REGIONAL REPORT : Blues of the Berth : Boating: Owners must face years on waiting lists for a place to keep the ship of their dreams.

Bob Stoppa is a boat owner caught between a dock and a hard place.

For the last year, he has been on a waiting list for a permanent slip in the Oceanside Marina. As he anxiously bides his time, Stoppa has jumped his sleek 26-foot sailboat between three short-term rental slips. The lease on the current slip is set to expire in March.

Stoppa’s options are to haul his boat 50 miles south to San Diego, or dry dock it altogether. “That boat represents 20 years of savings,” he sighed. “Now I may have to give her up. Because I can’t even find a place to keep her.”

Along the Southern California coast, hundreds of other would-be ocean goers are finding themselves in the same precarious boat.

A Southland yachting craze, coupled with a dearth of new marina berths, has created a slip shortage for many mid-sized and larger vessels--boats 40 feet and over--all the way from Morro Bay to Mission Bay.

Marina officials estimate that the Southland may have nearly twice as many larger boats as there are commercial and municipal slips to keep them.

The shortage is not universal. In several coastal areas, particularly Marina del Rey, there are plenty of slips for smaller boats--in the 20- to 30-foot range--officials said. In some areas, waits for 25- and 30-foot slips have dropped to two or three months. In other marinas, there’s no wait at all.

But owners of larger boats are finding that there are too few slots for their yachts.

Harbor officials say two- to three-year waits for some slips are common at many of the more than 90 large Southland marinas. In both Santa Barbara and Oceanside, some boat owners have waited 15 years to berth 50-foot yachts, marina officials said.

“There’s a chronic shortage of slips in Southern California,” said Bill Satow of the state Department of Boating and Waterways. “Unfortunately, it’s not going to get better. It’s only going to get worse.”

Boat owners stress that the shortage is not merely a rich man’s problem. Many middle-class families sink their discretionary income into their boats, as others would for golf or camping outings.

As a result of the shortage, they say, many boat owners simply aren’t able to use their boats as much as they’d like.

Marina operators say that the slip shortage has been brewing for more than a generation. With its year-round boating and fishing weather and a bevy of attractive destinations from the Channel Islands to Mexico, Southern California has long been one of the nation’s most popular locations for boat ownership--from tiny outboard motorboats to large live-aboard yachts.

In 1990, California ranked second only to Michigan in the number of recreational boat registrations, according to Department of Motor Vehicle statistics. About 141,000 boats 20-feet long or larger are registered statewide, officials said. That’s up from 112,000 such boats in 1985.

Of the 141,00 boats, about half--or about 70,000--were registered in Southern California.

Meanwhile, harbor masters say, there were about 38,000 slips between Santa Barbara and San Diego last year.

Most Southland marinas were built in the 1960s and ‘70s, and their slips were immediately snapped up by anxious boat owners--many of whom secured spots years before the complexes were even completed.

And while the number of Southland boat owners continues to rise, marina construction has been stymied by the environment and environmentalists, harbor masters say.

“Unlike Northern California, there isn’t any wealth of natural locations to house marinas and there’s also tremendous restrictions on any building of new boating facilities along the coastline,” said Julia Hazard, harbor master for the Santa Barbara Marina.

“The government and the environmentalists throw every bit of nausea imaginable at any new project. Meanwhile, the number of boat owners on the coast is simply burgeoning,” Hazard added.

Mark Richter, assistant director of property management for the Port of Los Angeles, which leases land and water rights to 14 area marinas, said a 1980 study showed that Southern California had a shortage of about 40,000 slips.

“If that number has gotten any better, it isn’t by much,” he said. “The demand continues to far outstrip the supply. The reason is because that supply is so non-elastic. It’s just not possible to build enough new marinas.”

The slip shortage appears to exist in pockets, harbor masters say. Most boat owners prefer to keep their boats close to home. So many, like Stoppa, would prefer to sit out a three-year wait in Oceanside rather than move to suburban San Diego, where slips are more plentiful, largely because a new marina opened recently in Chula Vista.

Slip fees--which range anywhere from $6 a foot per month in Chula Vista to more than $17 a foot in some Newport Beach marinas--are also on the increase, due both to the shortage and to overall inflation.

The rising price of keeping a boat near the water has forced many owners to dry dock smaller boats or use trailers.

Over the years, marina operators have tried to react to the shifting demands. “We’re not always successful though,” Richter said. “When we designed the Cabrillo Marina 10 years ago, the big demand was for 30- and 40-foot slips.

“But by the time the marina was finished five years later, the demand had changed to bigger boats--to 50-footers and larger. And so, no matter what we did, we still had a waiting list.”

Dick Miller, manager of the Long Beach marine bureau, which oversees the Alamitos Bay and Shoreline Village marinas, said about two dozen smaller slips at the Alamitos Bay Marina were enlarged to handle the demand. With the shortage of new marina spaces, other operators say, more such renovations could follow.

Harbor Master Bob Hyde said the Cabrillo Marina will even go a step further--doubling its size in 1995 by adding 1,180 slips.

“But they’ll be taken long before they’re finished,” he said. “It’s just so strange. There’s got to be an end to this crazy demand at some point. I mean, when do you saturate the market?”

Those on waiting lists have limited choices. They can take their boat out of the water or rent from a permanent slip holder who is away on a cruise or whose boat is being repaired.

Most marinas limit the time any slip can be sublet for a given year, forcing boat owners without permanent slip licenses to continually move their boats within a marina--if they can find available spaces.

“Some stop by the office every other day to see if any new openings have come up,” Hyde said. “They try to develop personal relationships. For many, the harbor master rises right up there with their church pastor.”

Some enthusiasts put their names on waiting lists before they’ve even bought a boat. “We let them know when their name is coming due and some go out and make that frantic search for a boat to fill their new slip,” said Hazard of the Santa Barbara Marina.

Paul Garren, a yacht and ship broker in Oceanside, said he has seen people buy a boat just to acquire rights to the slip.

Some boat owners in the most desperate straits have reportedly resorted to bribery.

Stoppa hasn’t considered offering any bribes. But he has thought of selling his boat--his dream of happy-go-lucky boat ownership in danger of being dashed on the rocks.

Stoppa’s is one of 414 names on the Oceanside Marina waiting list. “It’s kind of weird,” he said of the others queued up for a slip.

“I know that most of them aren’t rich. They’re average people just like me--who value the time they spend on their boat and would do anything to protect it. They’re out there--anxious and waiting--just like me.”