Into the wild blue yonder

So, here we are, all of us skittering around on our gray freeways and ignoring the deep blue adventure that’s right there on the other side of the beach sand. We live on the Pacific Rim, but how often do we actually step off it? Maybe you’re different. Maybe you have a boat or (infinitely better) a friend with a boat, but most of us just leave the seafaring adventures to professionals, people like Jimmy Buffett and Johnny Depp and that America’s Cup guy.

“Landlubbers” is an ugly, hurtful label, but there, I said it, that’s what we are. Maybe it’s because our inner voice tells us the boating life belongs only to people who are wealthier and/or more organized than we are. They intimidate us with their mysterious rope knots and fancy sailorman talk (Remind me again, starboard is where?) and how could we even begin to overcome that? Ah, but there’s hope. I’m here to tell you it’s quicker and easier than you think to become a, uh, waterlubber or whatever it is they call themselves.

Now there are plenty of charter boats in Southern California and for the right price you can spend a day on anything from a scruffy fishing boat to a supertanker-sized yacht. Ah, but those require some degree of wealth and/or organization. My mission in the marinas was to find some quick-fix floats, cruises that were low cost and walk-up easy. You could call it “dilettante boating,” but that sounds a little too frilly for the dockyards, don’t you think?

The water rocket

To get into the water mind-set fast, there’s no better place to start than in Redondo Beach at the berth of the Ocean Racer. The Racer is a ridiculously huge watercraft that clearly warrants a promotion from cigarette boat to full-fledged cigar. Actually it’s neither, the captain tells me, it’s a tobacco-free, one-of-a-kind water rocket that measures out to 70 feet long and has a gaudy 2,000 horsepower. It seats 150 people in rows that reminded me of all of those roller coaster rides that frighten me.

The captain is a guy named Jerry Poole and besides wearing one of those cool shirts with epaulets, he has blond hair that sweeps back from his forehead like he’s forever facing a gale. He’s a pilot, too, and works with disadvantaged kids and has met P. Diddy and Bob Newhart. All of this affirmed my belief that boat people are different from us.

“It goes about 35 knots,” he explained. Of course I needed a translation. “That’s about 40 miles per hour.”

It feels faster when the wind and spray kick up as the boat charges out to sea, about 10 miles or so, which is about the point when Poole looks to his left (That’s starboard, right?) and sees the Vicente Lighthouse peeking around the coastline. Poole eases up on the throttle at the top of swells (“If we don’t, we’ll catch too much air”) and plays with the wind to splash the passengers, who are yelling with glee. The best rides, Poole says, are when a yacht sidles up looking for a race or on the Fourth of July, when the Racer stops for a rare pause to watch fireworks. You might not want to wear a hat or hold up your expensive and lightweight digital camera because they might not come back to the dock with you. Some of the youngsters were crying throughout the rough ride, but most were delighted. “It’s funny, a lot of them go to sleep. It’s that motor. It just rumbles and puts them out. It’s loud, too. I can be idling in the harbor and people yell, ‘Slow down.’ I guess we just look like we’re going fast.”

There’s a similar race boat, the Rainbow Rocket, that moors in Rainbow Harbor in Long Beach. It’s smaller but when I asked the captain how it compared in speed to its rival up the coast, he smiled and said, “You know the answer to that question.” Sounds like fighting words. If there’s a race, guys, make sure you call me.

That submarine ride

What could be cooler than a seat on a race boat? Well a submarine ride sounded promising, and in Redondo Beach I heard about a replica World War I submarine that makes quick jaunts around the pier pilings. Well, it’s not exactly a submarine, really. It’s more like a boat with a lid. More precisely, it’s a homemade boat with a lid and a glass bottom. A guy named Lloyd Reeves built the curious craft as a tribute to the old S-44, a submarine that was called the “pigboat” because it was so unreliable and miserable to ride in with its lack of air conditioning. Oh yeah, and the real S-44 went down near the Aleutians and the only two crewman who managed to get out were captured and forced into POW labor in copper mines. So, ready to climb in?

Reeves is happy to share all the war tales as he chugs you around in the 42-foot boat. The ride may be a little cramped and the concept a little too Tom Clancy for most folks, but kids will dig the idea the same way we all loved the “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” ride at Disneyland. And wasn’t that just a boat with a lid?

Terminal Island hop

Speedboats and fake subs are pure escapism and, either bounding across the water or looking down into murk beneath your feet, you feel a world apart from the urban sprawl back home. That wasn’t the case down at Ports o’ Call Village in San Pedro, where I hopped on the one-hour sailboat ride offered by Spirit Cruises.

On this ride you learn more about the local landscape by leaving it.

The 90-foot ship has a tall, faded crimson sail but for practical reasons goes on engine power for this short, mostly shore-hugging cruise. (In whale-watching season, the same boat goes by sail out to open ocean.)

The captain is Marcus Wilson, and he’s been at the job for 25 years now. He has some regulars who come every month or even every week to have a cocktail and another look at the machinery and nature of water-world Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors taken together are the third busiest port in the world, and this tour showed that. I especially liked the crumpled cargo containers dropped from cranes and the huge drums of petrochemicals not far from the piers where the region’s seafood arrives.

It might not sound like compelling stuff, but it’s actually pretty amazing to drift within yards of a ship like the Hatsu Excel, a monstrous freighter that flies the Taiwanese flag and is too large to fit through the Panama Canal. The thing is almost completely automated; it’s the size of a city block but has a 17-member crew.

The cruise also passes other watercraft of various shapes and histories, including James Cagney’s wood-decked Swift, a 75-year-old fireboat, the World War II ship Lane Victory, with its working cannons (Is that really a good idea?) and some high-tech tugboats that can move sideways and probably even fly, for all I know.

We stopped by to wave to the sea lions and then got a glimpse of wildlife of a different stripe -- the caged prisoners of Terminal Island, which ranks right up there with Devil’s Island for “all-time most ominous name for penal institution.” The federal prison is medium security, so the 1,200 or so prisoners are “drug dealers, politicians and tax evaders,” as our captain summed it up.

As we cruised past, some of the prisoners played soccer in a grassy courtyard penned in by a tall fence and in the shadow of a guard tower. Two prisoners stood away from the game and stared at us and other passing boats. Two kids sitting near me waved. At the end of the ride, the passengers, myself included, clapped and a few cheered. I think we were all happy not to be back there on Terminal Island.

Long Beach chug

In Long Beach I found a less satisfying harbor tour aboard the Kristina. The captain, Bill Collins, is a nice enough guy, a retiree of the tugboat trade who found a way back on the water with the low-stress tour gig. But his monotone narration had the cadence of a Brooklyn subway announcement (“Blue heron on the left now, a blue heron.”) and the ride was shorter than the advertised 45 minutes. I also would have liked a closer look at the Queen Mary, and the ride didn’t even go past the bay confines to include the old Navy port, the Boeing-built sea pad used to launch satellites, or the world’s largest cargo ship, the Hamburg, which happened to be anchored that day in the harbor.

The two-deck Kristina was built in 1978 (the carpeting on the enclosed bottom deck proves it) and it has a snack bar and a polite if slightly disinterested crew. My 6-year-old daughter, Addison, came along for this cruise and was enjoying it until the family next to us held up some Cheetos and brought a squadron of seagulls down around our ears. “This is terrible,” she shrieked and I wasn’t sure if she meant the flurry of wings or the sacrifice of perfectly good snack food.

The sight of sea lions clustered on a buoy helped us put the ugly seagull episode behind us, and Addison was all smiles as she bounded the gangway at the end of the ride. “I want to do it again!” It’s hard to complain about a boat ride on a sunny day, and Long Beach’s Shoreline Village is one of the pleasantest places you’ll find in Los Angeles County.

Oh, one more thing -- if you get on board the Kristina and there’s a weepy fellow sitting next to you with an urn, make sure you’re upwind. Capt. Collins told me some folks seem to figure the harbor tour is cheaper and easier than arranging a private burial-at-sea cruise. Imagine the surprise of the seagull that expected food to come out of that big jar.

Riverboat mystery

Also in Shoreline Village, just down the dock from the Long Beach Aquarium and Bubba Gump Shrimp, I found fishnet of an unexpected sort. “I need to stretch,” the French chorus girl said as she perched her ankle on my shoulder.

Welcome aboard indeed. After a long day of boat rides up and down the coastline, I was capping my day with the Murder Mystery Dinner Cruise. In one of their ads, the delicately named Killer Entertainment Productions sums up the affair as “three hour tour, four course meal, multiple murders,” and I must admit I wasn’t sure that sounded like it would add up to my definition of fun. Eating dinner and watching a murder farce set in the 1800s sounded a little too much like Agatha Christie’s Medieval Times.

Turns out it was fun and funny. The troupe members don’t take themselves too seriously, and they mercifully let audience members off the hook if they don’t want to be part of the show. The food was even good. And I was even among the folks who solved the mystery.

The riverboat itself is not much of a character in the whole production -- the show keeps your attention focused inside the dining room, which is on the enclosed top deck -- and unless you step outside during one of the intermissions, you tend to forget there’s a big paddle spinning away behind you. The boat basically takes laps inside the breakwater and the few times it did stop, I noticed, a few of my tablemates began to look a bit green from the bobbing.

The riverboat is home to a lot of different programming, from late-night DJ parties to an American music revue. The revue, in fact, was staged on a lower deck at the same time as the murder mystery, and I ducked down to check it out. Instead of live music, it was prerecorded and the entire affair looked a bit sleepy.

The water view was much more the focus, though, so if you don’t like chorus girls and cadaver jokes, you might check that out.

O solo gondola

Riverboats are nice, but I needed to finish up my water expeditions with something less gimmicky and more reflective, and what could be more pure than a gondola ride? They have the grand wooden boats in Redondo and Long Beach, but I went farther south, to Newport Beach, for a romantic ride among the yachts. Well, it would have been a romantic ride if I brought my wife along but, no, she was working, so it was just me and a gondolier named Mark Kepple, who works for a company called Adventures at Sea. I asked him if he sang and he quickly said no, he was one of the few gondoliers in his shop who didn’t croon. I believed him at the time but now I wonder. I asked him if he ever had a solo passenger before. “No, not really. It’s not normal for us.” I explained that I’m not a normal person, I’m a reporter. “Oh, OK.”

The gondola I rode in was dark wood with a frilled canopy and a tabletop spanning the middle for the filet mignon, chocolates and champagne passengers can sample. (The meals are delivered by the Charthouse and can be arranged along with the departure time; both can usually be handled on a same-day basis.) Sinatra and Verdi CDs are on board, as well as cozy blankets. “We tell the passengers that they have to kiss under every bridge, it’s the tradition because in Venice you weren’t allowed to kiss in public,” Kepple explained. Off to our left (That’s port, right?) we passed a crew team sweating through a practice. I thought of hiding beneath the blanket. “If passengers see a flying fish, it’s a sign that their true love is on board,” Kepple said. I didn’t want to risk it. “Hey Mark, we can go back anytime.”

The winding circuitry of the Newport waterways seemed to be on an entirely different ocean than hard-working San Pedro. The ride was the closest to the water of all the cruises and the only one that didn’t involve the sound of a motor. Kepple told me no passenger has ever gotten off the boat and complained, no matter if the ride was jostled by delayed meals or docking mishaps. “You get on the boat, you get on the water and you have a good time. People take for granted how lucky we are to live where we can do stuff like this.”

As I was leaving, I passed a woman on the pier who pointed to the gondola and said, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to try one of those! How was it?” I told her she shouldn’t miss the chance to get on board. She stopped for a moment, thought about it and said, “Another time.”

These landlubbers, they’ll never learn.

*

Where to go

Gondolas

Adventures at Sea, 3101 W. Coast Highway, Rainbow Harbor, Newport Beach. Daily cruises by reservation only. One- and two-hour rides available with champagne ($125-$175) or catered dinners ($300). (949) 650-2412 or www.boatcharter.com/gondolas.html.

Gondola Getaway, 5437 E. Ocean Blvd., Naples Island, Long Beach. Daily cruises by reservation only. $65 per couple; $15 for each additional passenger up to six. (562) 433-9595 or www.gondolagetawayinc.com.

Gondola Amore, 181 N. Harbor Drive, Redondo Beach Marina. Daily cruises by reservation only. $75 per couple; $10 for each additional person. (310) 376-6977 or gondolaamore.com.

Racing boats

Ocean Racer, Redondo Beach Pier, Redondo Beach. Departures every hour on the hour on weekends beginning at 1 p.m. $13 for adults on Saturday, $15 on Sunday. Children under 10, $5. (310) 374-3481 or oceanadventures.biz.

Rainbow Rocket, Shoreline Village Dock No. 7, Long Beach. Adults $10; children, $5. Five to six departures on Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 6 p.m. (562) 437-6253.

Harbor tours

Spirit Cruises, Port O’ Call Village, berth No. 77, San Pedro. Also Shoreline Village in Long Beach. Prices vary by length of tour, $10-$15 for adults and $6-$10 for children under 12. Most cruises are daily in summer months. (562) 495-5884 or www.spiritmarine.com.

Harbor Breeze, Shoreline Village, Long Beach. Hourly 45-minute cruises, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. weekends. Adults, $10; $8 seniors; children under 12, $5; under 5, free. (562) 432-4900 or www.longbeachcruises.com.

Riverboats

Grand Romance, Shoreline Village, Long Beach. Dinner cruises include a murder mystery show (Friday, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 6:30 p.m. $69.50) and American Melodies Music Revue (Friday, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 6:30 p.m. $49). (562) 628-1600 or www.grandromance.com.

‘Submarines’

S-44 Replica, Redondo Beach Marina, Redondo Beach. Thirty-minute rides depart 10 a.m. to sunset Saturday and Sunday. Adults $20, children, $10. (310)374-3481 or www.rbmarina.com.