SEXTANT, LINES & VIDEOTAPE; WIT, SKILLS TAKE FILM STUDENT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC.

Byline: JEREMY BAGOTT Latitude 34

Aboard the 38-foot sloop Klondike, future UCLA filmmaker Ariane Compagnone was five days out of Horta in the Azore Islands and five days from the Brittany coast of her native France when the North Atlantic gale hit.

Wind and rain pummeled the Klondike. Twenty-five-foot seas rocked the vessel, which was soaked by the cascades of cold water coming into the cockpit.

The skipper, a French motorcycle mechanic who kept Klondike's engine the cleanest part of the boat, had ordered the one-man watches increased to two-man, with a rotation of two hours on, two off. Below decks, the wet clothing and foul-weather gear, damp bedding and splayed paperbacks, bottles and dishes were swirling around like the seas outside.

But Klondike was taking the storm well. And visibility was actually pretty decent . . . at times.

``When the waves picked the boat up, we were above the level of the ocean and could see for miles,'' Compagnone said.

When the boat slid back into the troughs, however, the crew could see only enormous slabs of vertical water.

``We'd been in the environment for a while,'' Compagnone said. ``The storm hit on our last leg of the journey. We had adjusted by then.''

She and a shipmate even made a game of trying to log the most miles-made-good during their watches in the storm.

Compagnone has been sailing since she was 14 and, by 23, she has crossed the Atlantic twice. Blame her parents. They shipped her off kicking and screaming to sailing camp one summer. Guess she liked it.

Her other great passion - filmmaking - blossomed later, when she learned to work a digital video camera. That's how she wound up in four-year film program at UCLA. Maybe it was fated that she would one day combine her two fancies.

``Never have I had a student shoot a documentary at sea,'' said Marina Goldovskaya, a professor of film at UCLA and documentarian of some renown in her native Russia. ``I think it is very unique, not so much what she's filming but how she's living her life. I would be terrified to do it. I was very worried about her. She left and then called from different parts of France waiting for this trip to happen. I said, `Look, Ariane, come back. I'm so worried.' Then she disappeared.''

In a week or two, she was in the middle of the Atlantic out of range of coast-guard helicopters, fuel and drinking water.

Cut away to 1994: By the two-week mark in Compagnone's first Atlantic crossing, discipline had begun to fail. Three of the crew squabbled in mid-ocean and then refused to speak to each other. The cause: food. Some of the crew weren't willing to prepare the type of meals the others expected.

``At sea, food is primary. When you have one crew member baking cakes and oven dishes and being creative while another only boils eggs, it creates friction,'' Compagnone said.

The recalcitrant hands were fired in the Azores, but it forced a 10-day delay.

Even when morale is good, crew diversions on the high seas are limited. BBC radio can sometimes be raised on the short wave, card games can be played, long novels read and watches talked away.

Then there's dealing with the daily adversities, small and large, of any long sea passage. Klondike's freshwater system was giving the water an unpleasant aftertaste. The solution? Someone poured a glass of Pastis, an anise-flavored liqueur, into the main tank, which gave the water a pleasing zing from then on. Problem solved.

By the time Compagnone had shipped out on her second Atlantic crossing, she had designs on a master's degree at the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA. It was January 1998 - the winter of El Nino. In the four years since her first ordeal, she was more versed in the ways of sailing and photography - namely how to operate the requisite digital video equipment for filming a documentary at sea.

This time, she spent 37 days sailing more than 4,000 miles as crew aboard the 38-foot catamaran Corca from La Rochelle, France, to Guadeloupe in the southeast Caribbean.

To prop up tourism and the French boating industry, the French government gives tax breaks to boat owners who lease yachts to charter firms on the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Delivery of the boats is where blue-water sailors like Ariane come in.

Patience was a virtue for the transoceanic sailor during the winter of El Nino. The crew waited in La Rochelle, France, for a four-day opening in the weather. Then they sat in port in La Caruna, Spain, for another four days while a low-pressure system passed. Later the crew waited in Funchal on the island of Madeira for six days to let two more low-pressure systems pass.

There was more waiting in Tenerife in the Canary Islands for final provisioning. And then the open ocean, finally.

The first 10 days were bitter cold with high seas and frazzled nerves.

``We would wake up thinking we had capsized,'' she said. As the passage progressed, conditions moderated. The crew wrestled aboard a 44-pound tuna. Dolphins appeared.

But that journey, too, was marred by a major crew problem, resulting in the firing of the first mate.

Also, between La Caruna and Madeira, the hull of a companion vessel, a Lagoon 42 catamaran, was stove in by a tree trunk floating just under the surface.

``It was the evening and the crew was preparing a show on VHS for us. Suddenly, bam. They thought it was a whale,'' said Compagnone. ``It made a hole in one of their hulls but at a waterproof compartment. They were able to seal it off. Our boat wasn't made that way.''

The Corca made landfall on Guadeloupe on Feb. 27, and Compagnone had 46 hours of raw footage.

``I have viewed the 46 hours three times and have already cut 26 hours,'' said Compagnone. She expects to have two versions complete for a February exhibition on campus.

Could the French Riviera be next for this nautical filmmaker? Just call her a Cannes-do kind of girl.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1--Color) UCLA filmmaker Ariane Compagnone used a transatlantic sailing voyage as the setting for a documentary.

Special to the Daily News

(2--Color) With reams of footage from the journey, Compagnone has her work cut out in the campus editing room.

David Crane/Daily News