Wet Wednesday : Anacapa Yacht Club Savors the Least Competitive, Least Pedigreed of Races

Things are hairiest at the start, if you can call it the start.

A crowded field of sailboats, many weighing 8 tons and costing $50,000 or more, plow through the water every which way: up across the imaginary starting line, back down across it, and then, as if in the Price Club’s Sunday Nightmare Parking Lot, rudely sideways in sudden U-turns and near-crashes.

Ahoy!

The idea, plainly, is to be under full sail, killing time and jockeying for position before a 6 p.m. horn blows, marking the official start of the race. If you’re an ace at this form of maritime loitering, you will cross the starting line and head out of Channel Islands Harbor right on time, gaining competitive position.

Not Rich Badger, though.

“I’ll hang back,” he says, tacking politely behind the crazed pack. “I’ll give the rest of ‘em 30 seconds at the start and just hang back here. It’s not worth taking a hit.”

There are all kinds of hits, some quite expensive. Most are mere “bumps,” in which boats traveling in the same direction miscalculate only slightly and rub each other. Thud. Creak.

There are those in which one boat crosses behind another, on an angle, the trailing boat nicking the stern of the other with its bowsprit, which usually becomes a former, sometimes floating, bowsprit. Crack. Snap.

Then there is the dreaded “T-Boning,” actually worse than the butcher shop image it conjures up: a sailboat, 5 or 10 tons’ worth, ramming its bow straight into the side of another, broadside. Boom. Glurg.

SOS.

On this recent Wednesday night, however, the mad minutes before 6 p.m. bring only the usual few close calls, and the race goes off without mishap. The 28-yacht helter-skelter quickly disperses and falls into a handsome order of sorts, an array of tilted masts heading northward along the Oxnard coast.

It’s a weekly sight all summer long: Wet Wednesday, off Oxnard and Ventura shores.

Yet the view from the beach is not to be trusted entirely, though it certainly is regal: sleek white yachts with bulbous neon orange and yellow sails dotting the cobalt horizon, no doubt skippered by extravagantly wealthy, tanned, champagne-quaffing, blini-popping czars of industry and art.

It isn’t so. Surely, there are the “prestige” races held annually, bringing out the most ambitious sailors and staggeringly expensive yachts from clubs all along the coast.

But this Wet Wednesday, sponsored and managed by the Anacapa Yacht Club at Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, is without question the least competitive, least pedigreed, least highfalutin’ of sailing races--even compared to the Wednesdays also held by Ventura and Pierpont yacht clubs.

Indeed, some participants won’t even abide its rather glad aqueous name, instead preferring the more descriptive “beer-can racing” (tiller in one hand, you-know-what in the other). As a result, Anacapa’s Wet Wednesday is Everyman’s Yacht Race.

It is sailed from Everyman’s Yacht Club. Situated in a plain wooden building near the harbor’s mouth, the Anacapa’s clubhouse has the feel and ethos of the handicrafts lodge at summer camp: tile floor, paneled walls, folding chairs, overhead fluorescent lighting. (Fine dining? Hold the lobster. After the race, the line will form outside and lead to a folding table at which members pay $4 for the privilege of getting a raw burger on a paper plate--take it out back and grill it yourself, thank you. Salads are on a table at the other end of the room.)

“A lot of people are intimidated by . . . yachting,” says Jerry Goldberg, a longtime Anacapa member. “But many of the people in our club are working people. We just like sailing and racing, and so this is our club. Wet Wednesdays are really very basic, and they’re designed to be fun. And for some people, it’s a way to learn to race, to gain experience.”

Only minutes after crossing the starting line, the beers are passed from the cabin below onto the deck of Rich Badger’s 38-foot Catalina, a sleek 8-ton whale of a boat named “Dragonslayer.”

The name is at odds with Badger’s laid-back race philosophy, stated, with raised eyebrow, as more an on-board social policy than anything else: “Oh, we just come out on these nights to relax and tell lies.”

But make no mistake. Badger is in it to win.

While at the moment he seems to be competing for last place--he crossed the starting line in the rear third of the pack--he competes aggressively and with rare exception finishes in the top five each week.

This makes him a subject of affection and derision, a tragicomic figure to his competitors, as Badger shows a peculiar race strategy: He jams the decks with riders, some of whom are aboard a sailboat for the first time in their lives.

On this particular night, he’s carrying 14 passengers besides himself and a crew of three; the week before, it was a record 21 aboard. As a result, during key maneuvers the formidable Dragonslayer can seem more like a rollicking “SS Klutz.”

“Heads down!” barks Danny Derrick, Badger’s first mate and all-round Dragonslayer comedian. “We’re coming about!”

Suddenly the boom, or horizontal beam of the vast triangular main sail, swings in from hanging over the water, threatening what seems decapitation to anyone failing to duck. Sails flap. People scramble, asking each other: Where do we go now?

The forward, surging motion of the boat eases and the vessel rotates magically, giving a sense of vertigo, and then swoosh: The sail billows out on the other side of the boat, tilting things that way, propelling Dragonslayer quickly forward again.

To those still scrambling, Derrick says: “High side. Get to the high side.”

They do. Quickly.

The “guests” are thus dead weight, employed to offset the boat’s tilt--a boat sails fastest when it is level and its hull slices cleanly through the water. For this key role, they might, on a more uptown yacht from a more uptown yacht club, earn the name “rail whale.” But here, on the humble Dragonslayer, they go by “rail meat.”

In carrying more rail meat than anyone else, Dragonslayer does much to dispel the notion that people sailing in yacht races actually understand the kind of things Badger will selectively say to his three or four regular crew members: “Sheet, Danny, let her breathe. More sheet. Pete can’t adjust the luff if you’ve got her flogging.”

Right now, other boats are taking a flogging.

Dragonslayer plows up the coast beyond Mandalay Bay and toward the power plant near McGrath State Beach, passing lighter boats with fewer people and some equally heavy boats forced to tack more often for lack of sufficient rail meat. Always, the people being passed wave. Often, they comment:

“Need a few more bodies, Rich?”

“Hey, you running a ferry?”

“Hey, can you spare some beer?”

Badger’s smile is wide, and he cheerfully replies, always returning with a wry grin to his own crew and happy rail meat.

But there’s trouble at the buoy that marks the turnaround for the three-mile run back to Channel Islands Harbor.

A boat named Aggressor--it seemingly has come out of nowhere--heads into the turn at precisely the same moment as Dragonslayer. A duel ensues: two huge craft, plowing into a turn alongside each other--is this the Indy 500?--and seeking the lead position.

Badger is no longer the charmer throwing that grin around; he has become a calculating machine, figuring the angles, the wind, the probabilities of a hit if one vessel doesn’t relent to the other. He relents.

Aggressor moves through the turn first, and her crew cheers. Badger is less than pleased. “Pleasantries” are exchanged as Aggressor moves ahead.

There’s more trouble ahead.

Trouble’s name is April Brownlow. She was bad news the Wet Wednesday before, placing third behind Badger’s first, and now she appears in Dragonslayer’s wake, threatening to pass on the way home: A 14-year-old girl driving her father’s 40-foot Olson called Hangover.

April Brownlow lives in Oxnard and is this season’s sensation at the Anacapa Yacht Club. The kid can’t drive a car but skippers dad’s 5-ton yacht like a pro, telling her little sister and huge father which sail to trim, when to move and what course the boat will take. She’s at the tiller the whole way. For her, it’s all a big hoot. Yet tonight, she just might do it: beat Badger.

April Brownlow is Badger’s Dragon Lady.

Going home the wind is behind everyone. It makes for odd, amorphous sailing. Main sails designed to whip wind out of their curved pocket and propel boats forward instead are used like dumb kites: flat-faced against the wind, pulling the boat rather than pushing it.

It’s called the wing-on-wing approach, main sail and jib wide open, and while it is an uncommon approach, Badger is quick to order it.

April Brownlow, however, is doing the same thing. Also, she is smiling.

Within minutes her boat, better-suited for these light winds, passes.

Still, it doesn’t mean Dragon Lady will win--not yet anyway. All boats have handicap ratings according to their efficiency, and so the faster-rated Hangover will have to finish nearly a minute ahead of Dragonslayer to actually beat it.

The wind gives out at 7:25 p.m. The whole field of boats, about a half-mile off the beach at Mandalay Club in Oxnard, bobs. It’s probably pretty from the beach but haunting at sea at nightfall. Dragonslayer’s knotmeter plunges to a pathetic 1.91, slower than walking.

This is not, however, an occasion to discuss strategy, retrim a sail, or shift the placement of rail meat. More beers are passed up from the galley.

“Men. Men are the more vulnerable,” says one woman. “It’s really the women who sneak around.”

“Amen,” mutters a guy who’s forward on the deck.

“Are you kidding?” implores another woman. “You’ve got to be kidding. Men never know what they want.”

Yet another of the rail meat crowd, a woman, struggles with a corollary: “It’s not that women sneak around. It’s just that they often like the guy who’s wild and then when he’s ‘reformed’ and ‘in love,’ she’s bored and ready to move on.”

Danny Derrick nods: “You mean when he’s domesticated.”

“Oh please!, “ says yet another woman, laughing. “Thank you for sharing. “

The maritime group session--or is this what Badger calls the telling of “lies”?--ends within minutes as the wind kicks up.

Dragonslayer holds its position rounding the breakwater to re-enter Channel Islands Harbor. Less than a quarter mile from the finish line, a dreadful sight appears: Aggressor has run aground, its keel stuck in mud near the jetty. Evidently, it was too aggressive and rounded the bend too close.

Crew members on both boats grimace and laugh, as Aggressor finally accepts a tow out.

Badger, minutes from the finish line, says: “Life’s tough, but it’s tougher if you’re stupid.”

The Anacapa clubhouse is buzzing. The burger menu is bolstered by entrees of chicken ($4) and steak ($5). The bar is tended by a member. There is more beer than gin and tonic. Nowhere is champagne in evidence.

At Dragonslayer’s table, one of the guest sailors, Laura Brooks of Oxnard, notes that she likes Anacapa for its friendliness and lack of pretension.

“You just sense it here. It’s real,” she says. “The people are so nice.”

Badger isn’t eating. He’s sipping a Heineken, noting that Wet Wednesdays work better for him because weekends are tougher to plan around, and he enjoys the social aspect of unpressured racing. He used to sail aggressively and quite successfully on weekends, even doing well in the grueling Hard Way race from Santa Barbara to Ventura via the turbulent outside of Santa Cruz Island.

“There was, in fact, some blood on the decks during that one,” he says.

“But these Wednesdays are pure fun. It’s good to get out during the week. I invite lots of people. You know, I’m never sure who’ll show up.”

The times are in.

Dragonslayer does extremely well, but April Brownlow takes first. The 100 or so people jammed into the little Anacapa clubhouse roar with applause.

Badger can’t rest until he congratulates her. He beams in admiration. While the inexperienced rail meat might not completely get it, Badger knows what it takes to win, even on a Wet Wednesday off Oxnard: concentration sustained over the long haul, despite all the fun.

April accepts her plaque, blushing, and runs off to play with her sister/deckhand, 10-year-old Della. Even after the attention has worn off, she’s uncomfortable discussing technique or strategy or last-minute race decisions. No, April Brownlow has a terrible case of modesty, befitting a budding sea captain.

“Well,” she says, hugging Della and searching for an explanation for her victory, “our boat goes well in light air.”