Cadiz Spain

Are some sailors superstitious? If so, they might think twice about competing in the Del Rey Yacht Club's 12th biennial race Feb. 5 from Marina del Rey to Puerto Vallarta. One dropout left the race with 13 entries. That's not the smallest fleet for one of the several races to Mexico each year, but it reflects a collision between commitment and the economy. Ten of the entries are ULDB (ultralight displacement boat) 70-raters, or "sleds," the elite of any West Coast offshore race.

Norman Korpi and Clint Cowen's sly and funny "The Wedding Video," which screens tonight at 7:30 at the Egyptian as an American Cinematheque Alternative Screen offering, reunites Karpi with other former colleagues from MTV's "Real World." It gleefully reveals the discrepancies between the unedited footage shot by an unseen videographer--and relentless interviewer--for a wedding video and the polished final product.

On Wednesday, the cruise ship Riviera is scheduled to sail from Cadiz, Spain, on a 116-day around-the-world trip. Most of the passengers will have paid more than $10,000 each up front, and many have paid more than $25,000, counting shore excursions and other extras. At least two made the reservations directly with the fledgling cruise line. But the ship they and others will board is not the ship they paid for. Nor is Spain the place where they were supposed to embark.

Six words you don't want to hear from a person of authority in the middle of an around-the-world cruise: "I have bad news for you." But that's what a ship official told passengers on the cruise ship Riviera on the morning of May 23, those passengers recall. The ship was just docking in Papeete, Tahiti. Fresh from breakfast, about 200 passengers were summoned to the ship's lounge. The company had run out of money, the official told them. World Cruise Co.

Mexico, like a vintage Humphrey Bogart movie, frequently fulfills a longing for both adventure and discovery. I know--because it's my beat. One of the few countries with a comprehensive program to develop tourism in new and existing tourist zones, Mexico offers a selection of learning endeavors in a trend that is here to stay. East Coast Visitors can follow the path of intriguing pre-Columbian civilizations to areas that remain curiously unknown.

The engines are built in Cleveland, Chihuahua and Cologne. The taillights come from Europe. The seats are made in the United States. A Canadian supplier makes the moon roof. And the car itself, already rolling off Ford Motor Co.'s assembly line in Genk, Belgium, will be produced simultaneously in Kansas City, Mo., starting next year. The small sedan, aimed at buyers in both the United States and Europe, is what Ford calls its first "world car."

Like the whales with which they share the oceans, cruise ships migrate as the weather changes. While near-empty hotels wait out hurricane seasons in the tropics or freezing temperatures in northern climes, these floating resorts can follow the sun to better climates, calmer seas--and happier passengers. When ships move from one cruising ground to another--say, from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean or Alaska's Inside Passage--passengers go along for the ride, often at discounted rates.

A proposal to build a container port in a pristine bay on Colombia's coast frequented by humpback whales has raised an outcry among environmentalists who say the project would put the giant mammals at risk. Malaga Bay is one of the whales' primary northern stops on their long migratory journey from the Antarctic to as far as Costa Rica. The bay's relative isolation and natural conditions make it an appealing place for the animals to mate and give birth. As many as 1,000 humpbacks are believed to arrive there from June to August.

Warren White and his son were swimming just off the beach when they saw it. About 16 feet below them, a mass of coral and rock reared up from the sandy bottom. On top, in plain view, sat two coral-encrusted cannons. "Look at those guns," White thought. "Those things are ancient." So ancient, in fact, that White and a handful of scholars have come to believe that the wreck is one of Christopher Columbus' ships, the Vizcaina, abandoned in 1503 during his last voyage.