With much of humanity still stunned in the sensory overload of the post-FIFA World Cup withdrawal symptoms, our ILCA sailors at home are benefitting from a dose of reality with a fleet of a hundred and more lined up for the ILCA Nationals currently being staged by the Royal St George Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire.
But half a world away on the coast of California, Ireland’s Olympic hopefuls are contending with having to discern reality from fantasy through sailing in an area where fantasy is reality. In fact, fantasy is big business, the main industry of sprawling Los Angeles and its curious coastline.
You may recall that the Paris ’24 Olympics drew to a close with Snoop Dogg and other showbiz luminaries performing on the beach at Los Angeles, the very beach where we were assured the 2028 Olympiad’s sailing events would be staged within easy viewing distance of folk ashore.
“Sunshine guaranteed, winds will be Zero to 20 knots” – Ireland’s Finn Lynch racing in the Los Angeles Grand Slam
MONETISING THE SPECTATOR EXPERIENCE
Seems that idea didn’t last long, not least because those who had notions of making money out of catering for live spectator requirements could see that the easy-viewing shoreside experience might be a difficult proposition to monetize, now very definitely well up the agenda after FIFA made a reputed $15 billion from the World Cup experience.
So this season, exactly midway between the 2024 and 2028 Olympics, we’re having to grapple with a number of places along that California coastline that seem to think they’re the hosting locale. Apart from anything else, it has been quite an education in just how deeply ingrained in the local Hispanic placenames is the heritage of the pioneering Spanish missionary priests.
The man who watered Los Angeles – Dubliner William Mulholland (1855-1935) sourced the essential fresh water from all over California for the growing city, and is remembered in the frequently-mentioned Mulholland Drive.
REMEMBER WILLIAM MULHOLLAND
But we must not overlook the fact that one of the main roads in the
area, Mulholland Drive, is named in honour of William Mulholland (1855-1935), Dublin-reared though Belfast born of Dublin parents. He was the man who – after an early career as a seafarer following his early escape from Christian Brothers education at the O’Connell Schools – fetched up in California, and saw to it that what was to become Los Angeles city managed to grab much of the limited fresh water available in that ultra-parched area.
Modern de-salination plants may mean that natural fresh water availability is no longer the sine qua non of a viable city, as is demonstrated in several instances in the Gulf. But in Mulholland’s day it definitely was essential. So the city’s wild growth went ahead with Mulholland water, plus easily available oil which was literally bubbling underfoot, and a virtually guaranteed supply of steady sunlight that was utilized for the growth of the movie-making industry.
Eve McMahon has already won the first series in the ongoing Los Angeles programme
In that over-the-top world, we’ve already had one recent event out on the Coast where Eve McMahon won the ILCA6 overall, and now we’re in the throes of another where Eve continues to star, and Finn Lynch appears to have found his mojo again in localities which “are guaranteed to provide winds of everything from zero to 20 knots, with sunshine”.
RECREATONAL SAILING IS FANTASY FULFILMENT
In such a setting, how can such a sport as recreational sailing – in itself something of a fantasy fulfillment – manage to thrive in an everyday way? After all, dedicated sailors often find any portrayal of their activity by the cinema to be an embarrassingly contrived and unrealistic affair.
DOUMENTARY LET-DOWN
And what’s worse, nowadays when documentary makers focus on our sport when it’s for real, they’ll hand their raw work over to some trendy editor who reckons that the average viewer’s attention span is rather less than that of a gnat, and we end up with something like this jumping-flea take on the 2025 St Tropez Classics,
Watching it, any real sailor will be just beginning to relish a shot of a properly-set-up classic boat sailing well, when it all cuts to some see-and-be-seen people trying to look the part, and then almost instantly cuts back to a very brief glimpse of some other boat that would be fascinating if we could just be given the time to study her in detail, yet in motion without requiring recourse to the stop button.
GUARANTEED MONEY LOSER
This means that a genuine piece of Hollywood movie-making in which boats and their sea-faring feature as the main theme has been almost guaranteed to lose money, perhaps the most outstanding example being the Kevin Costner-featuring Waterworld of 1995. It may be only thirty years old, but it’s said that computers were insufficiently powerful in those days to calculate just how much money it lost.
As for Wind, the respected 1992 Hollywood take on the high-drama of the 1987 America’s Cup, it can be watched and enjoyed by sailors without cringing, and is generally quite good on the technical side that we find fascinating. Yet it seems that it’s just sailors who fully appreciated it, as it made only $5,519,569 at the box office (more than many comparable movies, apparently), yet required a budget of $29 million.
A gallant effort from 1992, but it may have ensured Japanese non-involvement in the America’s Cup
JAPANESE TASTE OF THE AMERICA’S CUP
Further to add to the unreality, it’s said the funding came from Japan, as at that time there was serious interest in a Japanese challenge for the America’s Cup. But it seems that the financial sinkhole which resulted from the America’s Cup-inspired film was enough to dampen Japanese interest, and they certainly won’t be among the motley AC Challengers in Naples next year.
UNREALITY IS BIG BUSINESS
In this atmosphere where unreality is the true reality, it speaks volumes for the enthusiasm of those in Los Angeles who pursue real sailing when its fantasy version is part of the town’s stock-in-trade. I can remember being much impressed when given a Christmas present of the Mariners Library edition of “Around the World Single-Handed: The Cruise of the Islander” by Harry Pidgeon, who built his 34ft yawl on the beach in Los Angeles in 1917-19 and first sailed her round the world in 1921-25, and then – having been awarded the Cruising Club of America’s Blue water Medal in 1926 - did it again in 1932-37.
Harry Pidgeon’s 34ft Seabird Class Islander under solo construction on the beach in Los Angeles in 1918. Photo: Facebook
The newly-built Islander being launched by her sole builder and skipper
THOMAS FLEMING DAY
Islander was a hard-chined Seabird Yawl inspired by Thomas Fleming Day’s 1906 Bermuda-race-pioneering Seabird, which was significant sailing history in itself. But what intrigued me that Christmas, in a time when we’d winter weather in Ireland which enabled small boys to have life-changing toboggan accidents, was the fact that Los Angeles had a sufficiently agreeable climate to build boats in the open on the beach.
Islander was emphatically of hard chine construction, and demonstrated its viability with two circumnavigations and the Blue water medal award of 1926
BUSY CATALINA
That said, the relatively featureless Pacific coast, with only the Catalina Islands to provide extra interest, means that ways have to be devised to raise the sailing excitement. But they’re right up on that, for at the time Thomas Fleming Day was promoting the idea of an “ocean race” from New York to Bermuda in 1906, on the West Coast they were setting up the TransPac, 2,225 miles to Hawaii, with the winner being Harry Sinclair’s 86ft schooner Lurline.
With the often over-crowded Catalina Island (above) as their only convenient offshore destination, the sailors of California inaugurated the 2,200 mile Transpac race to Hawaii in 1906.
Since then, the Transpac has become more mainstream with smaller boats, and it has provided the setting in which the marvellous Cal 40s – designed by Bill Lapworth in 1963 – have been able to demonstrate their remarkable versatility. When we remember that on America’s East Coast, the first fin-and-skeg Sparkman & Stephens designed offshore racer didn’t appear until 1963, the fact that the Cal 40 was seen as normal on the West Coast at the same time tells us much about just how their sailing development was ploughing ahead of ideas in the “Establishment” areas around the Atlantic.
The legendary Stan Honey’s Cal 40 Illusion sweeps in to the finish and the win in the Transpac race to Hawaii.
IRISH SAILORS AT HOME ON THE COAST
Certainly Irish sailors who have settled on the West Coast find themselves at home, with former Moonduster crewman Ken Corry from Cork, now an enthusiastic Cal 40 owner, rising to become Commodore of the 1901-founded Los Angeles Yacht Club, while down the coast in San Diego Johnny Smullen - who has maintained his membership of the National YC in Dun Laoghaire since 1972 – found star status as America’s Cup legend Dennis Conner’s personal boat-builder, and has the immaculate classic International OD Altair as his personal pet boat.
The master boatbuilder’s pet boat – Johnny & Therese Smullen’s IOD Altair (NYC) in San Diego. Photo: Johnny Smullen
FILM STAR SAILORS
Traditional-style Hollywood movie stars such as Errol Flynn and Sterling Hayden also maintained yachts of one kind or another, schooners being their favoured craft. But it was the best of them all, Humphrey Bogart, who really was the sailor’s sailor in Tinseltown, as he campaigned and cruised his Sparkman & Stephens-designed 55ft Santana – originally a schooner but a much-loved yawl while he had her from 1945 to 1957 – with dedicated enthusiasm.
Ironically, while we remember him best for certain non boat-involving roles, it was his characterization of the role of male lead in John Huston’s African Queen which won him his only Oscar, yet that involved the kind of tropical river boat activity that Bogart would have avoided like the plague in his many ventures afloat in the successful search for sailing pleasure.
LEW GRADE’S SUREFIRE FILM IDEA
But either way, African Queen would tick all the boxes for any Hollywood work that involved active interaction with boats, including the almost mandatory hair-tearing budget over-run. The great Lew Grade summed it up after his ludicrously expensive Raise the Titanic proved to be a box-office flop, especially when set against such honestly straightforward works as William McQuitty’s Night to Remember.
Sucking his usual submarine-size cigar, Grade said it would have made better financial sense to create a movie called Lower The Atlantic.
The Making of a Mega-Flop. The absurdly expensive production costs of making Raise the Titanic resulted in one bright but so far unexplored idea
