Captains Outrageous!

All Sailors have at one time or another thought that, on the whole, sinking is probably the best thing that can happen to a boat. Only while still afloat can it drive ordinary people insane, and maim and kill. It is difficult to love a boat that leaks all over your bunk when it rains or that diverts the ship's sewage into the food lockers. Boats have been known to do those things and worse. This is not a true romance. It is not romantic to be running before the wind into a nasty, unfamiliar harbor at night, in fog and against a foul tide, surrounded by oil tankers, with an engine that has just died and a mainsail stuck halfway up the mast. Some people would say that the feeling you get, once you've made it inside the harbor and are safely anchored, might be described as romantic, but it is not; it is just simple relief, magnified a million times over. Most sailors would agree that one of the best things about sailing is when it stops and you find you're still there. But it is by no means the best thing.

If it were not for the unfortunate fact that living on land makes people genuinely crazy, perhaps sailors wouldn't go to sea, or at least they'd stay on land longer. But the landbound life is a problem: It tends to confuse people with its traffic lights and politics. There is nothing confusing about the sea. It is very complicated, but not confusing.

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The island of Antigua lies just below the northern end of the Leeward and Windward Islands, a curving archipelago that forms the boundary between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Antigua was once a British island, the site of a great naval base for almost 100 years of uninterrupted warfare between European powers for naval supremacy in the Caribbean during the 18th Century. As everyone knows, the British, who will do anything to avoid speaking a foreign language, came out on top, which meant they got Africa, America, Australia and Asia--at least until the Americans (who really liked the game at first) thought up an entirely different game with guns and slogans in it, all of which meant a busy time for everyone employed in and around the Royal Navy's Leeward Islands Station, Northern Division, English Harbour, Antigua.

In Saint Johns, the capital of Antigua, there are streets named after Admirals Rodney, Hood and Nelson, three legendary figures from naval history. Nelson himself served at English Harbour for three years as captain of a 28-gun frigate. Many years later, as Admiral of the Fleet, he anchored briefly off Saint Johns in his epic pursuit of the French fleet from Europe. Learning that it had already gone back the way it came, Nelson took off after it, a one-eyed, one-armed man leading 12 lines of battleships on another 3000-mile chase across the Atlantic, all the way to Cape Trafalgar on the Spanish coast, where Nelson was killed, winning. In the bar of the Admiral's Inn, which used to be the lead cellar and engineers' offices, is a portrait of Nelson: He looks out on the rowdy goings on beneath him, the drinking, the laughter and the talk about boats, and he seems to have an expression of serene detachment on his face, possibly because someone else is picking up the check.

The British hung on in English Harbour until 1899, by which time canvas had given way to the propeller and ships were getting too big to negotiate the entrance. So the navy abandoned the dockyard and sailed off to practice for World War One. The place lay derelict for the next 50 years. The occasional yachtsman might stumble onto it and think he was in some kind of sailing heaven, wandering around the silent buildings, seeing the great cannons that had been stuck into the docks to act as bollards and hearing the humming of the wind in the rafters of the copper and lumber store. Over the years, people carted away some stone and brick to build houses in the adjacent villages, and a few roofs caved in, but much of it stood up. Now restored and revived, it is again a fully functioning dockyard for sailing vessels, a good place to take your yacht when you break it.

And for the past 11 years, Nelson's Dockyard, as it is now known, has provided the background for an event that may well be the greatest annual celebration in the sailing world today, Antigua Race Week. It is officially known as Antigua Sailing Week, but only to officials. Serious critics of the ocean-racing scene, whom nobody takes seriously, have objected that Race Week is nothing but a nonstop party, while others have insinuated that the founders of the event were a notorious gang of shifty castaways whose only ambition was to promote a yearly binge at which they could drink for nothing, fondle women and borrow money--scandalous allegations that have hardly any basis in fact.

Everybody knows that Antigua Race Week is dedicated to the noblest principles of ocean racing, although it is debatable that a sport whose battle cry is "Eat shit and die, asshole!" can be described as truly noble. Ocean racing elicits great surges of wild elation and ghastly plunges into black misery. It is much like war at sea, except that live ammunition is banned.

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Race Week is usually held in late April or early May, just before the beginning of the end of the West Indies sailing season. Soon, the northeast trade wind starts to falter and fade; the wind shifts erratically to other quarters, the rains start, and the islands lose the steady breeze of the winter months and occasionally become hot and uncomfortable in the calms. In June, the hurricane season starts.

The Caribbean is not at its best in the summer, not for sailors, anyway, some of whom have schedules to meet. Charter yachts that work winters in the West Indies and summers in the Mediterranean usually anchor at English Harbour around Race Week to get ready for the passage across the Atlantic, to fix engines, repair sails, recruit crew, haul the boat out for bottom work, if necessary, and stock up with food, fuel and water. Hundreds of boats of all rigs and pedigrees, and from all over the world, arrive to prepare for their onward passages. Most of those are privately owned cruising yachts, ranging in size from the humblest 28-foot cutter to 75-foot racing cruisers, venerable schooners, Baltic traders and the occasional Monte Carlo gin palace with helicopter. Nearly all of them will leave after Race Week, some to cruise elsewhere in the Caribbean, others going to Europe, to North or South America or through the Panama Canal to the Pacific.

In addition to the charter and private boats are the Race Week celebrities, the racing boats. A big, fast ocean-racing boat, something around 80 feet, say, and driven hard in 20 knots of wind, is like an arrow held at full stretch in a taut bow, with great stress exerted by the pressure of the sails, through the rigging and down to the deck, where, when things go wrong, human flesh takes the load; things tend to go wrong in a race whenever a boat changes a sail or rounds a mark.

Ocean racing has hours and sometimes days and weeks of the purest bliss, when the opposition is miles astern, the winds are favorable and constant and the seas slide away under the hull in a soothing hiss of foam. People lie in the sun or snooze in the shadow of wind-filled sails on days like those. "I wonder," they are fond of saying, "what the rich people are doing today?" After Antigua, they sail off to the next series of races, which may be thousands of miles away. Everyone is getting ready to go somewhere during Race Week.

The week also provides an opportunity for "boat niggers," which is how working sailors identify themselves, to run into old friends and exchange the garbled rumor and blatant slander that constitute everyday nautical gossip:

"I hear Triumph went down."

"Yeah. A mercy killing. He pulled out the plug in 500 fathoms and rowed ashore in the dinghy. They say the insurance people didn't bat an eye, paid him in full."

"John's looking for a new cook. Leg-over Lucky's getting off."

"I heard. He told me she once made duck à l'orange in a 50-knot gale and then screwed six guys for dessert. He'll never find a replacement like that."

"Rags was telling me about some charter skipper who got drunk ashore and stole a horse to swim out to the boat with. He tied the horse to a cleat on the stern, climbed aboard and passed out on deck, but the horse panicked and tried to jump on, too. The owner is asleep with his wife, he hears this racket, comes on deck, finds his skipper drunk and out of it and a horse trying to kick holes in his boat, so he gets in the dinghy, gets a line on the horse and starts towing it ashore. When they get in shallow water, the horse feels the bottom, jumps over the guy in the dinghy and gallops up (continued on page 234)Captains Outrageous!(continued from page 178) the beach and into town, dragging the poor bastard and his dinghy up the main street. The cops pick him up, don't believe a word he tells them and throw him in jail for wearing his underpants on a public street."

"That's the oldest sailing story in the world. Rags is an Australian, right? You know how Australians are."

"And what are you doing for laughs on your boat?"

"Oh, we're waiting for money."

Waiting for money! That is the authentic cry of the ocean wanderer. You can go to any anchorage anywhere in the world, and sooner or later you will meet someone sitting on a boat, staring at the water.

"What are you doing?"

"Waiting for money."

People spend months in remote ports, waiting for money that's been sent to them but has by some cunning process been diverted to Tasmania or Chile. That is what happens to lucky people, those who still have money to be sent to them. Sometimes, even for the lucky ones, the day dawns when there's no more money, and there the poor yachtsman sits, unemployed, with no resources in the world and a food supply consisting of half a tin of yeast and a clove of garlic.

At times like those, those who are ambitious and unafraid may decide to go into the shipping business: guns on the African and South or Central American coasts, booze in Brazil (where whiskey fetches around $30 a bottle) or dope from North Africa and South America. Some people carry diodes and transistors between Fiji and Australia, others run porn in the Red Sea and rock records in the Baltic and Black seas. Three years ago, an 80-year-old Swiss naturalist chartered a 35-foot sloop to smuggle a consignment of 28 illegal parrots from Colombia to Guadeloupe, and tried to talk the skipper into making an Atlantic crossing from Africa with two gorillas and a pair of rare ducks. The skipper had found the parrots rather trying during the two-week run to Guadeloupe, so he declined and took up chartering in the Virgin Islands instead.

Most sailing people would no sooner deal in drugs and guns than the average citizen would choose to rob a bank or open a zoo, and when they run out of cash, they often start selling off bits and pieces of their boats or work ashore for a few months to earn something to keep the boat going.

Others become professional "traders" like the resourceful chap with the unidentifiable accent who arrived in the islands last season in a battered old schooner, selling diesel engines that had been removed at night from construction sites in Canada. This gentleman also dabbled in Trinidad teak and the Dominican coffee-bean market for a while, and in lean times he made a modest seasonal income by agreeing not to drag the sharks he occasionally caught onto the crowded beaches of various resort hotels. He and his crew of unquestionably psychotic deckhands had begun to upset the visitors when they went ashore in the ship's boat, towing a string of dead sharks and loudly assuring some defenseless honeymoon couple from Nebraska that those were just the babies, the big ones had got away.

This fellow describes his occupation as "discount shopping." When last heard of, he had run into a spot of bother in Antigua, involving a collision and the brandishing of firearms, and had gone west to the Panama Canal, bound for California, where, as he confided just before leaving, there was sure to be "a bit of this and that, know what I mean?" going on.

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It may not be generally realized that all people who live and work on boats eventually become the victims of something called yacht madness. That affliction shows itself in many ways in the sailing world but in the ocean-racing scene most of all, because that is where the aristocrats of yacht madness dwell.

Such people spend their lives racing around the world, across the Atlantic or the Pacific, around Cape Horn, between Sydney and Hobart, from Newport to Bermuda, around the British Isles, from France to Martinique, between the English Channel and the Azores, from South Africa to Brazil. A navy of niggers on the move. One man races across the Atlantic, singlehanded, in a yacht the size of a naval fighting ship; some of his rivals, also singlehanded, are in boats not much bigger than a service elevator. Here we come close to the essence of yacht madness. When racing sailors are not racing, they talk about it, about boats, skippers, crews, rules, rigs, sails, navigation, wind, sea, tactics, mathematics and stainless steel. And women and fishing.

The rules of yacht racing provide clear evidence that sailors actually appoint madmen to office, so it is pointless to try to explain them. It is enough to say that nobody knows or understands the rules and that they are changed constantly, usually in dead of night. The reason that racing sailors spend so much time arguing about them is that they hope to confuse slower-minded rivals, especially just before a race. The general rule in all sailing is: Take no prisoners.

The extent to which the sailing community accepts and respects racing rules may be judged by standing near a race-committee desk, listening to the opinions expressed by people who feel they've been unfairly done down by the decision of some cretinous geriatric on the committee. Disputes are adjudicated by the protest committee, an assembly of typically flinty types who must decide which of the two liars involved in a protest is telling the most truth: It is rather like the Nuremberg war trials.

Supporters of the rules claim that their stunning complexity keeps the sport free from corruption by the Mafia or the Communists, all of which may be true: but one of their main functions is to divide competing boats into classes and, within those, to assign handicaps to compensate for differences in size and design. After that, all hell breaks loose.

Antigua week has six racing classes, and those cover everything from the biggest and fastest ocean-racing boats in the world, the maxiboats of around 80 feet, to multihulls, traditional boats and other categories in the racing and cruising classes. It is an impressive display that unfailingly stimulates the same old disputes among those so inclined about the merits of different boats. The multihull crowd, for example, can get very touchy about criticism of trimarans and catamarans by monohull sailors. Multihull racing crews have been known to wear dramatic costumes in matching colors and identical crash helmets, pretending they're in rockets.

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As a sport, yacht racing might be compared to horse racing, which has many thoroughbreds, not just one. Unlike boxing, which strives to produce a single world champion--and compels all but two men to become spectators, screaming for more pain--sailing in boats, whether you race or cruise around the world in them, is mainly about having a good time. However, anyone seriously committed to vengeance as a way of life will have ample opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the concept if he or she takes up ocean racing or any other branch of sailing.

Halfway through Race Week, one begins to notice that many celebrants show fresh scars. The Frenchman, whose little wooden bateau was so horribly crunched by that big cruising ketch that came rearing up on a rising sea and smashed down bow first across his stern, still limps. A woman has her arm in a sling after a collision between two boats in the traditional class. One fool wears a patch over his right eye, where he was flailed by a snapping wire cable on a flogging headsail. Very few racing people are unmarked after a week in good winds off Antigua.

After a hard day at sea, the survivors seem especially pleased with themselves and with life, win or lose. An end-of-race party is always a joyful affair that radiates a feeling of gratitude and simple happiness, which is what happens when people get drunk and have a good time.

During Race Week, sailing people exploit the communal appetite for having a good time by holding an uncountable number of celebrations involving drink, food, music and naked wet people. There are end-of-race parties on the beach nearest the finishing line of each day's race, parties at the Admiral's Inn, at the Catamaran Club, at the Yacht Club and at hotels around English Harbour.

It is well known that yachting folk have highly sophisticated parties. One of the sophisticated things they like is the two-man upside-down margarita, where one man lays his head back on the bar and another man pours a margarita down his throat. A leading figure of the Antigua social scene, owner and skipper of a converted mine sweeper, plays military music and drills his guests in marches around the saloon table. Perhaps the most distinguished and original sophisticate to appear on the yachting stage in many a season was the English rock-'n'-roll drummer who was in the islands in 1976, idling away a year's enforced exile from British taxes on his yacht, with paid crew. He would entertain dinner guests by standing on a chair, dropping his trousers and manipulating his genitals to represent what he called living sculptures. " 'Ere, look at this, then: flamingo in flight, how about that? And my masterpiece, last chicken in the shop." He also used his navel to demonstrate a movement called "lady hurdler" and was for those and other reasons a celebrated host.

It is probably not unfair to suggest that by the standards of normal people, sailors might be described as loonies. All people who live and work on boats eventually turn into loonies, because of prolonged exposure to the deep and dangerous trouble, frequently attended by maximum panic, that now and then lashes out at them just to keep them on their toes. The finger from the deep, some call it, and during Race Week, one meets many victims who have felt its prod. That experience makes some people philosophical and reduces complicated human issues to simple formulas.

"What is it all about?" a man asked a veteran Atlantic sailor, a lady, at last year's Yacht Club party.

"Bucks and fucks," she said.

Maynard, a shipping consultant who had been cruising around the islands for a month, waiting to sail south on Colombian business, disagreed with that analysis. "It ain't bucks and fucks, man, it's toot and scoot."

Maynard works and prospers in the big-money, big-risk field of business boating, has a cold that he never seems able to shake and supports deep thinking. About his craft, his livelihood, he says:

"This is a thing you either want to do or you don't want to do, dig? Ain't no middle ground. I do it as a career, full time, I'm not one of these guys who do it for the one-time quick shot and end up in the slammer. My advice to people who get busted is the same as my advice to my friends: Stay loose and remember that when God made time, He made a lot of it. We're all just sitting here in the middle of eternity, so what's the big deal about jail?"

Maynard never has to wait for money.

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On the last day of Race Week, the dockyard is one big open-air party, revolving around the final race, which is open only to boats that (A) have never been launched and that (B) do not exceed about $20 in materials to build. Many of the entries disintegrate at first contact with the water and sink, leaving the crew boatless. It is one of the few races in the world in which it has become necessary to introduce a rule against piracy.

In the late afternoon of that Saturday, the Antigua Police Band parades around the dockyard flagpole, plays a few marches and anthems and fires off a rifle volley at sunset. Some say that is in memory of the poor thirsty souls who died waiting for service at the bar of the Admiral's Inn. The premier and the bishop take the salute, deliver speeches and lead the prayers, but it has been a long day and the sound system's not working too well, and while wholesome people may find it a stirring ceremony, others are no longer capable of decent behavior. Those who were there three years ago have not forgotten the young Englishman who climbed the mainmast of a big ketch that was tied up opposite the dignitaries' gallery and removed all his clothes--a disgraceful incident that created an outcry in the press. People said he should have been flogged. One well-known charter skipper in Antigua, an infamous English nitwit, thought the swine should have been hanged. As it happened, he was arrested on the spot, thrown into jail for the weekend and sentenced to two months' hard labor, later reduced to a bribe of $68.

If you get locked up before Saturday night, you miss the last fling of Race Week, the ball at the Admiral's Inn. That is when the prizes are given out, champagne flows and the crowd dresses up and dances under spinnakers that have been suspended above the floor and ripple in the evening breeze. A long table is loaded with silver trophies under bright lights and the winning boats in each class are anchored just off the dock at the foot of the inn's lawn, spotlit from the shore.

A brief, tactful speech is delivered before the prize giving, a tribute paid to the noble themes of good sportsman-ship and friendly rivalry. Next to speculating about the broader implications of Liberian highway drainage, and brooding about the private lives of celebrities, racing sailors give a lot of thought to those topics and often talk about them in private.

It is not the sort of thing they talk about at the ball, however, where some people don't look at all well in the strong light.

"I can't talk now, my mescaline just kicked in."

"Judy split with some Italian boat to Panama right after breakfast. I wonder if she knows she's got my passport."

"Nobody can get sense out of him when he's like that. He just rolls his eyes and says he's got a loose cannon on deck."

"But if you just stick to rum on its own, you don't get the same kind of hangover you get when you mix rum with champagne, beer, whiskey, gin and tequila. That's what made you want to eat crickets."

"There's nothing we can do to help, he's so far gone he's on the way back."

"She had a T-shirt, Only Sailors get blown offshore, so I asked her if she made house calls and she said, 'Bite my box, creep.' "

"Or I could go to Bermuda and do the dinghy races, if I could get a lift there. Failing that, Camelot leaves for the Pacific on Monday, and they're still looking for a couple of guys. And there's a delivery to Venezuela, which I'd really like to get...."

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Ah, yes, the romance of the sailing life, and the enduring magic that we see in our ships.

It was J. P. Morgan, or one of those people, who once remarked, "I don't know what all the fuss is about. Give the swine a yacht to run, that'll stop their whining." A beastly man, no doubt, and one with a sense of values that can only be described as deranged. But not entirely wrong. As everyone knows, it was also J.P. who said that if a man can't afford to keep a yacht, he should be taken outside and thrashed.

It's not the romance of the sea that draws sailors, it's the reality, and one of the more obvious realities is that a boat, no matter what the size, means freedom. If you've got one, you just have to climb in and shove off. At Antigua Race Week last year, there was a smallish boat that did well in her racing class. She was called Fujimo, and her owner was a middle-aged American who was, in a modest way, justly proud of her performance.

"Fujimo. Is that a Japanese name?" he was asked.

"No, it's American," the man courteously replied. "It means Fuck You, Jack, I'm Moving Out."

"People who live on boats eventually become the victims of something called yacht madness."