Pacific Coast

We have hit the home stretch. Our American adventure, now clocking more than 10,000 non-air-conditioned miles, makes a sharp left turn in Seattle, where we veer south to follow the Pacific Ocean home. We are met by warm salty winds and our first sunny day in weeks on the wide banks of Puget Sound. The waterway is busy with ferry boats. We are at Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. Someone has yelled for a shovel. A customer at Pike Place Fish wants his crab cracked to be eaten immediately.

Greg Bruckner of Manhattan Beach chipped in for a birdie on the first playoff hole Friday to defeat Tim Robinson of Palo Alto and win the 19th annual Pacific Coast Amateur golf championship at the Los Angeles Country Club. Bruckner, 25, and Robinson, 23, each had a two-over-par 73 in the final round to tie at 286 for 72 holes. After Bruckner made a par-saving six-foot putt on the 18th hole, Robinson barely missed an eight-foot putt that would have given him a par and the championship.

The Interior Department on Thursday proposed 33 new sales of offshore petroleum exploration leases between 1986 and 1991, including sales of undersea drilling rights in areas along virtually the entire Pacific Coast. The leasing plan--the first since former Interior Secretary James G. Watt opened up the continental shelf to drilling in 1981--was quickly denounced by environmental groups as too broad and by oil industry spokesmen as too restrictive. Interior Secretary Donald P.

When Paul Stankowski of Oxnard won the 90th annual Southern California Amateur golf championship last Sunday at Glendora Country Club, he became the first teen-age winner of the prestigious event in 10 years. Stankowski, 19, a junior at Texas El Paso, shot 279, nine under par, over the narrow, tree-lined course, defeating Randy Drake, the home club favorite, by three strokes. It was the second summer victory for Stankowski, who a few weeks ago won the Oxnard city championship.

A Montebello company has won a $1.9-million judgment against Arthur Andersen & Co. in a suit accusing the accounting firm of negligence during a four-year period in which the client's controller embezzled $2.5 million. Interest on the judgment could bring to nearly $3 million the sum owed to Pacific Coast Packaging. An attorney for Pacific Coast said Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge J. Kimball Walker will determine the interest award next Thursday.

The driver's signal to slow was given only after the procession of buses and support vehicles had snaked far along a private logging road and well into the Mendocino hills. The stop, carefully selected by a scouting party days earlier, signaled the start of a most unusual food foray. Out from the assembled transports poured more than 100 people--all far too enthusiastic considering the damp, dreary weather.

Don't tell the fans who cheered the Hollywood Stars or the Los Angeles Angels that the Pacific Coast League was the minors. During the six decades that the major leagues eschewed the West, the PCL was all the ball the Left Coast had, and all the ball it needed. Remember Joe DiMaggio's famous 56-game hitting streak for the New York Yankees in 1941? Well, that wasn't Jumpin' Joe's personal best.

The Pacific Coast triathlon is known for serving fancy pastries at the finish line, but race organizers really have gone international this year. In its sixth year at Crystal Cove State Park in Newport Beach, the event has branched out to include an International Triathlon Union race on Saturday, part of USA Triathlon's Race to Athens elite series. The Olympic-distance draft-legal format will serve as a lead-in to the original USAT regional sprint-distance age-group championships on Sunday.

Mexico will postpone construction of its planned Punta Colonet port on the Pacific Coast and may scrap the project entirely as interested bidders struggle to find financing for the $4.88-billion complex. The first simultaneous recession in the U.S., Japan and Europe since World War II has led to a 30% drop in port traffic on the U.S.

California lags behind other Pacific Coast states in preparing for a tsunami, with maps of worst-case flooding finished for only half of the state's shoreline and Crescent City -- where a killer wave drowned 11 people 40 years ago -- the only town officially declared "tsunami ready" by the federal government. In Oregon and Washington, blue-and-white tsunami evacuation route signs remind coastal dwellers of the danger of gigantic earthquake-driven waves.