COVER STORY : Shape Up or Ship Out : That’s the Message Many Boaters and Some Officials Want to Send to Residents of Unseaworthy Vessels Moored in Marina del Rey

Renee Mandel has lived on a boat in Marina del Rey for four years and has never once moved it away from the dock. In fact, she couldn’t if she tried. Her 25-foot houseboat, christened the “African Queen,” doesn’t have an engine.

And hers isn’t the only one.

So many unseaworthy vessels are moored in the nation’s largest small-craft recreational harbor that critics say it has come to resemble a Third World port of call. By some estimates, several hundred of the 5,000 or more boats there are unfit to navigate beyond the breakers that separate the marina from the Pacific Ocean.

Besides well-kept boats like Mandel’s, the “unseaworthies” include rickety cabin cruisers, schooners and expensive, motorless “floating homes” that were never intended to move.

“As much as I hate to say it, the place is becoming a waterborne trailer park,” complains Marina del Rey attorney David P. Baker, who keeps a sleek 48-foot yacht anchored outside his office.

Now, at the urging of pleasure boaters angry at the proliferation of houseboats, floating homes and derelict “junks,” Los Angeles County officials want the vessels either shaped up or shipped out.

The Small Craft Harbor Commission has proposed a law to require every boat in the county-owned marina to be seaworthy within 120 days. Owners of floating homes, which weren’t designed to be seaworthy, would be allowed to inhabit them indefinitely, but after 10 years, the vessels would have to be removed from the marina if they were sold.

The Board of Supervisors, which must give its approval, is expected to consider the matter Aug. 1.

After agonizing for months over what to do about the boats, officials believe the time is right to address the issue, especially now that the county and major lessees are promoting a glitzy high-rise redevelopment of Marina del Rey.

The proposed law places county officials at the center of a dispute between pleasure boaters and scores of non-boaters who have discovered living on the water as a source of affordable housing.

“It’s really a question of what the marina was intended to be,” explained Kerry Gottlieb, deputy director of the county Department of Beaches and Harbors. “Something has to be done to protect the recreational boating purpose of the marina.”

Indeed, almost everywhere you look amid the million-dollar yachts and flashy sailboats are ragged vessels whose presence would have been unthinkable during the 1960s, when Marina del Rey was shiny and new. Nor did they exist in the mid-1980s, before the economy turned sour and once hard-to-get boat slips went begging.

Some of the people who have become quite comfortable living in those boat slips say the law is really aimed at getting rid of them.

“It’s class warfare, pure and simple,” said Bob Higgins, 43, who rents a motorless cabin cruiser in Tahiti Marina, one of Marina del Rey’s 13 anchorages.

Michael Kunes, 33, an aspiring screenwriter, agrees. “You hear people on luxury yachts in the channel talk about how we’re riffraff over here and you resent it.”

For Kunes, a native New Yorker who once lived on a restored tugboat on the Hudson River, his home in the marina is a rented sailboat, beside which he has built his own floating whirlpool.

But what immediately strikes the eye is the profusion of potted plants stationed atop and beside his boat. The plants, he says impishly, are his way of thumbing his nose at wealthy yacht owners who view him and his bohemian associates as symbolic of what’s wrong with the marina.

“It comes with the territory,” said 24-year-old Mark Ashley, referring to the social gulf between low-budget renters like himself and more well-to-do, traditional pleasure boaters.

The $375 a month Ashley pays to live aboard an 18-foot sailboat (which includes a slip fee of $300), is half what he once paid for an ordinary apartment.

Such prices explain why non-boaters have flocked to the marina in recent years, often moving in beside boating live-aboards and other pleasure boaters who once had the place to themselves. The trend accelerated in the late 1980s, when lessees, who were eager to fill slips left vacant by the decline of the pleasure boat market, relaxed their standards.

Where safety and appearance codes were once enforced, some dock masters now conduct only cursory inspections or none at all. Frequently, they allow derelict boats with no insurance into their anchorages, observers say.

In some anchorages, professional dock masters have been replaced by people whose previous experience is in managing apartments and who know little about boating.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff’s Department, which took over patrolling the marina’s waterways in 1984 after the county Department of Harbors was abolished, has understandably devoted more attention to fighting crime ashore than to enforcing codes governing boats at the privately leased anchorages.

“We’ve been in an era of anything goes,” said a yacht owner who asked not to be identified.

One result is that the marina has seen more than its share of so-called “Unidentified Floating Objects”--derelict boats with rotting hulls and conked-out engines abandoned by owners in lieu of paying slip fees.

But it is what has become of some of the UFOs that has upset some boaters.

Critics say that often, no sooner are they towed to public auction by the Sheriff’s Department than the junks pop up at the same anchorages from where they came, having been snapped up for pennies on the dollar by people who want to live in them and others who want them as rental properties.

Sheriff’s Lt. James Oneal, the marina’s harbor master, said some of the boats sell for $500 to $1,000, and a few for practically nothing. “People think I’m kidding, but I actually remember one that went for a dollar,” he said.

Among those in the business of subleasing boats in the marina, no one has been more successful than Robert Grossman, a 50-year-old former high school teacher.

Grossman bought his first boat in 1983 and today owns a fleet of 41 sailboats and cabin cruisers, including several acquired at auction.

Grossman’s success hasn’t endeared him to those who blame him for drawing non-boaters into the marina.

“They say I’m a slumlord, but people who say that don’t know me. And they certainly don’t bother to come around,” he said.

Pleasure boaters and others contend that along with the non-boaters has come an increase in rowdiness, vandalism, petty theft, drug dealing and prostitution. They complain that since many of the rental boats don’t have restroom facilities, some occupants urinate and even defecate overboard rather than use facilities provided dockside by the various anchorages.

“The feeling here has totally changed in five years,” says Rene Hollander, 50, who lives on a houseboat in Dolphin Marina. Marina del Rey “is turning into a big Motel 6, full of people who don’t give a damn about the water and don’t know the first thing about boating.”

Grossman acknowledges the problems, but insists that he is part of the solution, including leading a 1993 campaign to persuade the owner of Tahiti Marina, where most of his boats are moored, to evict troublemakers there.

“I screen people carefully. I kick people out who misbehave,” said Grossman, who lives and has his office at the marina. “I’m just as interested in maintaining the aesthetics here as the next person.”

Just as Grossman is a lightning rod for those who want to get rid of derelict boats, Ron Buday, 62, draws heat from those who hate floating homes.

Floating homes, which are houseboats designed without motors, have been in the marina for years, but it wasn’t until Buday’s company, Marina Villas Inc., began mass producing them in 1993 that “all hell broke loose,” Buday said.

Pleasure boaters, who had come to tolerate older “floaters,” done up to resemble everything from paddle-wheelers to alpine chalets, were outraged by the sight of the squared-off fiberglass boxes that Buday’s company put into the water.

His first customer, world-class swimmer and actress Esther Williams, bought one along with a business partner for $195,000 and dubbed it “Million Dollar Mermaid,” after one of her movies.

She and the partner, Edward Bell, struck a deal to use Williams’ name to promote the boats. Sales were brisk until opponents, led by the Pioneer Skippers Boat Owners Assn., began to lobby for the proposed law last summer.

Buday says he delivered 10 of the floating homes to the marina, including Williams’ boat, and had orders for half a dozen more. But when word spread that restrictions might be imposed, “my client base dried up overnight.”

Now out of business, Buday blames the firm’s demise on the Pioneer Skippers, whom he refers to as elitists.

The group’s immediate past president, who helped lead the push for the proposed law, said the Skippers have nothing to apologize for. “The marina was built for open access to the ocean,” Heather Perkoff said. “Floating homes don’t need that [access] and we don’t think they belong in a marina that’s supposed to be for recreation.”

But residents of the approximately three dozen floating homes in the marina have cried foul, saying the proposed law treats them unfairly.

“Floating homes have been in here for 25 years, and nobody said a word until this came along,” said Mort Roth, 72, a retired women’s apparel salesman. He moved into his custom-built, 1,100-square-foot floating home, complete with fireplace, two bedrooms and a gourmet kitchen, 18 months ago.

Like other floating-home owners, Roth contends that by making it impossible for anyone to buy his home 10 years from now and remain in the marina, the law will destroy its resale value.

“I can’t attach an engine and go out of here, and unlike some of the others, I can’t be lifted out, so I’m stuck,” Roth said. “If this thing goes through, they’re essentially taking my life savings.”

On the other hand, talk is already widespread among dwellers of decrepit boats about trying to skirt the law, if it is enacted.

“You’re going to see a lot of people simply go out and buy outboards [motors], whatever it takes to get around this thing,” said a boat owner who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Oneal, the harbor master, whose deputies will be responsible for enforcing the law, believes that while some boat owners may be able to simply slap on a motor, the law will force out many decrepit boats whose low value doesn’t justify the expense of making them seaworthy.

Perkoff of the Pioneer Skippers agrees.

“I think it will solve maybe 70% of the problem,” she said. “And that’s something we could be pleased with.”

Meanwhile, on the “African Queen,” Mandel is nervous.

Having used most of her modest savings to buy the houseboat for $18,000, the disabled, fifty-something former clerical worker says she can’t afford the estimated $2,000 to $5,000 it will take to replace the engine removed by the boat’s previous owner.

“What I want to know is, what does anyone gain by placing this burden on me?” she said. “Even with the finest engine on Earth, I’m never going anywhere.”