On the Harbor: Gearing up for the Newport Beach Sailing Hall of Fame

The first of the Baby Boomers generation of “Hall of Fame Sailors.” Standing (L-R): Saint Cicero, Skipper Walt Elliott, Dick McKibben and Don Elder. Front row (L-R) Chuck Pickering, Fred Schenck and Tom Skahill. Four of these sailors will be included in the Newport Beach Sailing Hall of Fame story

By Len Bose

Now that the New Year’s festivities are behind us and we can focus past our bow sprints again with resolutions made to keep our bottoms clean and mast tuned we look forward to the 2020 yachting season. That’s exactly what I have been doing over the holidays by pulling the Santa Cruz 50 Horizon out of the water to inspect her rudder bearings, mast and bottom in preparation for the upcoming sailing season which will include this year Puerto Vallarta and California Ocean Race Week.

On the harbor, the city’s new patrol boats have arrived and have been in service for a month now. Title 17 of the Newport Beach Municipal Codes will be going in front of the City Council within the next couple of months and scoops of funding will be gathered to dredge the low bay over the next two years. Before I forget, remember that our first of two winters King Tides will be arriving on January 10,11 and 12th. The second will arrive on February 8th and 9th and should we have a winter storm roll through at the same time the conversation will quickly change to 

sea-level rise.

So with all this going on around the harbor, I decided to take a step back in time and piece together The Newport Beach Sailing Hall of Fame with the intentions in the upcoming years do the same for Angling, Rowing, and Stakeholders of the harbor. This is not a new idea and has been tried before by other publications yet I wanted to give it a try and add a little more zest into it. Zest means research, research equals time. While the task is overwhelming, my passion for the harbor remains high. The response has been extremely positive when contacting people like Dave Carol, Brad Avery, Don Ayres Jr, Larry Somers, Tom Schock, Henry Sprague, George Twist, and Jane Farwell.

The theme of The Newport Beach Sailing Hall of Fame is to go back as far as I can in the past and up until the present identifying our harbor’s best sailors. I’ve started by checking out the Newport Harbor Yacht Clubs history book and skimming through the pages, reviewing the different yacht clubs trophy case’s looking for the names that have continuously been engraved upon them. With this information, I went to the names listed above for their observations and memories and have slowly gathered up the information. My next step is to find the best way to categorize and present our history on the harbor.

My first thought is to identify the generations within the United States. For example, the first name that comes to mind from the Silent Generation is Harlan (Hook) Beardslee. In 1934 and 1936 won, with Barney Lehman as crew, two Star World Championships. It was written that in a Star Mid-winter regatta that Beardslee withdrew from a race because he had fouled another competitor, who did not file the protest Beardslee withdrew. It was written in the Rhodes 33 class, that always showed up with a sizable fleet, yet the race was usually for second place when Hook was sailing his # 8 Seabee” Beardslee Won 9 out of 10 Rhodes 33 Championships between 1939 & 49. Tom Schock said, “He was a man of very few words, he was bigger than life”. 

From the Baby Boomer generation the first name that appears is Fred Schenck: Who is said to be one of the best dingy sailors to ever come out of the harbor. When Humphrey Bogart was racing Lehmen 10’s, Bogart asked Schenck if Lauren Bacall could sail with him to learn more. Schenck was 19 years old and had seen photos of Bacall, yet in person, she was even more beautiful. “She was something else”.  Schenck said to his friends at the yacht club dock after Bogart and Bacall retired to the pirate’s den. Schenck was the sailing master of Cirius II for Howard Ahmanson and sailed to Hawaii. It was said he could sail anything, from Olympic class Dragons off the coast of Spain to part of the crew of Walt Elliot’s Cal 32 “Escapade’ Lipton Cup wins. He won the Snipe Worlds once as skipper and 4 times as crew, won Lehman 12 Champs 1963 & 65, NHYC Burgee of Merit.

Each generation had their champion sailors and I am continuing my research to bring them to you and will starve to complete my task by the end of this month. Yet at the same time, this will end up a life’s long project as I uncover more information and photographs. Your help will be appreciated with any old stories you would like to tell me or photos you would like to share with me. Please contact me at boseyachts@mac.com or call me at (714) 931-6710.

Sea ya