At Sea with the America’s Cup

February 1987

I hear the America’s Cup race was the most spectacular sporting event of the decade. You could have fooled me. I was right there in the middle of it on the official press boat, the Sea Chunder, getting bounced around and shook silly. I had a psychopathic strangler’s grip on the railing and was staring out at the horizon like some idiot Ahab who’d run out of whale bait. All I could see was a whole bunch of ocean and wet, messy waves. Though, as it turned out, I was facing the wrong way, and had to clamber and stumble and crawl on all fours over to the Sea Chunder’s other railing. There was a whole bunch of ocean on that side, too, if you ask me.

Way off in the distance, or so I was told, were Stars & Stripes and Kookaburra III. They looked like two dirty custard-pie slices stood on end. First one tipped one way, then the other tipped the same way, then the first tipped the other way and so did the second.

“Awesome!” “A brilliant tacking duel!” “Superb seamanship!” said the professional boat reporters from Dinghy & Dock, Flaps Afloat, and other important journals of the sport. I don’t think I’ll ever be a real boat reporter. My Rolex isn’t big enough. Also, I don’t have the color sense. You have to wear orange Top-Siders and a pair of electric-blue OP shorts and a vermilion-and-yellow-striped Patagonia shirt and a hot-pink baseball cap with the name of somebody’s boat on it in glitter, plus Day-Glo-green zinc oxide smeared down your nose and around your lips like a radioactive street mime. I do have one loud necktie with little Santas that I wear at Christmas, but this isn’t enough to qualify. And professional boat reporters love to hang bushels of stuff around their necks—press passes, dock passes, ballpoint pens that float, cameras, binoculars, and Vuarnet sunglasses on those dangle cords that are supposed to look so cool nowadays but which remind anyone over thirty-five of the high school librarian. Good luck to these men and women if they happen to fall over the side.

Falling over the side, however, was something the boat reporters were disappointingly bad at. While the Sea Chunder bucked like a fake Times Square sex act, the boat reporters assumed poses of studied nonchalance, talking boat talk in loud and knowing voices.

Its no use my trying to describe this America’s Cup business if you don’t understand boat talk. Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren’t on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it’s how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college. During the brief intervals on the Sea Chunder when I wasn’t blowing lunch, I compiled a glossary.

Fore—Front.

Aft—Back.

Midships—You don’t know “fore” from “aft” and had better stay where you are.

Bow and Stern—These also mean front and back. Yet although you can go back to the front of a boat, you cannot go aft to the bow (which shows that even boat people get confused by boat talk).

Port—Left. Easy to remember because port wine is red and so’s your face if you say “left” instead of “port” on a boat.

Starboard—Right. Not so easy to remember.

Leeward—The direction to throw up in.

Windward—The direction not to.

Avast—A warning that you’re talking boat talk or are about to start.

Ahoy—Ditto.

Deck—The floor, except it’s also the ceiling and this can be perplexing during bad weather when you’re not sure which one you’re standing on.

Bulkhead—A wall.

Hatch—A door.

Companionway—A staircase.

Gangway—When you’re moving along a wall, trying to stay on the floor, and you go through a door and fall down a staircase, you yell “Gangway!”

Sheets—Ropes and not the things that look like great big bedsheets, which are sails, even though the sheets tend to sail all over the place and the sails are really just big sheets.

Jibs, Mains, Mizzens, Jenoas, and Spinnakers—What you’re supposed to call the sails if you’re hep.

Cleats, Battens, Booms, Stays, Yards, Gaffs, Clews, and Cheek Blocks—Things on a boat and you don’t know what the hell to call them.

But none of this will help you with the most difficult part of boat talk which is how to spell yacht. I’ve tried “yacth,” “yatch,” “ychat,” and “yot.” None of them looks quite right.

Meanwhile, out in the shark-semi-infested Indian Ocean (most of the sharks were back on the Fremantle docks selling Kookaburra III sweatshirts for $65), the most spectacular sporting event of the decade dragged on.

If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around the Central Park Reservoir. The Sea Chunder—a lumbering diesel the size and shape of a Presbyterian church—can run rings around any twelve-meter ever built. So can a rowboat with a twenty-horsepower Evinrude on the back. The America’s Cup is like driving your Lamborghini to the Gran Prix track to watch the charter buses race.

Stars & Stripes and Kookaburra III dawdled out to this thing, a buoy, that was floating in the water and from there sailed 3.64 miles to another thing, then turned around and did that seven more times. This took five hours at the end of which everybody was drenched and sick and sunburned, especially me.

Of course they couldn’t do it in just any old boat or it might have been over in twenty minutes and cost only a hundred bucks, and what kind of fun would that be? They had to have special twelve-meter boats, which cost $1,000,000 apiece and don’t even have a toilet. They also don’t have a fridge full of tall cool ones or any tanned wahines in string-knit bathing-suit bottoms.

A twelve-meter is not twelve meters long or twelve meters wide or even wrecked and sunk and twelve meters under the water, no matter how good an idea that would be. A twelve-meter is a boat that conforms to a complex design formula:

In layman’s terms this means length (L) of the boat owner’s insider-trading securities-fraud-trial transcript plus all the dollars (d) in the world times 2 plus the square root of the Ralph Lauren designer sheets () ruined by the crew members sleeping with the spoiled rich girls who follow boat races around minus the number of ugly and embarrassing free (F) boat visors given away by the boat’s principal sponsor divided by all sorts (.75π) of snits and quarrels over the rules.

The race ended at last and somebody won, but the Sea Chunder was still going UP and down and UP and down and UP and down and oh, God, I had to get to a bathroom, I mean “head.” I worked my way along the “deck,” holding on to the “bulkhead,” and I had just made it to the “companionway hatch” when we hit an extra-messy wave. Blaauuuuughhh. “Gangway,” indeed.

There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily. But the most mysterious thing is why rich people like them. Rich people are nuts for boats. The first thing that a yo-yo like Simon Le Bon or Ted Turner does when he gets rich is buy a boat. And, if he’s a high-hat kind of rich—that is, if he made his money screwing thousands of people in arbitrage instead of screwing hundreds selling used cars—he buys a sailboat. I don’t know about you, but if I got rich I’d buy something warm and weatherproof that held still, like a bar. But not your true cake-eater; he has to have a breeze bucket, a puff-powered moola scow, a wet-ended WASP Winnebago.

Although I don’t know why rich people like boats, I do know that many of them deserve no better. And it’s all right with me if they spend the privileged hours of their golden days cramped and soggy and bobbing at a clam’s pace from Cold Hole Harbor, Maine, to Muck Cay in the Bahamas to Cap de Tripe on the Riviera to Phooey-Phooey in the Solomon Islands. And then there’s Fremantle, Western Australia.

Fremantle doesn’t seem to fit the mold. I mean, the place is okay, and I was glad to be there as opposed to being on the Sea Chunder. But Fremantle is Dayton-on-the-Sea. In fact, Western Australia is Ohio with one side of its hat brim turned up. As soon as I got on solid ground, I went over to the famed Royal Perth Yacht Club. It looked like a cinder-block drive-through bottle store. (Cinder-block drive-through bottle stores are the main architectural features of the greater Perth–Fremantle metropolitan area.) Then I visited the Fremantle docks where the twelve-meters are parked. Welcome to Hoboken, circa 1950. I expected Marlon Brando to saunter out at any moment and have the climactic fistfight in On the Waterfront. God knows how the America’s Cup race wound up out here. Somebody told me it had to do with the Australians cheating in 1983 and putting tail fins on their boat bottom, but that sounds unlikely. I think the International Sailboat Racing Politburo, or whatever it’s called, got Fremantle mixed up with Fort-de-France and thought they were going to Martinique. In Western Australia they don’t even know how to make that vital piece of sailboating equipment, the gin and tonic. If you don’t watch them, they squirt Rose’s lime juice in it.

Australia is not very exclusive. On the visa application they still ask if you’ve been convicted of a felony—although they are willing to give you a visa even if you haven’t been. Australia is exotic, however. There are kangaroos and wallabies and wombats all over the place, and even the Australian horses and sheep and house cats hop around on their back legs and have little pouches in front. Well, maybe they don’t. Actually I never saw a kangaroo. I saw kangaroo posters and kangaroo postcards and thousands of kangaroo T-shirts. Kangaroos appear on practically every advertising logo and trademark. You can buy kangaroo-brand oleo and kangaroo bath soap, and get welcome mats, shower curtains, and beach towels with kangaroos on them and have kangaroos all over your underpants. But, as for real live kangaroos, I think they’re all in the Bronx Zoo.

While I was visiting every bar in Fremantle, trying to recover from my Sea Chunder ordeal, I heard the Australians talking about how much they drink and punch each other. True, Australians do drink mug upon mug of beer. But these are dainty little mugs that hardly contain enough beer for one serving of fish-fry batter back where I come from. I could tell the Americans by the way they ordered four or six of these baby brewskis at a time. And the only fight I saw was between two U.S. boat groupies because one threw the other into a swimming pool and ruined his favorite pair of purple boat socks with little pom-poms on the heels.

Australia was like “Australia Nite” at the Michigan State Phi Delt house. The big excitement was driving on the wrong side of the road. Not that I drove on the wrong side. I was over on the right where I was supposed to be. But the Australians were on the left and coming straight at me. After ten or twelve of those lime juice G&Ts, this got very exciting.

I also went to the exciting Royal Perth Yacht Club Ball. The ticket prices were exciting anyway—$300 a pop. The invitation said black tie so I called South Perth Formal Hire and Live Bait and got a polyester quadruple-knit dinner suit with foot-wide lapels and bell-bottoms in the Early Sonny Bono cut. When I arrived at the dance, I was too embarrassed to get out of the car, especially since it was 100 degrees and I was sweating like a hog and the polyester had made my whole body break out in prickly heat. But nobody else in Western Australia owns a tuxedo either. Every guy there was wearing a rented one exactly like mine. We all spent the evening itching and squirming and scratching ourselves like apes.

The R.P.Y.C. buffet, booze-up, and fox trot exhibition had 2,500 guests. This was more than the Royal P’s dinky clubhouse or even its parking lot could hold. So the ball was given in an old wool barn that had been decorated to look like, well, an old wool barn. And there was no air-conditioning. Lanolin, ahoy.

At least the Australians weren’t dressed the way they usually are, which is in kangaroo T-shirts, khaki short shorts, work boots, and black mid-calf socks. You could tell this was genuine Perth and Fremantle high society because hardly anybody yelled, “G’day, Mate!” They yelled, “Ciao, Mate!” instead.

Australians are friendly, very friendly. I couldn’t spend three seconds eating my dinner without one of them butting in at the top of his lungs, “G’day, Mate! Eatin’ are ya? Whatzit? Food? Good on ya!” Followed by an enormous backslap right in the middle of my mouthful of boiled lamb brisket (which is either the national dish or just what everything in Australia tastes like). The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words. There’s g’day, which means “hello.” There’s mate, which is a folksy combination of “excuse me, sir” and “hey you.” There’s good on ya, which means “that’s nice,” and fair dinkum, which doesn’t mean much of anything. Australian does have, however, more synonyms for vomit than any other non-Slavic language. For example: “liquid laughter,” “technicolor yawn,” “growling in the grass,” and “planting beets.” These come in handy for the would-be boat reporter or the would-be Yacht Club Ball society columnist, for that matter.

Stars & Stripes captain and future White House guest Dennis Conner was there, also in a bad tux. He looked like a poster child for the Penguin Obesity Fund. Dennis is supposed to be something of a personality, but with 2,499 other drunks with skin rashes all around it was hard to tell.

In the middle of the wool-barn dance floor, flanked by armed guards, was the America’s Cup itself. The America’s Saucer, the America’s Dinner Plate, the America’s Soup Tureen, and the America’s Gravy Boat that go with it are presumably held by other yacht clubs. It must be quite a place setting when it’s all put together.

I was milling through the crowd of Cup admirers when I bumped into Jimmy Buffett, on tour in Australia and looking, as usual, like a one-man Spring Break. I’ve known Buffett since he was playing for Coppertone handouts on the beach at Key West. He’s a sterling character and so forth, except he’s under the misapprehension that sailboats are fun. He nearly drowned me in a sailboat one time when we almost collided with a supertanker off Miami Beach. It was a Gulf supertanker, but it came so close all we could see was the U. Anyway, Buffett had written the Stars & Stripes fight song “Take It Back” and was in a tizzy of spectator enthusiasm.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “This is about as interesting as watching George Bush get ready for bed.”

“Goddamn it, P.J.,” said Buffett, “you dumb-ass Yankee landlubbing typewriter skipper with your phony-baloney job making fun of everything—this is the most spectacular sporting event of the decade.” And he promised to explain twelve-meter racing to me so that I’d feel about the America’s Cup like John Hinckley felt about Jodie Foster.

Buffett and I went off to show the Australian bartender what he could do with his Rose’s lime juice. And before you could say, “G’day, Mate! Got a fair dinkum hangover? Good on ya!” We were back on the Sea Chunder, flopping around like tropical fish on the carpet.

This time I had a better view of the action, not that there was any. “Look!” yelled Buffett. “They’re jibing! They’re heeling! They’re running! They’re reaching! Oh, my God, they’re jibing again!” All of which seemed to mean that they weren’t doing much.

A twelve-meter is a big boat, some sixty-five feet long, with eleven people sailing it all at the same time. But no matter how much fooling around they do with the ropes and the steering wheel and stuff, the boat just keeps piddling along in the water. Now and then they put up a spinnaker—a great big sail that looks like what happens when a fat girl in a sun dress stands over the air vent at a Coney Island fun house. The purpose of the spinnaker is, I believe, to give the sponsor some place where he can put the name of his company in really gigantic letters.

“Jimmy,” I said, “I could probably get into this if they’d arm these twelve-meters. You know, maybe twin-mount .50-calibers right up in the pointy part at the front—with tracer bullets.”

“P.J.,” said Buffett, “shut up.”

Fortunately, there was a wild-ass drug scene on the Sea Chunder. I was popping fistsful of hyoscine hydrobromide (marketed under the Barf-No-Mor label). Enough of this in your system and you get seriously bent. Your vision goes zoom lens and begins doing Top Gun special effects, aborigine didjeridoos start playing in your brain, your temples inflate, and your mouth tastes like Lionel O-gauge track. You don’t feel like throwing up. But you do feel like wetting yourself and raping the first mate and eating all the colorful boat clothes. Sailboat racing can be interesting. So was Altamont.

I went downstairs to the Sea Chunder’s first floor and had twelve beers to cool out and make myself regular sick instead of hyoscine hydrobromide sick. Also, I figured it was important not to see any more of this America’s Cup stuff sober, or I might start thinking about how many starving Ethiopian kids you could feed with just one of these twelve-meters. Of course, that’s ridiculous. You can boil Kookaburra III for as long as you want, and starving Ethiopian kids still won’t eat it.

I spent the rest of the race in the Sea Chunder bar watching Dialing for Dingos on local TV. Eventually I heard Buffett outside hollering, “We won! We won!” And I guess we did. That’s nice. We now have a new national hero, size extra-large. I like it that Dennis Conner, 1987 Athlete of the Year, can’t touch his toes or even see them. And twelve-meter racing is the perfect sport for the eighties—snobbish, expensive, and high-tech in a pointless way. You have to be rich even to afford to go see it. I’m sure there are two dozen Hollywood mudsuckers slithering around LA this moment pitching twelve-meter movie ideas. “Like Karate Kid,” they’re saying, “but with boats.”

Already a great national debate has started about where the next America’s Cup race should be held. Let me be the first to suggest Aspen. I’ll bet these twelve-meters go like a bitch downhill.