of the deck or studies the marina’s wildlife.

A pregnant sea lion recently took up residence on a dock near the boat, Lesner says, and herons and sandpipers often fly in. “It’s an amazing little ecological niche,” he says.

For live-aboards, the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake was nothing more than another natural phenomenon--just a gentle jiggling of their boats from the back-and-forth movement of pilings pulling on moorings.

“You hear the slapping of the water on the bottom of the boat,” says Russ Smith, “and you can see the street lamps whipping back and forth.”

The Bennetts, who run a metal processing plant in Downtown Los Angeles, slept through it.

“A guy who works with us called at about 5:30 (an hour after the quake) and said, ‘Did you realize we had a major earthquake?’ ” recalled Jean Bennett. “Frank said, ‘Hold on a minute,’ and he went and looked outside. He came back and said, ‘Well, I’m in about 20 feet of water.’ ”

As people from elsewhere in the region tried to piece their lives back together, sweeping away rubble and glass, nothing had changed for the Bennetts, the Smiths, the Pards and the rest. Nothing at all.

The Cost of Living Aboard

A boat used to be the cheaper way to live. Today, living aboard can be expensive. This is what it would cost per month to live in a Long Beach marina if your boat is 50 feet long and cost $100,000:

Boat payment: $806*

Slip rental ($9.63 per foot): 482

Live-aboard fee (including utilities and parking): 115

Maintenance, including annual hull cleaning: 84

Property tax and other taxes: 75

Insurance: 117

Total: $1,679

*On a 20-year loan at 7 1/2 %

Source: City of Long Beach; Dimen Marine Financial Services, Newport Beach