Club Helps Youths Correct Courses

The U.S. Sailing-Nautica Youth Championships--the national title event for boys and girls 13 to 19--are being conducted by Alamitos Bay Yacht Club at Long Beach through Thursday of this week, in single- and double-handed Lasers and sailboards.

Among the 167 entries from around the country are about 40 youngsters representing the Longhorn Yacht Racing Assn. of Ft. Worth, on the first leg of a nationwide, 15,000-mile summer tour of events.

They are not the typical yacht club crowd. Some come from broken homes, some from troubled backgrounds.

The club splintered from the prestigious Ft. Worth Boat Club in the 1970s with the inspiration of Mary Helen Edgecomb and the support of Quentin McGown, a lawyer and former commodore. Only about half the kids are from Texas, the rest coming from around the South and even Canada.

Edgecomb somehow finds them, teaches them to sail and brightens their lives. The LYRA has no clubhouse, but operates out of Buster’s Cantina on Eagle Mountain Lake. Funds come from bingo games and donations.

They arrived in Long Beach with five vans and 27 boats, Edgecomb leading in her camper.

Local sailors Mike Segerblom and Ron Rosenberg have run clinics for the LYRA over the years.

“She never has enough money to get to the next place,” Segerblom said. “But she always gets there.”

Rosenberg, a U.S. Olympic team alternate this year, said, “It’s been amazing to watch them grow and build their confidence every year.”

Mike Hare, an LYRA member from La Porte, Tex., won the Youth World single-handed Laser title this year.

Sailing Notes

OFFSHORE--Cabo San Lucas has been a popular destination for races staged by the Los Angeles and Long Beach Yacht Clubs in alternate years, but LBYC is considering stretching across the Sea of Cortez to Puerto Vallarta in 1993. The reason, LBYC Commodore Phil Murray said, is “100% financial.” Puerto Vallarta is offering the club $30,000 worth of discounted rooms, free slips and other amenities to lure the fleet there. Cabo’s offer: nada. But the ULDB 70 fleet, which dominates the Mexican races, hates the idea, fearing that light November winds in the 300 miles beyond the cape would add three to five days to the race. Some owners have suggested dropping out and staging their own race to Cabo instead.

ULDB 70S--The week before Brack Duker sailed his Evolution to fourth place among the ULDB 70s in Long Beach Race Week, the boat was seen at Avalon. Duker thought it was in a slip in Long Beach. Persons unknown, with some knowledge of the racing sleds, borrowed the Santa Cruz 70 for the weekend. Upon returning, they cleaned it up inside and out and put on the sail cover, but had damaged the mainsail and broken some stanchions. Duker has offered a $5,000 reward for information on the pirates’ identity. . . . Eight ULDB 70s are for sale--some by owners wanting to build new boats, others by owners no longer interested in competing. One is Blondie, Peter Tong’s Santa Cruz 70 that recently won its class title in Long Beach Race Week. Then there is Chance, Bob McNulty’s Santa Cruz 70 that won the ’91 Transpac race to Hawaii, and is scheduled to be auctioned by a bank Thursday, June 25, at 11 a.m. at Newmark’s Yacht Sales in Wilmington.

OBITUARY--Arthur Knapp Jr., one of the grand old men of sailing, died last week at 85. Knapp sailed on the America’s Cup J-boat Ranger in 1937 and skippered the 12-meter trial horse Weatherly in ’58. A retired stockbroker, Knapp died of leukemia in a Greenwich, Conn., hospital. He is also remembered for his book “Race Your Boat Right” that is traditionally awarded to the last-place finisher in the Congressional Cup match-racing event at Long Beach.