Captains Outrageous

When several thousand larking sailors and several thousand loved ones who drive down to join them are taxing their welcome in a foreign port, the thing least needed is an influx of freeloaders even less well-behaved. The sailors popularized Ensenada, and in the early '60s shaggy-haired hippies pounced on the town, hitting it very heavily on race weekend when it had a lot to offer for free. By the mid-'60s three special diversions had become almost ritual: I) riding a horse into Hussong's, 2) throwing cherry bombs everywhere and 3) throwing anything or anybody into the pool at the Hotel Bahia. Empty bottles and cans, bed pillows, whole cases of unopened beer, patio tables and chairs ended up in the pool, and so did mariachi players, waiters, policemen and ladies both frocked and half-frocked.

At Hussong's, men tossed cherry bombs into the ladies' room and vice versa. Sailors who had no intention of being so foolish were swept up in the madness. It is said that one wild fellow got his motorcycle up on the bar at Hussong's. rode the length of it and out the front window. However true, simply at the telling such tales revive others. When asked about the motorcycle, Harold Adams, the former race chairman, said he never saw one on the bar, but he added. "I suppose you know about the time somebody put a cherry bomb inside a barracuda and laid it on the bar. It was quite an old barracuda, but considering how Hussong's always smelled anyway, that scarcely mattered."

For its first 14 years the race started on a Thursday so that even the pokiest boats would get to port for the weekend fun. In 1962 the start was changed to Sunday, and in 1963 moved back to Saturday, the purpose in both cases being to have most of the boats arrive after the shaggy weekend freeloaders had left. After several stable years, in 1967 the general committee moved the start back to Thursday. The Ensenada police put a roadblock on the main highway, but the undesirable hell raisers leaked in. The same sort of crude violence began again, and the same kind of rioting, and the jail was as full as it had been in the early '60s. In 1967, offenders were given a choice: time in jail or have their heads shaved for a dollar. Heads were shaved, but to no avail. By 1973 the situation was as bad as it had ever been. In 1974 the start was moved forward once again to Saturday, and the race has gone its own happy, wobbling way ever since.

As one might expect, in the most chaotic years the police in their zeal sometimes hauled in the innocent. In 1965 Jack Baillie, a Los Angeles skipper, was one such, victimized because he is color-blind. Seeing the bottom light go on at an intersection just down from Hussong's, Baillie proceeded to cross and waved to friends to follow. Ensenada has some old-style traffic signals; in the direction Baillie was headed the bottom light was red. The police picked him up for directing traffic and put him in jail with a bunch of surfers who had done one or another thing wrong. At the helm of an 8-meter, a 10-meter and a 12-meter, Baillie has won more Ensenada prizes, counting specialized honors, than even Bown—quite an accomplishment considering that keel-heavy meter boats are best upwind, a point of sailing that is virtually nonexistent in Ensenada. In 1965, the year he went to jail, Baillie, at the helm of his 10-meter Hilaria, won the President of Mexico Cup for best corrected time in the ocean-racing division. The three hours he spent in the slammer that year were in a sense the high point of his long Ensenada career. During the three-hour hitch he not only received a congratulatory telegram from the President of Mexico, but also was elected president of his cell block.

The Ensenada race is a lot like a mango. It has a big, tough core surrounded by a pulp of sweet innocence. During last year's race, before more than three dozen boats had finished, a reporter wearing a blazer was approached by a lady in the bar of the Hotel Bahia. "With a blue coat you must be an official," she said. "I am trying to find out if the boat my brother is on is here yet. I don't know the name, but it's a white boat with one mast and it has a big, round front sail."

"Madam," the reporter replied, "I am semiofficial. The real ones are busy, but here's what I suggest. If you have a phone in your room, whenever a white boat with one mast and a big front sail comes in, I'll give you a call. Stay close to the phone, because I may be calling you every three minutes for the next 36 hours. This is one of those big shows that goes on and on and on."