For Sail

VENTURA —  Mike Kelley knew exactly what he wanted: a model boat seaworthy enough to sail, yet beautiful enough to sit on a mantel and sturdy enough to pass on to children and grandchildren.

But he couldn’t find a model or a kit that suited him.

So the Ventura boat rigger joined two other seasoned Ventura sailors to create what he calls “art you can play with.”

Art and play are the defining qualities of his 40-inch, semi-scale models of graceful yawls and sloops driven by the wind and guided by rudder and sail-trim radio commands.

Four years after finishing his first creation, Kelley has built some 20 versions of the model boats, which he sells for as much as $1,500 each.

Most weekends he and his friends go sailing--drawing crowds as their boats ply the waters of local harbors and catch the wind with their bright, white sails.

Model sailboats, called pond boats, started as a hobby for genteel folk as early as 1850. The models gained popularity after President Franklin D. Roosevelt took up the sport and incorporated pond building for public parks as part of the Depression-era Works Project Administration.

Echoes of those early works can be seen in Kelley’s elegant compositions in varnished teak, ash, mahogany and birch. But below the polished wood deck is a fiberglass hull reinforced with carbon fiber and balanced by a cutting-edge fin and torpedo-shaped keel.

Design above and below the water are of equal importance to Kelley.

“They don’t sail as good as they do by chance,” said the designer, who spent a year “getting the geometry right.”

When the trio of inventors--Kelley, sailor Tony Morrelli and racing champion David Decrevel--started, they couldn’t find any information on how to build a boat from scratch.

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“We’re not naval architects, but we knew about balance, center of effort and center of lateral plane on the hull,” Kelley said, referring to sailing terms. “It’s a balancing act.

“They sail like a real boat,” he added, “because we’re all sailors.”

They started with Kelley’s original concept: a classic yacht design.

“Classic is always in style,” he said. “They don’t look dated. Racing boats, like race cars, always change design.”

Kelley, who owns Ventura Rigging, built his first boat from directions provided in a “Boy’s Life” magazine when he was 12, and has sailed and worked on boats ever since.

Decrevel, winner of many California coast sailboat racing trophies, helped with the engineering: deciding how to keep the craft stable, how much ballast to use and where to place the weights.

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Morrelli, a sailmaker who placed second in the 1984 West Coast Olympic trials on his Olympic Tornado catamaran, lent particular expertise on the ship’s miniature sails.

After some experimentation, the team chose a Dacron sail with the same pattern and seam design used on sails for 50-foot racing boats.

“You make an adjustment and it changes the whole boat,” Morrelli said. “You don’t just set the boat up and leave it, but you always tinker with it, just like a big boat.”

After the first craft was completed, Kelley kept on building so they could sail the boats together.

“Our goal was to get them all to sail the same, so they would be competitive against each other,” Decrevel said.

Kelley spends 100 hours building a boat, with most of that time finishing mirror-smooth polyurethane-painted hulls and glassy varnished decks. Chrome-plated hardware from Germany and adjustable sails and mast complete the boat, which is not an exact replica but a streamlined rendition of a vintage sailing vessel.

The boats weigh 7 1/2 pounds, with four pounds of lead in the keel. They are scaled for looks, ease of transport and most importantly, to handle breezes prevalent along the coast. The boats can handle up to 15-knot winds.

“You can’t scale the wind down,” Kelley said, which is why so much work went into design and balance.

“I’d have been perfectly content if nobody else wanted one,” Kelley said. “It’s the best toy I’ve ever had.”

But the orders keep coming.

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Kelley has built boats for customers including corporate jet pilots, Hollywood producers and retired teachers. “Everyone I have sold a boat to owns a [full-size] boat or has owned one,” he added.

Dave Delano, who owns a Ventura towing service for boats, received one of Kelley’s creations for Christmas.

“The best thing is it’s something you can put in your living room,” he said. “Mike has built the whole thing by hand with such TLC, it’s incredible. It’s a lot of fun--a whole lot better than Prozac for pressure relief. You can really relax.”