Holidays in Hell by P. J. O'Rourke

Author:P. J. O'Rourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1988-03-16T05:00:00+00:00

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, ball-point 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.

It’s 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

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