Sailing a Sea of Dreams and Memories, Guided by an Old Friendship

The name of the boat is Straylight.

Even before I bought it, wedding my weekends to 16 feet of faded fiberglass, corroded aluminum and dingy sails, Straylight was destined to be the name.

It seems to fit best when I am riding a swift sundowner wind across the Santa Barbara Channel toward the Ventura Harbor, chasing the fading afternoon light into port.

But the name resonates deepest when I remember how it all started 15 years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, aboard another Hobie catamaran.

I sailed with my buddy and fellow reporter Steve Marquez that day. We lofted lightly over blood-warm waves on the rented cat’s trampoline deck, swapping war stories and horrible jokes over soggy Chee-tos and icy beer.

Then Steve let me drive and sealed my fate.

For a boy weaned on summertime lake jaunts aboard clumsy single-hulled AMF Sunfishes loaned by friends, my first turn at a Hobie’s tiller was a kick in the head. The boat moved beneath us like a high-octane racing machine, responsive, fast and unquestionably cool.

It was a dead certainty that I would get one as soon as I could.

The name Straylight came from a space station in a William Gibson novel that I devoured four times over the next few summers. And it was coupled in my dreams with another Gibson creation, an orbital tug ship dubbed Babylon Rocker by its Rastafarian pilots.

But these were just names in a book until January 1987.

That’s when Steve lay ill in the hospital, wasting away from what he insisted was nothing more than a “serious blood imbalance.”

We were fellow newsmen in Philadelphia by then, the closest of friends.

But Steve didn’t talk much about being sick, just about the punk concerts and Sixers games and cheese steaks and cult flicks we’d check out together when he got out of that bed.

He put on a brave front, saying he’d have it licked in a few weeks.

Plugged into a respirator, he couldn’t talk. So he wrote me a note as I sat by his bed.

“Can you get car battery charged, get it washed, waxed?” he scrawled, twisting the pen to get past the IV line in his wrist. “I want it to be ready when I get out.”

Five days later, he died of what the coroner’s report revealed to be complications of AIDS.

And I suddenly found myself the shaken owner of a worn 1974 Toyota Celica that I secretly named Babylon Rocker.

It seemed to fit the indefatigable coupe that had carried its previous owner--a fan of reggae and myriad other types of music--through the suffering, earthly realm that the Rastas call Babylon.

And it matched the car’s future role as the vehicle that would someday tow its new owner’s dream boat to the sea.

When I moved to Ventura in 1990 to join The Times’ new Ventura County Edition, I saw the pristine, mountain-rimmed coastline populated by seals, dolphins and sailboats.

I knew it was time to realize the dream.

I bolted a trailer hitch onto Babylon Rocker. I scraped together the money and bought a beaten but seaworthy 14-year-old Hobie I found in the classified ads.

And I learned to sail it, the hard way.

On Castaic Lake one day, I jibed at high speed instead of tacking and the boat skipped up off the water and slammed down astraddle the dock.

I pitch-poled and capsized just outside Ventura Harbor while dangling solo from the steel trapeze line that hangs from the top of the mast, wrestling in vain to right it until a passing speedboat owner tossed me a line.

On countless afternoons, I plowed through heavy chop near Platform Gina, cackling madly while fellow reporters clutched the deck like soaked rats and grinned into the howling wind.

And I sweated for hours in the doldrums, becalmed on a sea heavy as mercury, dead in the water and tantalizingly close to the Ventura docks.

Straylight belonged here. It was home.

Babylon Rocker carried me all over Ventura County on hundreds of stories each year, from Grimes Canyon and Simi Valley to the Oxnard Plain, through brush fires and fog banks and downpours, until one day a few years ago.

The car--by now adorned with a rebuilt motor, chrome wheels and purple metal-flake paint--finally conked out one rainy night in the parking lot of The Esplanade.

The alternator, its fourth, was cooked. And the mileage--although the odometer had failed six years earlier at 147,920--was probably up around 350,000.

It was seven years almost to the day after Steve died.

Reluctantly, I decided to let the car go. I donated it to a trade school. And it gave me solace to know it would be torn apart and rebuilt time and again as the next generation of Southern California mechanics learned the secrets of auto repair.

I still sail Straylight whenever I can.

I bring queasy newcomers who toss up their ill-chosen breakfasts, and seasoned catamaran vets who love screaming past Surfers Point with a firm grip on the tiller and mainsheet while I lean back and smell the lush wind surging in from Santa Cruz Island.

We sail in June gloom and Santa Ana fury. We gobble pretzels and sip beers. We tack happily from the sea-lion-infested buoy outside Ventura to the churning fringes of Surfers Point.

And we revel in touring Ventura County’s coast with little more than a few square yards of sailcloth and a stiff breeze.

Though I love to go solo, I always prefer to sail with crew and company.

But sometimes, as I reach into the cooler to fetch my sailing partner a beer, I stop short.

And I think, “This one should be for Steve.”

Mack Reed is a Times staff writer.