Recapturing the Magic

Isn't it entrancing? Let's take a closer look!

I’d had a bad feeling about the trip from the beginning; something down deep in my waddayacallit. Understand that I make no claim to precognitive powers. I just always have bad feelings. On my way to the grocery store I’m figuring it’ll be just my luck one of those automated jungle forest misters in the fresh vegetable section is going to spritz Swine Flu in my face while I’m selecting broccoli crowns. That’s if a text-messaging soccer mom in a Humvee doesn’t take me out in the parking lot first.

So getting back on the boat for a mini-cruise is bound to stir up some mental dust bunnies. But there were Deb and I in the middle of summer with little to do thanks to the economic meltdown, and a favorable weather report “looking forward,” to tax the idiom de jour. I made a lame effort to incite my meager impulsive side to relax a little and take on some real human risk.

Naturally the report began to get more realistic as we approached our week on the water. As the launch date approached, what had previously looked to be an unabated stretch of bucolic weather began to resemble what we’d been experiencing most of the summer: hot, humid, with the ever-present possibility of afternoon thunderstorms. I tried to forget about the recent squall that had taken the life of a local sailor, terrorized others, felled healthy climax vegetation and provided me with footage for my very first YouTube video (search "manhasset bay microburst"). Still I heard the rumblings. They came from the pit of my stomach.

Harpies, I think they're called

This despite the cheery parade of jerrycan-laden cruisers who continued to pass through on their visits to here and beyond. All were yucking it up despite living in floating fibertubs hundreds of miles from their real homes.

We’d just visited new friends, Susan and Tom, two researchers turned sailors in enviable harmony with their new lifestyle. We’d rendezvoused with them on Long Island’s North Fork, we naturally arriving by motorcar, to enjoy a day of wine tasting, camaraderie and a bonus night on the water aboard Gypsy Soul. The BreatheRight had held fast to the bridge of my nose, and we’d all slept like babies.

So off east Deb and I went again, this time by boat, with the thought of checking out the Thimble Islands, or whatever.

Whatever arrived early on day two, after about an hour of motoring in light wind. I was preparing to try out our cruising chute, a colorful gewgaw that had been roused only once prior a few seasons back, it having then nearly killed me in a rapidly escalating breeze. It had taken me a couple years and near stillness on the water to convince me to give it another go.

Then our engine, the same one that had ticked like the watch Leonardo Di Caprio wears all the way to the Bahamas and back (inspiring me to give it its own chapter in my book), started to make a noise. It was like a… a sort of a… Deb how would you… The kind of noise we used to try to make as kids with our bikes using some clothespins and a deck of cards.

I was below when the clackity-clacking started. Deb was at the helm. We immediately exchanged TV close-up looks. Deb put the engine in neutral. No change. She said white smoke was coming out the back. I opened the engine compartment and saw nothing. The sound continued. I told Deb to kill the engine.

This is where I typically begin to channel the spirit of Ralph Cramden, doing that “omina omina omina” thing until Deb tells me take a deep breath. Then I go over everything I remember from my Mack Boring diesel engine seminar, which now consists solely of the mandate, “Run your engine hard on a regular basis.”

Oh, I tried a few things. I checked the inboard sea strainer. I dismantled the raw water pump. I dove on the prop and outboard sea strainer, I burned my hand on the engine. After we let it cool down I checked the coolant level. Why did I do these things? Because I knew how. It made me feel like I was trying.

While I was pretending to be a mechanic, Deb was attempting to sail with what little wind there was in a homeward direction. Which meant we were actually heading further away from home at a slightly slower pace because of the current pushing us toward Maine. This is pretty much par for the course when you own a sailboat, which is why you should get one with a reliable engine.

After a while, since there was little else I could think to do (please don’t bring up the thermostat), I told Deb to give the engine another try. She turned the key and hit the button. It ran like a top, and has ever since. This fortuitous shift in fortune, however, did not compel me to turn around and resume our original course away from home. What are you, some kind of adventurous type?

This actually is fun

Over the next several days Deb and I zigzagged our way back toward home. It is very easy to take a long time to get to somewhere in a sailboat if you really want to. We stopped at new locations along the way, visiting places we had no intention of visiting prior to the noise. We island-hopped, explored some new-to-us landmasses, watched sunsets, got mooned once, flew the spinnaker just fine, thank you, and solved all manner of earthly problems over glasses of moderately priced wine.

All the problems except the one.

All's well that ends.

Starboard!!!

Aren't they lovely? Now how hard could that be?

Deb and I were at a fundraiser for a New York judicial candidate, a very good friend of ours for whom Deb is campaign treasurer. Please vote for her. Her name is Leticia. Always vote for anyone named Leticia.

There were a lot of legal types in attendance, most of whom I did not know. At some point someone I did know, perhaps sensing I was something of an outcast, pointed out to me that yet another lawyer-attendee also happened to be a sailor. The two of us were introduced, and naturally from then on all moot points of jurisprudence were off the table.

The young man was engaging, obviously had a good head on his shoulders, and somehow along his tortuous path to the New York Bar he’d gotten the itch to learn to sail as well.

I know. Boy has he got a lot to learn now.

A self-starter with little waterborne experience, he’d read whatever he could get his hands on and consulted anyone who’d lend a salted ear. He was told that a wise choice in a boat would be a model that would have reliable resale value, for the day he would inevitably conclude that sailing was for the birds.

The J-24 was mentioned as a suitable consideration. Grabbing the bull by the horns, he searched and found one for sale. He bought it. He then found a yacht club he liked, and joined it. He took his boat there and put it on a mooring. Next, he took his book learning aboard, along with his lovely, somewhat reticent fiancé. And then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, on a day with a good breeze up, he allegedly conspired with the prevailing winds to kill the woman. I said allegedly. Anyway, she's fine now.

I really admired Nico’s spunk. He reminded me of Deb, whose lack of experience on any given subject will not dissuade her from jumping into the fray anytime, full throttle. Thus her present status shift from clothing sales executive to political treasurer.

His one strategic mistake was simple and direct. He asked me if I’d like to go racing with him. Mine was to say, “Hey, why not?”

In my defense, I was completely forthcoming as to my racing pedigree, which is virtually non-existent. I prefer the occasional, casual, come as you are, protests strongly discouraged, main and jib affair. Testosterone-laced competition rattles me, as it tends to make men who haven’t been given the chance to honorably acquire PTSD very, very, disagreeable.

I like life in the slow lane, but a promise is a promise. I know how hard it is for a new captain to acquire a reliable crew, though Nico did say there would be other friends along to help. Then there was his sincere insistence that he didn’t care where he finished as long as everyone came home in one piece after having had a good time on the water. Ditto and sold.

Still, I believe in trying, and that ebullient effort need not intrude upon the pursuit of good fun. So I prepped for the event. I read over “The Rules”. I watched YouTube videos on spinnaker sets and douses. Oh, have I not yet mentioned that spinnakers would be involved? I really ought to have mentioned that. Spinnakers are those lovely, colorful, balloon-shaped affairs that are an absolute joy to witness from shore. My brother, who is a for real racer, will tell you: the difference between jib & main versus spinnaker racing? Apples and hand grenades.

So I’m sitting there pretending that watching YouTube will prepare me for a J-24 race, and I wasn’t the only one watching the videos. I packed sunscreen, sailing gloves, kneepads and aspirin. I should’ve added a tourniquet and some finger splints.

It was never quite clear to me who among our crew had what kind of sailing experience. There were five of us, and I gathered that four of us had virtually no serious racing time. The fifth was maybe going to make it to the boat from a Paris flight after three sleepless nights of European partying. As I interpreted the information, he was to be our ringer.

We got out on the water with just enough time to try out the borrowed spinnaker a couple of times under light winds (thank you, weather gods) and a 4hp Yamaha substituting for jib and main. You know, I can hear somebody who doesn’t even know what a spinnaker is laughing at me right now. Blow it out your poop chute, Sophocles.

But in terms of the Fear Factor, the thing that really had me spooked, my personal albatross, was Niko’s proud display of his damn winch handle, a precious artifact forged in the fires of Arian conflict, its proclamation “Made in West Germany” fused forever onto its righteous forearm. I don’t have to explain it to you, do I? I mean I have a piece of the fallen Berlin Wall. I am an authentic Kraut.

Already knowing the answer to my next question, I asked if his Teutonic jewel might happen to float. I then asked if he had another less historic lever onboard. Weighing my estimable skill sets against the diverse and challenging responsibilities involved on the J-24, I found myself the de facto trimmer. A little voice inside my head went, "uh oh."

Cut to the chase. The winds were blessedly light, or we would have been in some real shit. No boats were fouled, and the only damage to flesh, mine anyways, was the result of my cut-off gloves, which could not prevent layers of epidermis from being stripped from my fingers within the first three tacks, making it a bitch from then on in to trim. Nico, bless the guy, flew the spinnaker on every downwind leg, assuring us that on principle we would twice finish DFL. Had we forgone the monstrosity, we probably would’ve overtaken a straggler or two each race.

The real disaster, though, came early in race two on an upwind leg. Despite my intense procedural study on YouTube and my acute awareness of my less than stellar performance during earlier tacks, I continued to foul the just released lazy sheet, sometimes with a shoe, sometimes with my ass, as I concentrated on setting the new working sheet. So our tactition/pit man started to lend a helping hand with the cockpit chores.

It would be a cowardly, not to mention physically painful gesture, to point fingers at this juncture. Let us just say that somewhere along the first upwind leg of Race 2, around mid-tack and with all the frantic, congested activity that occurs in the cockpit of a small racing sailboat, something happened to the winch handle. I heard it, and then I saw it, sliding down the deck toward eternal rest.

The rest, as you know, is predictable; a redundant reminder of the destiny of all things natural. Time morphed into slow motion as I went lunging like a table hockey fanatic for a hunk of poured metal. Had I composed myself, charted its likely course, and made one strategic attempt… maybe, just maybe. Instead, I made a series of vain, sweeping motions, like an off-meds epileptic attempting the breaststroke on dry land.

I half considered jumping in the water for a last attempt. Had it been my boat, and we not racing, and me not wearing a pair of six hundred dollar prescription glasses, my having ascertained with lightning reflexes that my iPhone wasn’t in my pocket, and finally noting that a responsible person was at the helm, I would’ve totally gone for it. I’m a pretty good swimmer, and I had a good bead on the SOB when it hit the water.

If.

Now how do we get it down???

Labors of Lunacy

A Promising Fixer-Upper

In my heyday I could afford frivolous expenditures, like double-dip ice cream cones and subscriptions to boating magazines. It’s interesting to note, by the way, that these two discretionary expenditures are nearly equal in value these days. If you find yourself weighing their relative merits and happen to live by the sea, go with the ice cream.

Like all cellulose-based publications, which are dying by the barge-load from lack of relevancy, boating rags seem to recycle the same information every third issue. Amongst the repetition is the oft-rehashed Shakespearean theme of love’s labor, wherein some wave-smitten business consultant with time on his hands and a languishing 18v drill commits himself to a forlorn hulk with oodles of hidden potential. He then proceeds to dedicate the best years of his life, health, marriage, and if he had any, self respect, to the reconstitution of the thing to near-buoyant status.

Not me. I’m a turnkey kind of guy. In fact she doesn’t even have to start as long as the key turns. Saves on gas. But this one guy (I will not name names) makes Joshua Slocum look like an impatient hack.

I was sitting on the pot, where I do my best reading, taking in the story from my Boat US mag, which I get free, mind you, because of the annual towing insurance I happily shell out for. Therein I read of a man who proudly confessed to spending somewhere near half a century, and I don’t know, a hundred times the original value (while I think lopping off a finger or two in the process) to reconstitute a thing he’d found rotting in a field, into a boat.

A no-brainer. For a buck, she's yours. All you have to do is pay the salvage bill, the yard bill (ten years in arrears), re-power, redo the electrical system and gut the interior, all destroyed by salt water. Oh, and patch the gaping hole where she's been hulled.

Here’s the kicker. Over the decades he’d regularly exploited the free labor of his father and brother, neither of whom survived the project to completion. It isn’t explained how each met his demise, though there was no overt implication of boatyard accidents or murder. Let's just chalk it up to natural attrition.

I’m not the sort to denigrate the spirits of those who have passed before me, unless I knew and despised them in life, in which case their legacy is fair game. I’m sure this project had been a satisfying and bonding experience for all. I really mean that. It’s just, a little part of me wonders if the last words of either of the deceased were, “I don’t care what else you do (Son, Bro), you just have to finish this thing and put it in the water and see if it floats. Nothing else in life matters near so much.”

Or something to that effect. To which I would naturally have responded, “I’m on it, (Dad, Bro). I will not rest until I’m plying the high seas aboard her or I’m buried between the two of you first.” A little white lie doesn’t hurt once in a while, particularly when it’s told graveside.

Then I would have gone out and bought something I could’ve had some fun on right away.

But maybe I’m missing the point. I recognize the occasional perverse need to nourish something back to life from near extinction, which impulse is perhaps an extension of our own deep-seated desire to live forever. That compulsion exhibits itself in droves near water. It’s possible that some folks are truly happier fixing boats than boating in them. I, having once lived on a sailboat for a year and replaced the joker valve not once but twice during the period, recognize that what really makes me happy is living by the water, and occasionally playing in or on it. This is no great shame. Know thyself, is the dictum that comes to mind. Or as Deb likes to say, whatever blows your skirt up.

I have feet, not fins. And while I take pride in problem-solving and effecting certain types of repair, I’d prefer those problems surface only rarely and as far removed from the bilge as possible. That’s the way I hang.

By the way, that hopeless cause I’ve been alluding to? You should see her now. She’s a beaut.

The Arizona, looking for a caring home

Look Both Ways Before You Cross The Sound

Care to take the helm?

I blame the women.

That's a lie. Of course I don’t. It is, after all, a poor captain who blames his Crescent wrench for ruining his manicure. But there were Deb and Jan, gabbing away on the high side with an unobstructed view of the western horizon: the picturesque lighthouse at Stepping Stones, a burnt umber (I'm not really sure if that's accurate. I just like the Crayola name) sun setting over the bridges of Throgs Neck and Whitestone, and the glittering metropolis of New York City beyond.

Did I say unobstructed? Perhaps there would have been one obstruction for someone paying a modicum of attention: a rapidly approaching freighter the size of Rhode Island.

Did you see something? Nope. Ever been to Country Curtains?

I think the women were discussing window dressing for the saloon. In any event, the real culprit was yours truly. Jan’s husband Ron had offered me the helm of their Alberg 35, which I’d greedily accepted. Hell yes, I’ll steer your dreamboat too if you’ll let me. And I did okay for a while, poised at the pedestal like a Praetorian guard, alert to any possible oceangoing threat. Assume the helm, sir, and you assume some serious responsibility.

After a while of that nonsense I assumed a posture more conducive to the collective vibe, a slouching tuck in the aft corner of the cockpit along the leeward rail. From there I had a duck’s eye view of everything directly ahead and to port, as well as what was left of the topsides not buried in sea spray.

Ron and Jan’s boat has a nice big wheel that lets you to hang out in Ted Turner fashion, one hand on the wheel and and the other available for whatever else one might wish to grip. The problem with this arrangement is that one can easily become comfortable, and so I stayed there. With a good breeze up, my view to windward was obscured by our well-heeled hull, which was capped by the aforementioned chatting silhouettes. Ron was facing me on the low side, protecting our flank, I think, from a surprise flying fish attack. A little traffic help to starboard from the women would’ve been, well, nice.

But then it’s the guys who insist this is the way we all ought to have fun together, right? Come on, let’s hop into a painful plastic bucket, when an arm and a leg (not to mention a well-placed boom to this reporter’s noggin) could have been spared and we could all be enjoying a lovely harbor view from beach chairs. Still, just a little help?

The captain of the behemoth didn’t see any of that coming to the hazard crossing his path. Using whatever stealth technology they employ these days (a pair of eyes, I suspect) he must’ve figured if we were up to anything, it was a game of chicken where nobody wins. I’m thinking of all the paperwork the poor guy would have had to fill out.

Part of me would like to have been a fly on his cabin wall as another moron conspired to send him to Rite Aid for more Grecian Formula. On our big boat trip to the Bahamas, Deb and I would stand alert for days on end, occasionally listening to the VHF execrations of container captains as they were forced to deal with oblivious hoards of casual day sailors. More than once we heard the five blasts, and watched as recreational boaters narrowly avoided annihilation at the hands of floating bulldozers.

    Starboard!

I’ll bet this guy never bothered trying the radio. As if the clowns in front of him knew how to use one. And he was right. Back in our home waters Deb and I rarely turn ours on anymore. He could only have been hoping we’d all figure out how to don our Coast Guard-approved water wings prior to deboarding our soon to be minced vessel.

No, that captain went straight for the airhorn. Nor did he give the standard five-note alarm recognized by accomplished seamen. Nope, he just laid on one long hard “Get the hell out of the way, you stupid, son-of-a-bitch” salute. Which worked, I might add.

Our crew tacked, with plenty of time to spare so that we could compose ourselves and gawk, like a herd of cattle at the fence as the semi rolls down the road loaded with merchandise for some far-off Walmart.

It wasn’t really that close, but I’ll bet that’s not how the other guy saw it. We see these monsters rumble through all the time, and they really have no defense against us other than an angry growl of the foghorn, if you discount their looming visual presence. If we’d kept coming, a lovely sloop named “Weeble” would now be an underwater obstruction near Can #27. Which is why “limited ability to maneuver” always trumps “vessel under sail” in the rule book.

Do you feel lucky, punk? Do you?

Elsewhere

Take me somewhere else, big guy

Deb and I had received a call from friends we hadn’t seen in a while. They live on what I like to refer to as “the mainland.” Technically Deb and I are island dwellers since we live on Long Island, a hyper-populated slab of glacial debris more congested than the Tokyo subway system. It’s separated from continental America by the East River, which isn’t a river but a tidal estuary, which is an interesting bit of trivia that is perhaps neither here nor there. The point is it’s enough water to legitimize an emotional detachment from a homeland to which I feel little fealty. See, I happen to value my family’s health over the federally funded destruction of fruit bat habitat in Ubetyurassistan. Steep on that, Teabaggers.

To join our friends for dinner in their neck of the woods, we’d have to take a circuitous drive away from our destination in order to exit the peninsula we live on, then circle back and creep over the heavily taxed, ergo socialist, thoroughfare known as the Throgs Neck Bridge. From thence we’d batter our way through a portion of The Bronx. Let me tell you, any place called “The” anything is an awful place to have to pass through. The Hamptons? I’d rather gargle with Sno Bol.

A transit of The Bronx is a caustic slog through commuter hell. Then it dawned on us there was another option, involving a considerably more direct route, less fossil fuel expenditure, fewer traffic altercations, and a more enticing view. So we sailed to New Rochelle, which burned roughly eight times as much off our life clocks, and cost eighty times more in parking fees than what a round trip auto excursion would’ve.

Here’s the way I look at it. Life is a series of trade-offs that ends with the Big Trade-In: that of one’s questionably led life for eternal peace and quiet. I consider this a fair exchange, and boating helped teach me this lesson.

What the harbor at New Rochelle taught us, once again, is that Deb and I live in a really nice harbor. No anchorage is perfect, but Manhasset Bay, let me tell you, well just come visit and see. And that’s the point. Sometimes you just feel the urge to get out of Dodge, pretty as the local saloon gals might be. You know the feeling. Richard Gere knows the feeling. Brad Pitt knows the feeling. I think you know wherefrom I gather my inspiration, but I’m sure there are feminine equivalents. Kate left Jon to go dancing, right? Even after he blessed her with all those glorious offspring.

So Deb and I pulled into a sort of new harbor for us, though her dad had docked and dined us there years ago when teaching us how to sail shamefully irresponsibly.

As I’ve often said, sailing into a new harbor is exhilarating and dangerous because you’re on fresh turf, and because of that one obstruction just below the surface near Green Can #9, or some other such submerged solid thingy someplace. All the locals are fine with it because they pass it every day, but for newcomers it’s a little scary, which again is kind of the point. Shake things up a bit. Get nervous. Consult the chart overly frequently.

Getting past the mystery rock is a lot like rolling on a rubber for the first time. Then bang zoom, you’re snug inside the harbor, and you’re calling the dock master at the local marina on your cell phone because nobody uses VHF anymore, which seems a shame even though guys who bemoan the demise of Loran are, let’s face it, pathetic dweebs. You’re calling this guy because he undercuts the municipal marina’s rate by a buck a foot, and you have a hankerin’ to find out how he pulls it off.

Then you find out how, because he and his brother (both escaped bit actors from the movie “Deliverance”) snub you into a slip with the reek of fuel pumps to starboard and the panorama of a three story shrink-wrapped behemoth named “Andiamo” (the largest of three vessels so named in the harbor) to port. To finish out the scene, the view out the stern is a worm-laced field of pre-war pilings held in place by dinosaur ooze. There’s nothing to see forward because we’re on a sailboat (mast, boom, dodger, raised hatch, and if you’re lucky the requisite dockside “don’t do” sign (No Displays of Mirth, unless you bring us something from Carvel).

Welcome to Elsewhere. Which is just what the doctor ordered: something N.E.W., as our pal Mary liked to say. So Deb and I sat for a while in the cockpit because we had time to kill, and we slaughtered it by laughing at human folly. The kind that makes people pack their Studebakers to the gills with suitcases and kids who until recently were content fooling around in the back yard, so that everyone can experience The Badlands as a family unit. Laughing is good for the soul, which if you’re wondering, doesn’t actually exist. But Carvel does, so it all evens out in the end.

Our hosts were sour-faced dock rats (we have those guys in our harbor too, so there) put off by our ill-timed visit. They had better things to do than make easy money on transient schmucks willing to snort petrochemical vapors in the floating equivalent of a Motel 6. They had real business to tend to, which was the preparation of very large vessels for a season of slip decay while the boat owners billed land-based clients for work done in their sleep.

Cuz that’s how you pay for a bottom job. It’s all ebb and flow, Cap. Ebb and flow.

Let's see, that's a dollar a gallon, for water

The Shyster's Cup

Care for a spot of tea?

We recently invited a couple from our complex over for one of Deb’s four-star dinners. That’s where Deb does absolutely everything except sit around and watch me sound entertaining to myself.

Jim and Ruth are great folks, and while they have a couple years on us they’re a lively team paddling with panache into their golden years. At least that’s what I was thinking until Jim dropped what sounded painfully like a senior-moment bomb on the festivities.

The old coot was insisting that the America’s Cup had recently been fought over and won by America. Surely, I figured, it’d been a restless dream brought on by a prescription malfunction. Jim has had some health issues lately (he’s entitled), and judging by the number of pills I take every night I’m surprised either of us had room for desert.

While I’m not one of your typical zealots, able to recall every historical apex of my chosen sports fetish (Dude, was Arnie’s 1974 Augusta seven iron approach to Sixteen money, or what?), certain targets always light up the radar screen. I may not have a firm grasp of time, but the America’s Cup couldn’t possibly have snuck past me. I mean, I own a sailboat, and I’ve occasionally kind of raced it.

Yet sneak past me it did, and it’s just as well. Because long ago the quest for this most ancient of contested grails gave up any semblance of being an honorable, worse still gentlemanly (ick!) pursuit, prone to the tweaking of faux national pride.

At the dawn of my professional career as a cameraman I became involved in the Louis Vuitton Challenger Cup Series in Newport, where it was obvious to anyone with assisted vision that this was a jiggered game played by filthy rich white boys with nothing better to do as long as their respective ladies were comfortably engaged in comas. Yes, Louis Vuitton, he of the multi-thousand dollar handbag, aka loser swag.

Having been indoctrinated into the popular pastime of robber barons, I recall soon thereafter coming across a bizarre ad, run I think in that august weekly, Time, in which the local sailing consortium attempted to fleece from the most gullible of New World patriots financial support for a “defense” of the gaudy tureen claimed to rightfully belong to Joe the Plummer. You go, Denny, you zinc-encrusted gladiator! Protect our national dignity!

Mr. Conner failed miserably, as you may recall, and then succeeded miserably, and then failed yet again, the pudgy, over-baked sea serpent. But you can no more blame the guy for trying than you can any Lycra-encased Olympic “amateur” these days. Somebody’s got to pay for all this technology.

There ought to be a version of Funk & Wagnall that foregoes alphabetization for the logical association of like things, and the Olympic Games would butt right up against the entry for “non-profit” organizations. Because hoser, huge cash money is flowing through those scuppers, like a spring thaw in the Vancouver hinterlands.

Which begs the question, whom are we to root for? The American ex-pat living in Lucern and trained by Austrians, or Chinese kids coached by an American in Uzbekistan? And not that I follow hockey (unless Vinnie reads this, and then it’s Go Rangers!), but there was the coach of my Red Wings leading the Canadians against my America, we done in by the very bastard who, dressed as a Penguin, helped steal that other cup from my Motor City. Holy geez, it’s bound to give a simple man a clinical case of schizophrenia.

Back on melted water, no athlete better personifies the nature of modern sport than Kiwi Russell Couts, who finally wrested the cup from “America” for Team New Zealand, then went turncoat and shopped out his resume to Switzerland, for whom he pilfered the trophy from his own nation. He’s since followed the scent of money to Team Oracle, where his contracted talents contribute to the shuffling of overwrought metallurgy from yacht club to yacht club. What’s a fan to do these days but chant, “Go favorite corporate enterprise!”

Having blinked, I missed the two-race Deed of Gift event that went unnoticed by everyone but members of the engaged law firms. I started googling for the details, and the official America’s Cup site seemed too ashamed to even talk about it. It concentrated on happy thoughts of long ago memories of simpler times when people had servants, and fun statistics like the number of “unique visitors” to its website, which despite my hit I fear fell short of the daily views of Ashton Kutcher’s Tweets. Certainly Demi’s visage still stands a good chance of launching more ships than Valencia did this February.

It was that final arbiter of all knowledge, Wikipedia, that weighed in on the matter, in an amicus that was anything but wiki. This was a ground war waged in the wainscoted halls of jurisprudence, and had little to do with boats. It was all about spoiled little boys who’d grown up, but continue to scream “cheater” at each other from opposite ends of the playground.

It’s ironic that at a time when technology finally exists which would allow the proletariat a view of the once rarified "sport" of yacht racing (with live satellite feeds from micro-cams and gyro-stabilized stealth drones), the game on the water is nothing but an afterthought. But then the pursuit of The Cup has never really been about the sailing, has it, Guv’nuh?