He was up for anything

For many enthusiasts, sailing isn’t an activity: It’s a lifestyle.

Second-year Balboa Yacht Club director Jim Forquer was no different.

There are seeds of what Forquer loved even when he was a teenager, said his son, Andy.

The elder Forquer bought his first boat before he was 20.

“It was a ridiculous tar-and-pitch kind of boat; something really old-school that took a lot of maintenance,” said 22-year-old Andy, Forquer’s youngest son. “Maintaining boats turned out to be a lifelong endeavor.”

Just before midnight Sunday, Jim Forquer’s life ended in a trip-and-fall accident in Mexico. He was 57.

“Sometimes I can’t even get a grip around it. He was a great guy, he was enjoying life,” said Pattii Yanochko, the Balboa Yacht Club project coordinator.

Only a few years into his retirement, Forquer had recaptured his love for sailing and was regularly sailing between California and Catalina Island and Mexico.

After years of working for Texas Instruments in Texas, and Apple in Singapore and Northern California, Forquer settled into Orange County as a management consultant with his family.

He joined the Balboa Yacht Club in 1993.

“He was a great guy and extremely loved by a lot of people here,” Yanochko said.

Forquer grew up in Port Washington, N.Y., where he attended boarding school. He graduated from Syracuse University with dual bachelor’s degrees in industrial engineering and economics.

The Texas Instruments job took Forquer south, where he met his wife, Gwen, from Fort Worth, Texas.

“He lived on a ranch with a bunch of guys and rode dirt bikes. Even when he was a young professional he was living a wild life,” said Andy, who described his father as a “workaholic-liveaholic.”

No matter what it was, Andy said, his dad was willing to try it.

Jim tried snowboarding, wakeboarding and dancing, Andy said with a laugh.

One year, his dad competed in the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers race from Spain to the Caribbean.

Always treading his own path, their crew took a different route and narrowly escaped a hurricane. They placed first in their division anyway, Andy said.

In September, Forquer’s kids put his adventuresome spirit to the test when they signed him up for the Pacific Coast Triathlon in Newport Beach. Said Andy, they did it for his own good.

“He didn’t necessarily sit by the pool when he stopped working. He had a noticeable belly after he retired, but whittled it down because he paid real good attention to his health,” said the younger Forquer. “To make him stick to it, on his birthday we signed him up.”

Jim got revenge, though. He signed all three of his kids up for the Camp Pendleton Races triathlon this July.

Richard Spindler, publisher for the sailing magazine Latitude 38, met Forquer a few years ago.

“He was always able to have a lot of fun and be really responsible,” Spindler said. “All I know about him is, he was a helluva guy.”

Forquer is survived by his wife, Gwen; sons, Tom and Andy; and daughter, Heather.

JOSEPH SERNA may be reached at (714) 966-4619 or at [email protected].