Ragtime’s Auction Saga

To: Alan Peterson; John Drayton; John Aschieris

Subject: Ragtime

 

RAGTIME
It doesn’t seem so very long ago that a syndicate of six Long Beach (California) sailors chipped in $5,000 each in 1973 to buy a 62-foot wooden boat built in New Zealand for the sole purpose of doing the Transpacific Yacht Race to Hawaii—just once. It was one of the best bargains in sailing history. That boat, dubbed simply Ragtime, stunned Bob Johnson’s formidable Windward Passage by 4 minutes, 31 seconds—still the closest Barn Door finish in race history—and became an instant legend.

Not only was Ragtime fast, but also anyone who ever saw her was taken by the beauty of her slim black hull, glossy wood cabin top, and gracefully low-raked lines. Under subsequent owners, she would win another Barn Door in ’75 and share the record of a dozen Transpacs with Merlin, which will top that this year under the new ownership of Trisha Steele—who, incidentally, chartered Ragtime for the race in 2001.

Now the saga of Ragtime has come to this: At 10 a.m. on Friday, Jan. 21, the day this issue of The Log hits the streets, the black beauty will be up for auction at a boat impound yard in West Long Beach. The owner, Scott Zimmer, moved his miniature blimp advertising enterprise from Orange County to Austin, Texas, after business reversals. He borrowed against the boat, and now the lender, a Newport Beach woman who asked to remain anonymous, is hoping to collect $172,000 in debt and costs. Rhonda Mehlman, a lawyer with Hart, King, and Coldren of Santa Ana, is handling the action. All sides seem to agree that an auction is the only way to go. “If the boat doesn’t go for that amount, we would have a deficiency judgment against [Zimmer],” Mehlman said. “I don’t know what it’s going to go for, but we did not put a minimum bid on there.”

A $172,000 bid seems unlikely. In 1996, according to sources, Zimmer bought Ragtime for about $130,000 from Pat Farrah, who had spent more than a million restoring her to pristine condition. The lender said she is confident about a high bid because “it’s the [100th] anniversary of Transpac, and it’s a very historic boat.”

— Excerpts from a story by Rich Roberts in The Log, 2005.