Rounding buoys on a lark

Matt Ballinger

Editor’s note: The Pilot’s Matt Ballinger sailed aboard the Skylark

on Friday in the First Team Real Estate Invitational Regatta to give

us this first-hand account of the race.

I don’t know anything about sailing.

Sure, I can dazzle my less salty friends and co-workers with talk

about tacking, jibing, leaving a mark to port and so on. But compared

with the crew of the Skylark, I might as well be from North Dakota.

So despite my recent fascination with sailing -- I’ve been taking

some classes at Orange Coast College -- I felt like I’d stepped into

another world Friday morning. Everybody at the Balboa Yacht Club

seemed to know what to do. I must have looked like a novice: fumbling

my notebook and press materials, trying not to spill my coffee, being

the only person wearing jeans. But I finally found my way to Skylark

and out onto the ocean.

I’ve been on the ocean on a sailboat only once before. It was in a

30-foot sloop for about 20 minutes on a day with very little wind.

Friday’s outing on the Skylark, which is classified as a 70-foot

boat, consumed the better part of my day.

Accept, if you can, that a 70-foot boat is about medium-sized in

the First Team Real Estate Invitational Regatta. Then try to imagine

17 boats, from 50- to 90-feet long, all trying to cross a starting

line at once. That’s about 1,100 feet of fiberglass and rigging and

sails and crew all moving at full speed for a line that is, I would

guess, only about 700 feet long. The skippers in this regatta are all

professionals, so there were no collisions, but there were some close

calls and some depressing overlaps.

At the start, Skylark got caught in one of those overlaps --

that’s when a sailboat gets between you and the wind, giving you

“dirty air” and making you go slower. It’s great to pass a boat in

your wind shadow, but it’s no fun to be on the receiving end of that

maneuver.

Skylark’s skipper and owner, Doug Ayres, went right into a tack

after our less-than-stellar start. This meant that the majority of

the fleet was on a starboard tack, and Skylark and a few others were

on port. That turned out to be a great move.

The race course this weekend is set up with two marks to round.

The first is directly upwind, the other downwind. A sailboat can’t go

directly upwind, so the only way to get to that first mark, the

weather mark, is on a zig-zagging course.

Skylark is a racing boat, from its masthead fly to its keel, and

we made good time against the other boats. After our start, we didn’t

have much chance of catching the stars of the regatta, the 90-foot

Genuine Risk and Roy Disney’s boat, Pyewacket. But we did make up

some ground on the boats in our class, Grand Illusion and Taxi

Dancer.

After the chaos of rounding the weather mark and changing the

heads’l, it’s time to sit on the rail -- which helps to balance the

boat and to make it go faster -- strategize and enjoy some salty

conversation.

There isn’t much for a novice, like me, to do, and rather than bug

the crew, I decided to just take it all in.

I watched the horizon bob and listened to the spray coming off the

bow. I heard the crew talk about time spent on other boats in exotic

places.

I also got some history about Skylark. It was built around 1991,

and between then and Friday, it endured four name changes and sailed

in the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. It was out of the

water for repairs for some three weeks before this weekend’s regatta.

And at one point, it was owned by Roy Disney, whose Pyewacket, along

with Genuine Risk, was now far out of our reach.

But in that final leg to the finish line, we were smoking our

competition. We learned, shortly after the Race Committee sounded its

horn to signal our finish, that we’d come in fifth overall and about

a minute ahead of our closest competitor.

“We had great crew work, great jibes,” Ayres said.

And he didn’t let it go unthanked. Right before I got off the

boat, I heard him offer to put crew member Skip Allen, whom Ayers

called the Jack Nicklaus of sailing, up for the night at one of the

Ayres hotels.

Genuine Risk can keep its state-of-the-art design and matching

crew uniforms. I’ll sail on Skylark any day.

* MATT BALLINGER is a news editor. He may be reached at (714)

966-4634 or by e-mail at [email protected].