I was pedaling along, nose in a newspaper, when a raised voice penetrated the electronic din of whirling exercise machines: “Hey, Bill, what’s going on in the America’s Cup?”

It came from a fellow on the stationary bike next to mine who turned out to be an acquaintance from boating circles. I had to tell him that America’s Cup competition had degenerated into a years-long court fight between two billionaires to be followed by a racing series between the billionaires and their teams sailing enormous multihulled machines. I added, trying to put at least a little positive spin on things, that the racing would be held in Valencia, Spain, instead of a place called Ras al-Khaimah, where one of the billionaires wanted it held but was thwarted when a court ruled that the America’s Cup Deed of Gift frowned on a venue in the United Arab Emirates because it was in the wrong hemisphere.

My acquaintance, looking perplexed, said, “I guess I’m sorry I asked.”

He’s a powerboat owner, not a sailor, but was once a big America’s Cup fan. In our conversation, he recalled details of some of the great Cup matches of the late 20th century, named the sailing stars of that era’s Cup races and said he kept an America’s Cup memento displayed in his house—a framed print of a painting by Dennis Conner.

“It’s a shame that’s all gone,” he said.

True enough, but an understatement. I’m not going to waste space here flogging the billionaires. They can’t help themselves. Hard-charging billionaires need all the gratification money can buy and the fact that they’ve been able to turn something as revered as the America’s Cup—I’m sure there are still teary-eyed denizens of yacht club bars somewhere referring to it as the Auld Mug—into a toy for their own amusement is but another manifestation of their ability to succeed at just about anything.

But I am going to spend a few hundred words reminding myself and any readers who would like to join me (granted, at the risk of wallowing in nostalgia) of what sailing has lost. By sailing I mean the community of sailing, the loose affiliation of all of us, individual sailing enthusiasts, our clubs and sailing centers, the companies that make the things we use in sailing. For this community, the America’s Cup was once a cherished icon of dramatic sailing history and extraordinary sailing skill and technical innovation. Today it stands for nothing that matters to sailing or to anyone except a few stakeholders.

There is an abiding sense of bewilderment over the non-sailing world’s lack of interest in what we do and in the rewards and challenges that attract us to the water and the craft we use to enjoy it. We hear ad nausea about France, where the masses understand sailing and follow sailing competition avidly and winning sailors are national heroes. Well, the French are different in a lot of ways and, besides, they don’t have NFL football games to keep them occupied on weekends for half of the year. But it is nevertheless strange that in America, a country that embraces such a broad and diverse array of interests, sailing is perceived as an esoteric, if not silly, pastime pursued by privileged people in things called yachts. Until it all went to hell, the America’s Cup was changing that.

There was a time when America’s Cup reporting was regular fare on the sports pages of American daily newspapers. Magazines, not sailing magazines, mind you, but general interest magazines, covered Cup racing. Time magazine, 99 percent of whose millions of readers had surely never set foot on a sailboat, put Dennis Conner on its cover. There he was, on the front of the February 9, 1987 issue of Time, gripping the wheel of the 12-Meter Stars & Stripes, in spray-wettened white foul-weather gear, zinc oxide-coated lips arched in a smile, the headline “Going For It” set into the dazzling, cerulean Australian sky behind him. Peeking over his shoulder from a tiny thumbnail photo in the upper right corner was Mikhail Gorbachev. The leader of the Soviet Union got second billing to a yachtsman.

A few weeks later, after Conner had gone for it and won it, Sports Illustrated, the weekly journal of mainstream sports read mainly by football, baseball, basketball and hockey fans, put Conner on its cover along with Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States. They were locked in a joyous embrace of the America’s Cup trophy.
When I came back from Fremantle, Western Australia, after covering Conner’s recapture of that trophy, I was surprised to find invitations from local service clubs wanting me to give programs about the America’s Cup. When I recounted my experiences and showed slides of 12-Meters and their crews battling in the steep indigo seas produced for the Cup races by the formidable sea breeze called the Fremantle Doctor, the merchants, bankers and insurance agents of the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce not only stayed awake, but contributed comments and questions indicating they had followed the Cup enough to recognize the skippers, know that in sailing parlance a grinder had nothing to do with coffee beans and tell a spinnaker from a jib.

Now that seems like ancient, nearly forgotten history, or a myth like Camelot—a time when America’s Cup racing was so compelling it introduced millions of Americans to sailing.
One of the reasons that time was real, and not a myth, was that those Americans were rooting for Americans competing against sailors from another country. (I’m sure many fans didn’t know the Cup was named for a boat, not a country.) Remember that quaint rule, the one that said America’s Cup boats had to be sailed by citizens of the country of the sponsoring yacht club? The instant that requirement was repealed, and Cup teams were no longer identified by nationality, the America’s Cup began its descent to irrelevance.
If Joe Six Pack and the Joe the Plumber and all manner of regular Joes were interested in the America’s Cup in that golden age, sailors were nigh on to obsessed with it. SAILING ’s special America’s Cup issues were some of the biggest and best-selling we’ve ever produced. Now we don’t bother.

As these words are being transmitted to the electronic file for the March issue, the 33rd America’s Cup series is supposed to be a few days from starting. By the time the issue reaches readers, the series could be over—or it might not even have been held because the billionaires are back in court, this time over the burning issue of where one boat’s sails were made. (It speaks volumes about the absurd state of the Cup that the nationality of sailors doesn’t matter, but the nationality of sails is worth going to court over.) The billionaire currently holding the Cup has announced that if the decision goes against him he will forfeit the America’s Cup.

As if we give a damn.

An editor of a magazine published in England called to ask me for some comments for an article about the 16-year-old Australian girl who, amid controversy over her demonstrated incompetence as a bluewater sailor, has set sail on a quest to claim a record as the youngest person to sail around the world alone.

I gave her my comments, which in short form were that I think the young lady is involved in a silly stunt and I hope she has a safe passage. Then I went home and read a book about George Mallory.

When Mallory climbed Mount Everest in the 1920s, many people thought that what he was trying to do—reach the highest point on the planet—was impossible for a human to accomplish. Airplanes had not even flown that high. The earth at 29,028 feet above sea level was terra incognita, an alien place that even some thinkers of scientific bent believed was as hostile to life as the moon. Mallory and his party walked hundreds of miles in Tibet just to reach a suitable place for a base camp on a slope of Everest. When he climbed into 40-below-zero (Fahrenheit) air driven by shrieking gales, he wore ordinary winter clothing bought at a London haberdashery and wool mittens knitted by his wife. He tried three times to reach the summit and may have made it in 1924, but no one knows for sure because he never returned. He and his climbing partner were last sighted close to the top. His body wasn’t found until 1999.

Mallory, an Englishman, made his living as a school teacher and climbed mountains as a hobby. Amateur or not, he is regarded to this day as a climber of awe-inspiring technical ability and undaunted courage. Many who studied his climbing career and final effort believed he was the first person to conquer Mount Everest.

Twenty-nine years would pass before it was certain that the feat had been accomplished. Another amateur climber, the Kiwi beekeeper Edmund Hillary, and his Sherpa climbing mate Tenzing Norgay reached the summit in 1953. Hillary said later he wasn’t sure that what he was trying to do was humanly possible until he had actually done it.

It is not a play on words to say that these are towering achievements. So too was Joshua Slocum’s accomplishment in 1898, even though it took place more than five miles lower—at sea level. No one had ever sailed around the world alone before.

It is George Mallory who is credited with saying, when asked by a reporter why he wanted to climb Everest, “Because it is there.”  That’s a quote for the ages, but perhaps what he meant was—because it is there and no one has ever climbed it before.

Brave people like these who ventured into the unknown reaches of an often hostile natural world and achieved seemingly impossible goals own revered, and deserved, places in the annals of extraordinary human endeavor. I only wish they could reside there without the company of so many who sail or climb or otherwise travel in their wakes and footsteps to grab a spot in the reflected glory of those pioneering achievements.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of these subsequent records are worthy. Robin Knox-Johnston’s 1969 solo circumnavigation, the first ever without stopping, put him and his boat Suhaili just astern of Slocum and Spray. There are more than 20 Mount Everest climbing records on the books, and though they are differentiated from the original by distinctions so fine as to be borderline ridiculous (sex, age, nationality, route, time of year, etc.), they all derive from great fortitude, attested to by the fact the slopes of Everest are littered with 120 climbers’ corpses.

Jessica Watson, the Aussie teenage sailor, obviously doesn’t lack for courage. She started her record attempt in spite of being found at fault for a collision with a ship during a practice voyage, being criticized by investigators for poor sailing skills and having to weather a well-publicized effort by Australian circumnavigator Andrew Cape to persuade her parents to make her keep her borrowed sailboat, painted in pink and festooned with sponsors’ logos, at the dock. Success, if she achieves it, will mean celebrity for her but almost nothing to the sailing world. It matters not at all that she would be a few months younger than the current holder of the youngest solo circumnavigator title.

The record would be not only meaningless, but probably short-lived. Californian Abby Sunderland, 15-year-old sister of a one-time youngest circumnavigation record holder, is preparing for a record attempt. Then there is 14-year-old Laura Dekker of the Netherlands, who was stopped by a Dutch court from attempting to set the record in a 26-foot sailboat named Guppy, even though her father not only approves of the record attempt, but has been promoting it vigorously. The court fight and her subsequent disappearance have made her a celebrity without leaving the dock. Police found her in St. Maarten in December. There is speculation she went there to elude child-care authorities and start her voyage from the island.

I don’t know how well prepared the girls’ boats are, but their celebrity-making apparatus is certainly well oiled. They have commercial sponsors, sophisticated Web sites and souvenir products for sale. Dekker (more likely her father) is said to have been negotiating with television companies to sell the rights to make a documentary of her voyage.

Mallory climbed Everest because it was there. He and Hillary and Slocum and the others in their cohort of pioneers aspired to do what was thought impossible or at least had never been done. Today’s record chasers seem more interested in achieving fame and finding its frequent companion fortune.

When Andy Warhol coined his famous phrase, I think he meant that in the age of ubiquitous, pervasive media, everybody would get their “15 minutes of fame.”  That hasn’t happened yet, but it does seem that more people than ever crave those 15 minutes. How else do you explain television reality shows in which adults allow themselves to be viewed by millions in situations that once would have been thought embarrassing, if not debased and utterly shorn of dignity? It may be recalled it was a shot at becoming famous by appearing in a reality TV show that motivated a Colorado father to release a spaceshiplike balloon and call 911 to report that his young son was trapped aboard the high-flying craft.

At least it can be said that the balloon boy spectacle was a fraud. Sadly, children sailing around the world alone in pursuit of fame is the real thing.

It’s not likely to stop. One of these years the world’s youngest solo circumnavigator will be a pre-teen. And then someone will surely say: What’s so great about Joshua Slocum? A 12-year-old can do what he did.

There are times when I wish GPS had never been invented. One of those times was when I read about Yuppie 911.

Two men went hiking in the Grand Canyon with their teenage sons. “In the span of three days,” the Associated Press reported, “the group pushed the panic button three times, mobilizing helicopters for dangerous lifesaving rescues inside the steep canyon walls.”

The panic button was on a personal locator beacon, a gizmo you can buy for less than $100 that sends a distress signal and GPS coordinates at a touch of that button. The signal goes to a private company, which then alerts search and rescue organizations, which have no option but to respond to save people from whatever dire threat it is that they’re facing. In the case of the Grand Canyon hikers, the threat was water that “tasted salty.”

After the third rescue summons, the rescue team forced the hikers to get in a helicopter and took them back to a safe world where there was plenty of sodium-free bottled water. The rescuers apparently did not have the authority to confiscate the personal locator. Pity.

You don’t have to be a pessimist to see this as a sign of a decadent society: Self-reliance and personal responsibility don’t matter anymore because you can push a button to have your sorry butt saved from whatever difficulty you got yourself into.

That difficulty doesn’t even have to rise to the menace of salty water. Another hiking party reportedly pushed the button and caused a rescue mobilization because they wanted their families to know they were going to be late and their cell phones didn’t work. Now there’s an emergency—no cell coverage.

The fellow who coined the term Yuppie 911, Matt Scharper, the head of California’s search and rescue operation, lamented the fact that his “personnel are placing their own selves at risk for somebody that’s just uncomfortable or didn’t plan or prepare” and pointed out that the GPS locators let people take risks they would never have considered before. For a mere hundred bucks they can buy bragging rights to adventures that will enthrall their friends, neighbors and office mates.
What does Yuppie 911 have to do with sailing? Quite a bit.

I’m not saying that sailors have been abusing rescue services in as egregious a way as those hikers. There has been some of that on a small scale, sailboat owners calling the Coast Guard because they ran out of fuel, that sort of thing. (That’s why the Coast Guard got out of the towing business.) And there have been a few instances in which sailors pursuing their sail-around-the-world dreams put themselves in situations they weren’t prepared to handle and in desperation activated their epirbs. It can at least be said for these rescue supplicants that the trouble they got themselves into was the real thing. Their problem wasn’t that their drinking water tasted salty; it was that without rescue they would be immersed forever in salty water.

What Yuppie 911 really has to do with sailing is that it should serve as our inspiration to live up to the ideal of sailing, which is to master the skills and develop the judgment that make us self-reliant at sea. This is the essence of sailing. Almost anyone can step into a sailboat and in a short time learn how to make the boat move more or less in the direction they want it to go, but that is merely to dabble. Mastering sailing means to master the ancient sailor’s imperative of knowing how to “hand, reef and steer.” It comes with study, practice, the advice of mentors, the patient accumulation of experience. It is the ability to handle a boat in heavy weather, to anchor in a blow, to splice a line and repair a sail, to fix what breaks, to understand weather, to navigate without GPS, to sail the boat to the dock when the engine is out of gas, to know all of these things so you don’t have to push the panic button.

Sometimes it seems this is not widely understood even in the sailing community. The “safety police” who bust this magazine with their scolding letters to the editor every time we publish a picture of someone sailing in breezy conditions without wearing a life preserver trivialize the principles of safety at sea. PFDs are to sailing what parachutes are to flying—no substitute for knowing how to handle the craft in dangerous conditions.

This is not about some sort of macho mentality that dictates that real sailors don’t ask to be rescued. The point is that real sailors will use their skills and judgment and do their damnedest to stay out of trouble, or get out of trouble, before asking others to put their lives in jeopardy to save theirs.

Sailing is the anti-Yuppie 911. This should be its great appeal. Sail enough and it’s certain your sailing competence and your self-reliance are going to be tested. Those of us who would like to see the decline in sailing participation reversed should keep in mind that this is what sets sailing apart from many of the ways you can spend your recreational time. Maybe our slogan should be, “Try sailing—it’s not easy.”

That might attract people who are best cut out for sailing. Yuppy 911 types need not apply.

Members of my family had the bittersweet experience on a recent weekend of emptying out our late parents’ house. Rafts of memories were released by the things we found, many of which were sailing mementoes. There were photos by the hundreds, logbooks, half models, a navy blue yachting hat, the old-fashioned kind featuring an anchor device in the front with a yacht club pin in its center, that showed all of the character that decades of wear could impart, including spots of copper-red bottom paint. The most remarkable find, though, was a trophy for first place in a sailboat race in the 1960s. It was remarkable because I never imagined the boat whose name was engraved on the cup could actually win a race.

The boat, a Pearson-built Rhodes 41 yawl, was pretty if you didn’t let your eye linger too long on the coachhouse, which was a too-high and too-white expanse of fiberglass. The swooping sheerline, long overhangs and elegant counter stern were the epitome of sailboat aesthetics of the era. Under the water she had what was then considered the right stuff—a full keel with internal ballast and attached rudder and classic wineglass sections. But there was nothing pretty or right about her performance. She was, in a word, slow, even by the forgiving standards of the times. When forced to go fast, she complained.

In one race when I was a crewmember, the breeze came on strong from astern and we piled on sail—spinnaker, spinnaker staysail, mainsail, mizzen spinnaker and mizzen—and pushed the boat to what were for her extreme speeds, 9 or 10 knots. She didn’t like it one bit. Pulling a quarter wave the size of a minor tsunami, she protested by rolling gunwale to gunwale, literally, wetting first one rail and then the other. That idiosyncrasy, dramatic though it was, was the least of her problems. We finished with the dregs of the fleet. That was a long time ago, but it must have been a searing experience for me, because it sent me on a determined quest to sail fast boats.

I’m still on that mission, but I’ve begun to understand that something has been missing from the quest—a proper reverence for seakindly sailboats.

Readers who get into my story in this issue about sailing on a square-rigger will come across an observation about the comfortable motion of the vessel in a challenging seaway. The waves on the Mediterranean were steep, and hard-edged and I know from experience that their effect on a modern high-performance sailboat would have been brutal. The word seakindly essentially describes a boat’s ability to be in harmony with the sea, to get along with it instead of fighting it. Today’s high-performance sailboats, with nearly flat bottoms, hard turns on their bilges, ultra-light hulls with heavy ballast attached at the bottom of long keel arms that function like an upside down metronome do not get along with a sea; they fight it. The price paid for their speed is a motion that is twitchy and unpredictable at best, outright dangerous at worst.

The sheer size of the four-masted bark I wrote about had something to do with her sedate ride, of course, but her captain credited the excellence of her design, dating to 1930. He compared it to a square-rigger of similar size but more modern design that he occasionally commands. In the conditions we were experiencing, he said, an epidemic of passenger mal de mer would be expected on that not-so seakindly vessel.

You could say that a proper reverence for seakindliness is what distinguished the career of Bill Crealock, who died in September at the age of 89. He designed sailboats that got along with the sea. He once wrote that his design ideas were developed in “the school of open waters.” He said he “wanted speed, as we all do to some extent, but only if it could be achieved without the handling problems which beset many boats.” 

The best known of his boats expressing that philosophy was the Crealock 37, a bluewater cruiser designed in the 1970s and later marketed as the Pacific Seacraft 37. There is no official tally that I know of, but there’s a good probability this boat has crossed oceans more often than any other production design. That was the fundamental reason for its existence. Owners love the boat for its ability to be manageable in heavy weather while providing a steady ride that does not wear down those aboard for the often extended duration of foul weather. With narrow beam, long keel, separated skeg-mounted rudder and easy-going lines, she is, above all, seakindly. That attribute is further developed by a canoe stern, a handsome touch that serves an important purpose. “The true canoe stern,” Crealock wrote, “is a potential bow, for when the weather is truly bad, it is the stern that will bear most of its venom.”

Crealock was sensitive to the seakindliness imperative because he was an ocean-voyaging sailor before he was a yacht designer. In 1952, he and three young friends bought an ancient cutter to, as Crealock put it, “study the behavior of boats at sea.” Their voyage  covered thousands of miles, including many along the coast of Africa, and resulted in Crealock’s book Vagabonding Under Sail. Later he wrote about sailing in the South Pacific in a book titled Cloud of Islands. I recommend them both as classics of the cruising adventure genre. Born in Westcliff-on-Sea, England, Crealock sailed a small sailboat to America, where he stayed, and in Southern California became a successful and much respected yacht designer.

A half model of the Pacific Seacraft 37 is enshrined in the American Sailboat Hall of Fame, one of only about two dozen to receive the honor. It’s an honor that is meant for builders of production boats, but when, as chairman of the Hall of Fame selection committee, I announced the induction of the Crealock 37 at a ceremony in 2002, I made clear this was as much a tribute to a designer of seaworthy and seakindly boats as to the builder.

Speaking of awards, that mysterious trophy we found was presented by unanimous family vote to my sister Micca (former editor of this magazine) in recognition of her ability to resist seasickness during a stormy passage on the boat named on the cup. The event was quite unpleasant at the time long ago but is now a cherished part of family sailing lore. The seasickness that afflicted others resulted from the ferocity of the frontal passage we were caught in (today we would see it coming on the computer screen but then it came out of nowhere), which brought a gale and instantly mountainous seas, not some deficiency of the boat. I did some hurling and furling myself, the latter in taking down the mainsail. After that we sailed under jib and jigger (mizzen) as comfortable as could be under the circumstances, like a buoyant gull resting on the sea. And so I can say something good about that boat: When you didn’t push too hard, she was seakindly.

But I still don’t have any idea how she managed to win a race.