Scores of Ventura Homes for Sail

For five years John Cruz, his girlfriend Ivy Kudo and their cat Napple have cruised the Pacific on their sailboat Gypsy.

But only when the couple dropped anchor in Ventura Harbor in June did they feel at home.

Now they plan to join the hundreds living full time on boats moored at Ventura Harbor. Cruz said he isn't sure they will ever leave.

Amid fishing trawlers and vacation craft, live-aboards go to bed and wake up on cramped sailboats or on yachts that are the seafaring equivalent of mobile homes. They haul their dirty laundry up rickety ramps to Laundromats at four Ventura Harbor marinas. Once a week, they dump their sewage at a city-operated pumping station in the harbor.

To the uninitiated, life on a docked boat may seem spartan. To live-aboards it's home.

"It's just like living in a condo or housing tract," said Cruz, 46, an emergency room nurse at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura. "But I live on a boat because I couldn't afford a house and a boat."

Along the California coast, live-aboards have at times been blamed for everything from rising crime to increased pollution. In Marina del Rey and Santa Barbara, officials have clamped down on the number of live-aboards they will allow.

But that hasn't been the case at Ventura Harbor. Live-aboards are welcome, harbor officials say.

If anything, said Ventura Port District director Oscar Pena, they have helped transform the harbor from a sleepy boat lagoon into an emerging neighborhood with growing political clout. Pena said he will consult with live-aboards and the newly formed Ventura Harbor Community Council as he studies a Ventura plan to give the city more say in harbor operations.

"I'm envious of them," Pena said. "I see people sunning on their boats on a perfect day and I think, 'You can't get any better.' "

Live-aboards describe their communities as floating neighborhoods, subject to the same fears of crime and development as any landlocked subdivision. Like owners of more conventional homes, they also tell of neighbors banding together in hard times, of live-aboards pitching in to keep boats from breaking free during storms.

But the standard tract house doesn't have to be kept seaworthy.

Dust from the strawberry and mushroom fields across Harbor Boulevard can stick like glue to sails and hulls. Barnacles, algae and salt water can combine to bore through a boat like an army of termites.