Harboring hopes of being the world’s largest

June Casagrande

If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a jillion, kerzillion times:

Newport Harbor is the largest small craft harbor in the world. Right?

Right?

We can’t know for sure whether this is wrong. The one thing we can

know is that anyone who says it’s right probably hasn’t done his or

her homework.

That’s understandable. The homework is overwhelming. Even trying

to get to the real story is an exercise in frustration in a lesson on

hyperbole.

Type in “world’s largest small boat harbor” or “small craft” and

“pleasure harbor” into an Internet search engine and an unlikely name

tends to pop up: Marina del Rey.

“I’ve always heard that Marina del Rey is the largest small craft

harbor in the world,” said Megan Standard, public information officer

for the California Department of Boating and Waterways.

The department does not maintain up-to-date statistics on relative

harbor sizes, Standard said.

A more thorough search revealed the likely source of Marina del

Rey’s unlikely assertion.

“Built around the largest man-made small-boat harbor in the world,

Marina del Rey is home to over 6,000 pleasure boats and yachts,”

according to MarinadelRey.com.

Ah-ha. Man-made.

Perhaps that gives them some bragging rights in other parts of the

state, but not in Newport Beach.

“We usually have about 9,000 to 9,500 boats in Newport Harbor,

though we’ve had over 11,000 at times,” said Lt. Greg Russell of the

Orange County Sheriff’s Harbor Patrol, who serves as assistant harbor

master of Newport Harbor.

The numbers are based on the Harbor Patrol’s annual count of all

the boats docked at piers, moorings and marinas in the harbor at any

one time, Russell said. Compare that to Dana Point, which has about

2,500 boats, and Huntington Harbor, which has close to 3,500, and

it’s clear that Newport is a heavyweight.

Newport Harbor contains 30 miles of coastline if you count both

sides of the bay’s winding edges and the borders of the small islands

within. Most of this 30 miles is densely dotted with piers and

moorings.

But just because we easily whup Marina del Rey doesn’t mean we can

go around bragging to be biggest in the world. Or can we?

“Newport is definitely biggest on the West Coast and possibly the

biggest in the country,” Russell said. The way the state of Florida

conducts boat counts per harbor makes it hard to know whether you’re

comparing apples to apples.

But as for the world, well, no one knows.

“With some things, people say them over and over again and

eventually everyone accepts it as true,” said Ralph Rodheim, member

of the city’s Harbor Commission who has also served on the California

Boating and Waterways Commission. “Then it gets into print and

suddenly it is true. But is Newport the world’s largest small boat

harbor? To the best of our knowledge, it is.”

Standard offered an even more incisive analysis of how Newport and

Marina del Rey might both have come to be known as the biggest

pleasure harbor in the world:

“This may be like a lot of things: It seems to be human nature to

claim to have the largest.”

* JUNE CASAGRANDE covers Newport Beach and John Wayne Airport. She

may be reached at (949) 574-4232 or by e-mail at

[email protected].