Arizona Ahoy

Arizona's image is hot sand and arid dunes and dry desert and the idea of a wet sport in such a thirsty spot is preposterous. Yet sailing, real sailboating with lee rails awash and storm jibs straining Nantucket-style, has become an Arizona pastime as solid as a schooner's keel. And there is no paradox between sailing and a droughty state once Arizona's true geography is realized. For, from a barely settled territory of one natural puddle, Coconino County's Stoneman Lake which filled the bottom of a collapsed volcano, man has dammed and diverted Arizona's rivers into some 70 lakes. The state can claim big waters like Lake Havasu, a mileswide bulge on the Colorado River, where Atlantic-force winds have built white waves that keep sailors beached and winters cold enough for watch caps and peacoats.

Above Lake Havasu, Arizonans can sail their watery corner of mighty Lake Mead. Further east and higher north, where Arizona becomes Utah, there is Lake Powell, 14 million acre feet of water and a sufficient challenge to sailors to be the subject of a federal navigation chart.

Phoenicians can take their pick and their sailboats to nearby lakes Pleasant, Saguaro, Canyon, Apache and Roosevelt, the furthest of which is only a three-hour drive. It is feisty, challenging sailing. Particularly on Phoenix area lakes where winds veer, back and twist and the trim of a sail demands a sea dog's touch. Especially on Lake Powell where stiff breezes shout and ricochet from steep canyon walls like breath puffed into a bottle. With all this water lapping its desert doorstep, Arizona can produce boating data which surprises even native Arizonans.

A Coast Guard Academy graduate, and supported by 60 reservists and a full civilian auxiliary.

And the world's largest inland sailing series, the London Bridge Regatta, which this year saw 300 twin-hulled cata-marans nipping and tacking during a two-day sail-off, has become the annual foundation of boating sports on Lake Havasu.

These are numbers and evidence of the full pursuit of a total sport which now holds sufficient substance to have created the dubious accolade of polarization. Powerboaters deride sailboaters as "ragbaggers." Sailboaters scorn power-boaters as "stinkpotters." "Sailors Have More Fun," crows a new bumper sticker. "Sailors Are Full of Wind," contend the engine-driven mariners. Yet it is the ragbaggers who build this story for they are creating the current and undeniable growth of new water fun.

Across the nation, sailboat factories which once could keep pace with their markets by hand building hulls are now moving Rainbow Bridge was once extremely remote and seldom visited. A finger of Lake Powell now makes it a popular attraction. ALLEN C. REED to production line methods. One California manufacturer was so backlogged on production this summer that customers were fretting for five months between cash deposits on, and deliveries of their craft. Across Arizona, sales of all sailboats, from Sun-flower 12-footers, virtually a one-master surfboard, to the popular Catalinas, a 22-foot sloop with enough space below decks to sleep five, are doubling annually. Membership in the Arizona Yacht Club (AYC) has jumped 100 per cent in five years. And sailboat racing has sped to the extremes of the AYC's spring and fall series on Lake Pleasant (featuring 26-footers of ocean racing class) to weekly beer can regattas (nicknamed in honor of sponsoring breweries) where mono-sail dinghies beat around mini-lakes in city subdivisions.

"It's fantastic, it's gone crazy," enthused Jim Rhodes, a partner in Desert Sails of Tempe, an outlet currently putting Arizonans at the tiller of a dozen models from a $249 Sun-flower to a $12,000 Ericson 25-footer. "Even when the energy crisis was at its peak and Arizonans were cutting back on recreational travel and purchases, our business went up, not down."

Rhodes, who sails one of those $12,000 Ericsons, complete with a spinnaker sail loyally cut and tailored as an Arizona state flag, is a typical Arizona boat dealer. He sells yachts as the extension of a personal hobby rather than pursuit of a profession. For when he's not lounging across some lake at five-miles-per-hour he's flying near the speed of sound as the captain of a Pan American World Airways jet. "I can come back from a 10-day, gut-busting trip around the world and not come down from the journey for three days," he explained. "But the moment I feel water under the keel of my boat the relaxation is immediate. I've tried golf, hunting and fishing but sailing is the only thing that really does it for me. Y'know, it's a helluva kick to be riding the wind, trimming sails, racing as fast as you can go and still only be doing five miles-per-hour."

Yet sailing's new growth is more of a tribute to the state of the boatbuilding art than the reflection of a lust for a fresh state of mind. In post war years a pleasure sailboat was a wooden-hulled thing. It required annual dry docking, spar varnishing, constant scraping and caulking of seams which maintained a constant rebellion against the shrinking of sun and the expansion of water-soaked planking. Sails were linen which mildewed and rotted. Masts were wood that split and splintered. Her ropes were manila and they frayed. Such craft produced the cliche lament that a boat was nothing more than a wood-lined hole in the water which owners were continually trying to fill with money. Then along came fiberglass and anodized aluminum and plastics and synthetic fabrics.

So today's pleasure sailboaters have hulls of gel-coated fiberglass which is virtually maintenance free. Sails are Dacron which retain their aerodynamic form and will resist weather-rot for decades. Masts and booms are of unsplinterable alu-minum. And her sheets are nylon rope which will outlive the boat. "And the use of these materials has dropped the initial purchase cost of sailboating until it has a substantial edge over the expense of powerboating," continued Rhodes. "For $5,000 or less a man can buy a 21-foot sloop fast enough for racing, safe enough for coastal cruising and big enough for a family vacation. You'll pay more than twice that to obtain the same qualities in a cabin cruiser."

As fast as sailboats have developed, so have the means of getting them to the nearest body of water. "It wasn't too long ago that a 20-foot boat was about the biggest you could get on a trailer and those trailers were being built with less than the concern of an afterthought," commented Bob Kroon.

Kroon is a shareholder in Sails West of Phoenix, another company run by a team of weekend sailors who are openly, albeit optimistically predicting the demand and the day when their hobbies become full vocations. "Now we have rugged trailers with surge and electrical brakes and built for only one boat," added Kroon, a computer programmer with Honeywell Inc. "So you can load a 26-footer on a trailer, hitch it behind the family station wagon and head out at highway speeds in complete safety."

Science has improved sailboats and their popularity. And there are afficionados, such as Kroon, who believe that society has changed sailors into a new and expanding breed. "The people coming into this recreation, particularly the younger people, are getting away from the establishment and don't want to follow the old yacht club traditions," continued Kroon, skipper of his own Aquarius 23 sloop.

"All today's sailors seem to need is a boat and a beach and a beer. It's not a rejection of the old, formal, bar-and-initia-tion-fee yacht club establishment but more a realization of 'Who needs it?' "It's a rare bird who comes to buy a boat from us and is a veteran or a traditionist from Buzzard's Bay or Newport. We're seeing guys who haven't the vaguest notions about sailing but just want to try it because it promises a Sunday afternoon of relaxation without scaring the bejabbers out of the wife and kids."

There are additional reasons why more Arizonans are moving to their lakes in boats and doing their weekend business in small waters. For many it is the thrill of piloting a Hobie 16 catamaran, an ultra-lightweight, twin-hulled greyhound which can sprint up to 25-miles-per-hour, skim along on one pontoon and combine all the tingles of surfing and motorcycling with none of the head-cracking dangers. For others, it is the leisure of loafing along in the sun aboard a 21-foot monohull, swimming over the side and dawn fishing when waters are still and unscarred by powerboats and skiers.

Then it is beaching boat and family in some lonely cove among the maze of inlets at Lake Pleasant where kids can hear wild burros bray. Then it's steak over a campfire, a late toddy with the family crew of the boat cuddling alongside yours. Then it's sleeping aboard with its waterbed motions or on the beach beneath rough blanket and soft stars. And for all lake mariners, there is this definite preference for windblown recreation with no worries of Middle East wars which might again dry up Central American gasoline supplies.

Some sailors are purists, new ecologists with a sincere concern against the noise, smoke and slicks of internal combustion travel. There are those who find the softness and tranquility and, yes, the lethargy of sailing as the only antidote to the emotional rasp of harsh, noisy, frenetic weekdays. And no rag-bagger worth his weight in sea salt will deny the idea that his love of sail comes from some ingrained sense of romance, a hereditary, passionate, intangible instinct of man which has filled maritime logs with names like Cook, Lafitte, John Paul Jones, Nelson and Chichester.

"For me, sailing is one half the blood and guts of competing against nature and other sailors in a race and one half the total satisfaction of relaxing after the challenge," said Phoenix architect Donn Wooldridge, owner of a Santana 21, and commodore of the Arizona Yacht Club.

"Masefield is the first thing I think about when somebody asks me 'Why Sailing?'" explained Bob Kroon. Masefield. That's John Masefield, Britain's late poet laureate. He wrote of going down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky. All he asked was a tall ship and a star to steer her by. And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sails shaking. And a gray mist on the sea's face and a gray dawn breaking. There, in one verse, Masefield summated the fever of sea and sailors.

It was felt first when boats began with civilization.

It continues in Arizona today.

And that's not strange for an inland state. For man first sailed from Egypt a place of hot sand and arid dunes and dry desert where the ideas of a wet sport in such a thirsty spot was preposterous.

Ruth Chatfield's paintings of natural things are sublime expressions on the theory that birth, growth, renewal and death are the product of one and the same process at work. For the flower that has bloomed, death is not the end but the beginning in the total garden of the ecological system. Every second some things are being born and flourish, other things are going to seed and others dying. Individual species may be forever lost, but the system lives infinitely on.