A Tack 'Round the Sweet'n'Low,
Then a Run For the Ketchup Bottle

The Galveston Daily News, June 11, 1988

By MAX  RIZLEY, Jr.

ABOARD INSPIRATION -- There's nothing quite as spectacular as the fall from grace of a reverse snob.

After years of snickering at the yachty types in their Dockers and Topsiders who spend their weekends indolently hobnobbing around the Club with Biff and Winkie and the Commodore, sipping Bloodies and moaning about the quality of the "help" these days, l am watching a regatta.

Not just any sailboat race, either, but the J-24 North American Championships, held last week on Corpus Christi Bay.

We're talking Regatta-with-a-big-"R" here, complete with a Committee Boat, and protest flags, and 10-minute-warning guns -- the full inventory.

And I'm watching from a luxury cabin cruiser, one of the judges' boats, in fact, soaking up those warm South Texas rays on her foredeck, a Fiberglas beach about four miles long.

When I fall, I fall good.

I'm here in Corpus because a friend of mine crews one of the J-boats, the Greybeard, out of Lake Ray Hubbard; I'm on the judge's boat because Greybeard's skipper was kind enough to wangle me a berth.

  I will be eternally grateful for that gesture, since a J-24 race seen from shore is about as thrilling as cell division. Even the most rabid fan, peering through 10-by-50 binoculars, would be hard-pressed to make any sense out of those tiny, featureless triangles crawling ant-like along the horizon; one who, like me, knows nothing about formal yacht racing is lost entirely.

But the view from Inspiration is great, front row on the 50-yard-line, as it were, chasing the '24s from one "mark"; to the next. It's a stirring sight, as 40 sleek, colorfu sailing machines with names like Psycho and Besty's Boys and (here's one whose tale I'd like to find out) Poodle With A Mohawk, all struggle to be the first around each day-glow orange buoy that defines the course.

Each turn is a confusion of sound and color -- the straining rush of water against Fiberglas as the boats turn in little more than their own length, arguing physics with the ocean all the way; the slapslapslap-flop-POP! of the rainbow-hued spinnakers lifting and  filling, and the waste-paper crumple of jibs coming down; the zzzzingkkkkk! of sheets being winched home.

The boats race around a triangular course, each leg about two miles long ... but wait, let me give it to you just the way my friend aboard Greybeard explained it to me, over dinner at a Water Street seafood house:
"We start here, between the committee boats." (Which she represented on the tabletop by the salt and pepper shakers). "Then, we make a leg to windward, around the first mark -- this Sweet'n Low packet -- set the spinnaker (a great, parachute-like affair that balloons out ahead of a boat running downwind) and make a long reach, around the sugar packet.

"Here, we jibe and head for the ketchup, then round the ketchup, back upwind to the Sweet'n Low, then a straight downwind run, back to the ketchup, and make a last upwind leg to finish between the salt and pepper, which have since moved up here to the Sweet'n'Low."

Of course, it's not all that simple. For one thing, a sailboat race depends on the presence of wind. Any skipper who unlimbers a 200-horse Evinrude is likely to find himself in the protest room post-haste, so if the wind don't blow (as Johnny Cochran might phrase it), the race don't go.

And when the wind goes AWOL -- as it did for the first four hours of last Tuesday's races -- you have the disheartening spectacle of 40 sailboats and their adrenaline-pumped crews drifting aimlessly about a glassy sea while an official stands importantly on the deck of the Committee Boat brandishing a wind-seeking thingumbob that probably cost $3,000 and does the same thing he could do by holding a wet finger to the air. But then he wouldn't look nearly as imposing.

The wind finally did pick up, as you might gather, and two of the four scheduled races got off.

But even when there was no wind, there was still the sun and the sea and loafing on  Inspiration's sun-splashed foredeck, drinking a tall, cool one and wondering what the simple folk are doing tonight.

All in all, I can think of worse ways to spend a summer Tuesday.

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