Shore to Ship

Justin Fujita’s sailboat was racing along in the brisk breeze, not gaining but not losing ground against the boats ahead of him, when tragedy struck. A thin support string gave way and the mast slipped free of the deck, dropping the sails into the rippling water.

Lost. Adrift on the open pond. At the mercy of winds and waves with nothing to do but wait for help.

“It’s just floating around out there like a barge,” said Fujita, 11, of Irvine, as he watched a couple wild coots paddle past his disabled model sailboat.

It was a moment of high drama on the low seas as members of the Orange County Model Sail Club met Saturday afternoon for informal tune-up races before the club’s annual Spring Regatta, which launches at 11 a.m. today on the pond at William R. Mason Regional Park in Irvine. At least 10 boats were preregistered for today’s event, which pits meter-long remote-controlled sailboats against one another in races operating under international sailing regulations.

Fujita’s boat eventually made it to shore, aided both by a steady breeze and by his father, Mike Fujita, a club member who used his own remote-controlled sailboat to push the now-mastless hull to shore. As they worked, about 10 other club members continued practicing, navigating their boats around a permanent course of floating markers.

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“It’s great for people to watch because they can see the whole race, the whole course,” said Mark Mason of Costa Mesa, as he used levers to maneuver the sails and rudder on his boat, hoping to beat Richard Diamond’s boat to a marker. “You use the same skills out here that you use racing the big boats.”

But that’s where the similarity ends. As one racer put it, the model racers can finish a day of racing in the amount of time it takes to set up the sails on a big boat. The little boats are a lot cheaper--modelers can build one for $400. Model yacht club dues are negligible, and as long as you have a closet, you don’t need to rent a boat slip.

The Orange County sail club began about 20 years ago when three open-water sailors set their sights smaller and began running models around the Mason Park pond. The club now has about 35 active members who race almost exclusively two styles, or classes, of boats: the One Meter, in which the boats must be 1 meter long with 600 square inches of sail; and the Marblehead, 50 inches long with 800 square inches of sail.

Nationally, there are 19 classes of model sailboats raced by about 1,500 hobbyists, according to Don Peacock of Dayton, Ohio, president of the American Model Yachting Assn., which oversees about 115 clubs. Five of the clubs are in Southern California, including the Orange County Model Sail Club, the Tri-City Model Yacht Club based in Brea, and the Helmsmen Model Yacht Club in Long Beach.

The national group establishes the limits for the classes, which top out with Newporter boats, measuring 6 feet in length and weighing about 40 pounds. Within each class, the association dictates such design points as keel length, which affects the boat’s stability; height of the masts; and size and shape of the sails.

“Everything that influences speed is limited in the rules,” said Lloyd “Swede” Johnson, one of the founders of the Orange County sail club and a retired sailmaker for Baxter & Cicero Sailmakers of Costa Mesa. “If they didn’t limit it, somebody would cheat. We all would cheat a little bit, if we could get away with it.”

The challenge, Johnson said, is to find room within the limits to design a competitive advantage. He has developed a reputation among racers for his innovations, and his boats--which he builds on order for about $600--have won a number of national titles.

But the latest ripple on the Irvine pond comes from new German-designed Marblehead-class boats that at least three members have imported for a rumored $5,000 each. The boats have rotating masts that allow racers more flexibility in responding to changes in wind, and other innovations such as using the battery for the counterweight in the bottom of the keel.

“It’s the fastest boat in the world, as far as I’m concerned,” said Paul Brown, a club member and editor of the national association’s quarterly magazine. “From an engineering standpoint, it’s quite an amazing piece of equipment. . . . It’s the Mercedes-Benz of model boats.”

Brown, who has been racing for about 10 years, declined to say how much he spent for his boat. And he professes to not care that Johnson already is leveling the sailing field by coming up with his own home-grown adaptations of the German designs.

“I think it’s great,” said Brown, an Irvine lawyer. “It’s fun to watch Swede invent stuff, because he’s a very talented gentleman. It’s fun to see him excited. I’ve seen some of the work he’s produced so far. Basically, you’re talking about a guy working out of his garage. He really is an amazing craftsman.”

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Harry Bourgeois, commodore of the Orange County club, believes that by the time Johnson is done, he’ll have surpassed whatever design improvements the Germans came up with.

“He’s pretty innovative when it comes to seeing an idea and copying it, and making it better,” said Bourgeois, who has won four national championships using Johnson’s models.

For his part, Johnson--a self-effacing man of 77--says the fun comes from the challenge of creation, and of racing itself.

“These are not models; these are high-tech racing machines,” Johnson said, sitting in the living room of his house in Costa Mesa. His passion for boats has consumed his living space. Rolls of synthetic sailcloth hang from a rack built over a window; the dining room has been converted to a work zone, with a rib-high table standing against a side wall. One of his creations--its hull made from West African mahogany, the decking from Alaskan white cedar--sits propped against the fireplace.

“Personally, I like wood,” Johnson said. “I like the look of wood, the feel of wood.”

Yet most of the boats he makes these days are fiberglass because of the weight advantage the material offers. He molds the hulls--”eggshells,” he calls them--around wooden plugs he builds from his own designs, a skill he developed by picking the minds of nautical engineers he has known over the years.

Johnson has no formal schooling in ship design. His is the art of the self-taught, knowledge gained through books and trial and error. He uses mathematical equations to design the curve of the hull so that it will hold the weight he needs to place in the boat. Experience refines what the math tells him.

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Johnson works on his boats from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily and races nearly every weekend. He’s won his share over the years, but stays with it now for personal reasons: The camaraderie that comes with spending time among people who share an interest, and the satisfaction born of doing something well.

“It’s a hobby, not a business,” he said. “I try to make parts for these boats that other people can’t.”

The competition draws the sailors to the pond’s edge, but the lure of the boats themselves run deeper than simply sailing a piece of fiberglass faster than the person next to you.

For Brown, the sense of escape fuels his passion.

“These boats are very relaxing,” he said. “They’re almost therapeutic. You go to the pond with all the problems of the world on your shoulders, and when you come back your mind is relaxed, refreshed.

“It’s total escape. Like going to Disneyland without all the people.”

The Orange County Model Sail Club’s Spring Regatta begins today at 11 a.m. at the pond in William R. Mason Regional Park in Irvine. The entrance is off University Drive, between Harvard Avenue and Culver Drive. Parking is $4.