After Mid-Course Correction, Life Is Yachts of Fun

As Jeffrey Blume tells the story, he was 25, on a bureaucratic fast track going nowhere when he decided to jump ship and tack onto a new life course.

The trained mathematician spent six months struggling to come up with a way to integrate work and play.

Kicking back on his sailboat home in the Berkeley marina, he delved into his childhood--to the things he loved: art, science, math and the ocean.

“There is something Zen-like about being out on the ocean on a boat going 9 to 12 knots,” he said. “The only sound is the wind in the rigging, and the motion of the boat. It’s almost primal.”

He decided to become a naval architect.

It was an unorthodox choice, but 25 years later, as the pony-tailed, khaki-clad naval architect sits in his small home studio in east Ventura, his walls are lined with design awards, his drafting table littered with boat sketches. And the 50-year-old, internationally renowned boat designer never runs out of seafaring stories.

Since the ‘70s, Blume has been involved in designing more than 200 vessels--from racing sailboats to performance power yachts, from commercial fishing boats to special craft for the military. His custom yachts have been featured in the glossy pages of Yachting, Sail, and Power and Motoryacht magazines.

In January 1996, Blume received the California Engineers’ Council Distinguished Engineering Achievement Award for his achievements in small-craft naval architecture and marine engineering.

He has designed remote-control weapons retrieval ships for the Navy, boats for Mexican fishing fleets and tourist boats for Channel Islands Harbor.

He has taken his skills to the far reaches of the globe, and is even called on by the United Nations to design artisanal, or sail-assisted, fishing boats--for remote island people such as the Tongans.

His customers say he produces what he promises.

“Most of the time when you work with an architect, the figures are optimistic in terms of the performance of the boat,” said Glen Galbraith, owner-operator of the Vanguard, which operates out of Ventura Harbor. “But he told us the speed we’d make and the fuel economy we could expect, and he was right.”

Blume ended up in Ventura in the early 1980s when Ed Jenks, head of the now bankrupt Ocean Services Corp., recruited him to help run a boatyard at Ventura Harbor.

Today, as he zooms through Ventura in his Ford Explorer with a “HOTYOTS” license plate, his agile mind jumps from story to story, design to design, as quickly as a Hobie Cat catamaran skimming over the waves.

Blume, who surfs long boards when he’s not sailing, admits that when it comes to his career, he caught a good wave.

He plunged into the marine industry during a boom. The economy was flush with money, and in the ‘70s people who got rich fast wanted to buy boats, he said.

“Fifteen years ago you could submit designs on the back of envelopes and get Coast Guard certification,” Blume said. “These days they have hardened up the requirements for what they approve.”

*

Today, designers in the luxury yacht industry stay busy, he said, but they are busy on a much smaller scale.

Originally from the San Fernando Valley, Blume graduated from UCLA with a degree in mathematics in 1968, and a master’s in math in 1969. Bored with his job as a policy analyst in the University of California system, he went back to school in 1975 to get a degree in naval architecture at UC Berkeley, then one of the few places in the country to offer such a program. He graduated in 1977.

Upon graduation he headed to the Pacific Northwest to Puget Sound--a boater’s paradise--to work for Ed Monk, who ran a design company well-regarded in the industry. There, he cranked out 250 boat designs in three years.

“That kind of experience is almost unheard of these days from a premiere boat design company,” Blume says. “But it was a boating industry boom. Everybody thought they were wealthy, and there were lots of . . . boats and fishing boats being built.”

But when the boom faded, Blume decided to strike out on his own, casting his net wide.

However novel the request, Blume tries to accommodate the unusual desires of his clients. One client asked for a hatch in the back of the boat, so he could lower his Honda Accord into the aft deck.

“I asked him why,” Blume said. “And he said, ‘I really like going to foreign places, but I hate to rent foreign cars.’ ”

Jock Chamberlain, an entrepreneur and international businessman who now lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., worked with Blume in the Yucatan and remembers him as practical, experienced and terrific under pressure.

*

He tells a tale of the first time Blume walked into his office.

At the time, Mexico was going through a population crisis and a food shortage and the World Bank had just given the Mexicans $380 million to develop their fishing industry.

“I didn’t know anything about boats,” said Chamberlain, who was managing the Yucatan boat-building program for the Mexican government.

He had a boat in production designed by a Mexican naval architect, and it was not quite seaworthy, he recalled.

“It looked like a group in committee designed this boat,” he said. “It had a tugboat body and Queen Mary chimney stacks, and Jeff took one look at it and said the berth is too narrow, it’s going to go underwater.”

Blume asked how much the average Maya weighed. After a quick mental calculation he asked Chamberlain to bring out 27 Mayas, and they put them on the bow, one by one.

“Literally, as the 27th Maya climbed on the bow, the boat went underwater,” Chamberlain said.

So Blume redesigned the boat, and together they built a fleet of 45- to 55-foot fishing boats.

Working as a consultant for Banpesca, a Mexican national bank, between 1979 and 1983, Blume designed four fleets of fishing boats for Mexico from Baja to Sinaloa and Oaxaca.

His international clientele grew.

He was showing some designs at a symposium on sail-assisted fishing boats in Seattle in 1981 when he was approached by a naval architect from the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization.

“He asked me if I would be interested in going to Southeast Asia,” Blume recalls. “He said it would require six to 12 weeks in primitive conditions.”

Blume accepted, and took off for Tonga--a small Pacific island nation.

“The Tongans had basically forgotten how to fish,” Blume said. “Their No. 1 food source was tinned corned beef from New Zealand. The United Nations was trying to reestablish use of indigenous fishing boats.”

Over the next 2 1/2 months, Blume designed a fleet of 35-foot hook-and-line, wooden jig fishing boats.

He said he never met the king, recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the physically largest head of state in the world, but the prince dropped by his design studio.

*

Blume’s experience in Tonga put him on the U.N. list of artisanal boat building consultants--and since then he has been called to Fiji, Africa and Greece to do designs.

“Once you design one,” he said self-deprecatingly, “you become kind of an expert. I mean, how many people even know what artisanal means?”

But though he designs virtually any type of boat, Blume’s real love is still sailboats.

His office bookshelves include 16 sailing novels by Patrick O’Brien, and photos of the first yacht he designed, “Hot Sheet,” hang on his walls.

When he has time to spare, he scratches out a design for his dream boat.

Like a sculptor who sees the form trapped in stone, he names boats as he sees them in his mind’s eye. This one, whose preliminary sketches lie on his drafting board, will be a 43-foot performance sailboat, for the 2,250-mile Transpacific Race, from Long Beach to Honolulu. He is calling it Millennium--or maybe Hal, for the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“I perceive its aura when I think about it,” he said. “In my mind it has taken on a name, and a personality.”