Anchors Away : Move to make all boats in harbor be seaworthy could end a way of life in Marina del Rey.

Renee Mandel has lived on a boat in Marina del Rey for four years and has never once moved it away from the dock. In fact, she couldn’t if she tried. Her 25-foot houseboat, christened the “African Queen,” doesn’t have an engine.

And hers isn’t the only one.

So many unseaworthy vessels are moored in the nation’s largest small-craft recreational harbor that critics say it has come to resemble a Third World port of call. By some estimates, several hundred of the 5,000 or more boats are unfit to navigate beyond the breakers that separate the marina from the Pacific Ocean.

Besides well-kept boats like Mandel’s, the unseaworthy include rickety cabin cruisers, schooners and expensive, motorless “floating homes” that were never intended to move.

“As much as I hate to say it, the place is becoming a waterborne trailer park,” said Marina del Rey attorney David P. Baker, who keeps a sleek 48-foot yacht anchored outside his office.

Now, at the urging of pleasure boaters angry at the proliferation of houseboats, floating homes and derelict “junks,” Los Angeles County officials want the vessels either shaped up or shipped out.

The Small Craft Harbor Commission has proposed a law to require every boat in the county-owned marina to be seaworthy within 120 days. Owners of floating homes, which were not designed to be seaworthy, would be allowed to inhabit them indefinitely, but after 10 years, the vessels would have to be removed from the marina if they were sold.

The Board of Supervisors, which must give its approval, is expected to consider the matter Aug. 1.

The proposed law places county officials at the center of a dispute between pleasure boaters and scores of non-boaters who have discovered living on the water as a source of affordable housing.

“It’s really a question of what the marina was intended to be,” said Kerry Gottlieb, deputy director of the county Department of Beaches and Harbors. “Something has to be done to protect the recreational boating purpose of the marina.”

Indeed, almost everywhere you look amid the million-dollar yachts and flashy sailboats are ragged vessels whose presence would have been unthinkable during the 1960s, when Marina del Rey was shiny and new. Nor did they exist in the mid-1980s, before the economy turned sour and once hard-to-get boat slips went begging.

Some of the people who have become quite comfortable living in those boat slips say the law is aimed at getting rid of them.

“It’s class warfare, pure and simple,” said Bob Higgins, 43, who rents a motorless cabin cruiser in Tahiti Marina, one of Marina del Rey’s 13 anchorages.

Michael Kunes, 33, an aspiring screenwriter, agrees. “You hear people on luxury yachts in the channel talk about how we’re riffraff over here and you resent it.”

For Kunes, a native New Yorker who once lived on a restored tugboat on the Hudson River, his home in the marina is a rented sailboat. Next to it, he has built his own floating whirlpool.

But what immediately strikes the eye is the profusion of potted plants stationed atop and beside his boat. The plants, he says impishly, are his way of thumbing his nose at wealthy yacht owners who view him and his bohemian associates as symbolic of what’s wrong with the marina.

“It comes with the territory,” said Mark Ashley, 24, referring to the social gulf between low-budget renters like himself and more well-to-do, traditional pleasure boaters.

The $375 a month that Ashley pays to live aboard an 18-foot sailboat (which includes a slip fee of $300) is half what he paid for an ordinary apartment.

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Such prices explain why non-boaters have flocked to the marina in recent years, often moving in beside boating live-aboards and other pleasure boaters who once had the place to themselves. The trend accelerated in the late 1980s, when lessors, who were eager to fill slips left vacant by the decline of the pleasure boat market, relaxed their standards.

Where safety and appearance codes were once enforced, some dock masters now conduct only cursory inspections or none at all. Frequently, they allow derelict boats with no insurance into their anchorages, observers say.

In some anchorages, professional dock masters have been replaced by people whose previous experience is in managing apartments.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff’s Department, which took over patrolling the marina’s waterways in 1984 after the county Department of Harbors was abolished, has understandably devoted more attention to fighting crime ashore than to enforcing codes governing boats at the privately leased anchorages.

One result is that the marina has seen more than its share of so-called Unidentified Floating Objects--derelict boats with rotting hulls and conked-out engines abandoned by owners in lieu of paying slip fees.

Critics say that often no sooner are the UFOs towed to public auction by the Sheriff’s Department than the junks pop up at the same anchorages from where they came, having been snapped up for pennies on the dollar by people who want to live in them and others who want to rent them out.

Sheriff’s Lt. James Oneal, the marina’s harbor master, said some boats sell for $500 to $1,000, and a few for practically nothing. “People think I’m kidding, but I actually remember one that went for a dollar,” he said.

Pleasure boaters and others contend that along with the non-boaters has come an increase in rowdiness, vandalism, petty theft, drug dealing and prostitution. They complain that because many of the rental boats don’t have restroom facilities, some occupants urinate and defecate overboard rather than use facilities provided dockside by the various anchorages.

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“The feeling here has totally changed in five years,” said Rene Hollander, 50, who lives on a houseboat in Dolphin Marina. Marina del Rey “is turning into a big Motel 6, full of people who don’t give a damn about the water and don’t know the first thing about boating.”

After the derelict boats, the pleasure crafters’ favorite targets are the so-called “floating homes,” houseboats designed without motors. Such boats have been in the marina for years. But it wasn’t until Ron Buday’s company, Marina Villas, began mass-producing them in 1993 that “all hell broke loose,” Buday said.

Pleasure boaters, who had come to tolerate older “floaters,” done up to resemble everything from paddle-wheelers to alpine chalets, were outraged by the sight of the squared-off fiberglass boxes that Buday’s company put into the water.

Sales of the boats were brisk until opponents, led by the Pioneer Skippers Boat Owners Assn., began to lobby for the proposed law last summer.

Buday says he delivered 10 of the floating homes to the marina and had orders for half a dozen more. But when word spread that restrictions might be imposed, “my client base dried up overnight.”

Now out of business, Buday blames the firm’s demise on the Pioneer Skippers, whom he refers to as elitists.

The group’s past president, who helped lead the push for the proposed law, said the Skippers have nothing to apologize for. “The marina was built for open access to the ocean,” Heather Perkoff said. “Floating homes don’t need that [access] and we don’t think they belong in a marina that’s supposed to be for recreation.”

But residents of the approximately three dozen floating homes in the marina say the proposed law would be unfair.

“Floating homes have been in here for 25 years, and nobody said a word until this came along,” said Mort Roth, 72, a retired women’s apparel salesman. He moved into his custom-built, 1,100-square-foot floating home, complete with fireplace, two bedrooms and a gourmet kitchen, 18 months ago. Like other floating-home owners, Roth contends that by making it impossible for anyone to buy his home 10 years from now and remain in the marina, the law will destroy its resale value.

“I can’t attach an engine and go out of here, and unlike some of the others, I can’t be lifted out, so I’m stuck,” Roth said. “If this thing goes through, they’re essentially taking my life savings.”