Scores of Ventura Homes for Sail

For five years John Cruz, his girlfriend Ivy Kudo and their cat Napple have cruised the Pacific on their sailboat Gypsy.

But only when the couple dropped anchor in Ventura Harbor in June did they feel at home.

Now they plan to join the hundreds living full time on boats moored at Ventura Harbor. Cruz said he isn’t sure they will ever leave.

Amid fishing trawlers and vacation craft, live-aboards go to bed and wake up on cramped sailboats or on yachts that are the seafaring equivalent of mobile homes. They haul their dirty laundry up rickety ramps to Laundromats at four Ventura Harbor marinas. Once a week, they dump their sewage at a city-operated pumping station in the harbor.

To the uninitiated, life on a docked boat may seem spartan. To live-aboards it’s home.

“It’s just like living in a condo or housing tract,” said Cruz, 46, an emergency room nurse at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura. “But I live on a boat because I couldn’t afford a house and a boat.”

Along the California coast, live-aboards have at times been blamed for everything from rising crime to increased pollution. In Marina del Rey and Santa Barbara, officials have clamped down on the number of live-aboards they will allow.

But that hasn’t been the case at Ventura Harbor. Live-aboards are welcome, harbor officials say.

If anything, said Ventura Port District director Oscar Pena, they have helped transform the harbor from a sleepy boat lagoon into an emerging neighborhood with growing political clout. Pena said he will consult with live-aboards and the newly formed Ventura Harbor Community Council as he studies a Ventura plan to give the city more say in harbor operations.

“I’m envious of them,” Pena said. “I see people sunning on their boats on a perfect day and I think, ‘You can’t get any better.’ ”

Live-aboards describe their communities as floating neighborhoods, subject to the same fears of crime and development as any landlocked subdivision. Like owners of more conventional homes, they also tell of neighbors banding together in hard times, of live-aboards pitching in to keep boats from breaking free during storms.

But the standard tract house doesn’t have to be kept seaworthy.

Dust from the strawberry and mushroom fields across Harbor Boulevard can stick like glue to sails and hulls. Barnacles, algae and salt water can combine to bore through a boat like an army of termites.

Live-aboards must also contend with the occasional wood-rotted boat bobbing in the next slip with no owner in sight--the marine version of the shuttered home down the block with broken windows and dead grass.

The life isn’t for everyone.

“I couldn’t do it all the time,” said Sue Buck, office manager for Ventura West Marina. “I need the space. I want my bathtub.”

Of the nearly 1,500 slips in the harbor, about 500 are occupied by people claiming a boat as their primary residence, Pena said.

Slip fees in the three privately operated marinas--Ventura West Marina, Ventura Yacht Club and Ventura Isle Marina--range from $150 a month for small boats, up to $600 for larger vessels. The three boat docks rim the harbor, 274 acres transformed in the early 1950s from sand dunes and wetlands, complete with an airstrip.

Ventura Harbor Village maintains an additional 167 slips with a few live-aboards sprinkled among dozens of commercial fishing boats.

At the Ventura Yacht Club, Jim and Mary Brye, Thousand Oaks transplants who sold their home in 1997, live aboard a 42-foot Catalina sailboat.

Jim Brye is a retired semiconductor executive who now owns a Thousand Oaks building maintenance company.

From the stern of their sailboat Allegro, the couple serve as an unofficial welcoming committee for vessels coming in and out of the harbor. “It’s conducive to being mellow,” Brye said as he waved to crew members of Oracle’s sailing team cruising by on one of their racing yachts. “The con is there is not enough space for stuff. The good news is you adjust your life. It makes life much less cumbersome, busy and complex. If I buy a new pair of shoes, the old pair goes off the boat.”

Life may seem simple for live-aboards but that may be changing, Brye said.As commodore of the Ventura Yacht Club, Brye has been closely involved with the formation of the new harbor council, which includes live-aboards and business owners in the harbor. The city’s recent interest in wielding more influence at the harbor spurred the creation of the council, Brye said.

City officials have said they would like to work closely with the port district for mutual benefit. A report released last week recommended that port and city officials team up to bring badly needed improvements to the Ventura Harbor. Brye and other live-aboards in the harbor still aren’t convinced.

“We think it would mean that we would lose the services and timely response from the port district,” Brye said.