A Rhodes Scholar
An afternoon off the coast of Maine.

By Chandler Rosenberger, assistant to the president of Boston University and an undistinguished sailor.
September 1-2, 2001

he air horn squeals three times. You've got six minutes. The crew, your two brothers, are setting the downhauls and freeing up sheets. You're propped up on the stern, fiddling with the tiller, scheming to cross the starting line exactly on time.

You take a second to look over the fleet. There's Gretchen, skippering the "Mary B." Twenty years ago she crewed for Bunny on that boat. Sail number "350" — that's Peter, the guy who, as a kid, used to scream at your sister's mistakes so loud you could hear the fights on shore. But that was before he bought Bunny's boatyard, married a lovely wife and became, well, almost kind.

The horn blows at five minutes and the Rhodes 18 flag goes up, and you still haven't figured out the course.

Rhodes 18's are handsome boats, with tall masts, well-proportioned sails and full hulls that sweep up to elegant bows. The small day sailors were one of the earliest designs of Philip Rhodes, architect of the 1962 America's Cup-winning "Weatherly" and a man famous for hulls of gracious lines.

But for some reason the boat never sold especially well, and only a thousand or so have been built since 1938. As a result, the Rhodes 18 Nationals Regatta, sometimes called the "Rhodes 18 Internationals" or "Rhodes Intergalactics," are small affairs between two or three yacht clubs, themselves little more than shingled sheds on the ocean's edge. These "national" races that rarely get more than 20 crews to compete.

And that may be the greatest luxury of an otherwise simple boat. America thrives on its restless drive, and celebrates success — especially in sports — with million-dollar contracts, thousands of pages in glossy magazines. It's Michael Jordan, not Philip Rhodes, in whom the world sees our strength.

But most of us are happy to know a different kind of country, especially in the summer, when we settle into all those small associations, "little platoons," and pursue pastimes unfashionable and obscure. On an afternoon off the coast of Maine, you can give thanks that beautiful old boats are still sailed for no better reason than that they are still adored.

The final horn blasts and the fleet spills across the line, sixteen sterns ahead of you and none behind.

Sailing is relaxing. Racing sailboats is nerve-wracking. If you're not going to do it well, it's probably best to fail with only family and friends looking on.

The first mark of a race is always directly to windward, exactly where no boat can sail straight on. The best you can do is zig 45 degrees in one direction, then zag back. Some skippers, trusting their judgment, light out on a long course, making one brilliant tack halfway through to sweep down right on the mark.

It's the kind of risk only fools and geniuses take. Peter does that. And he's not a fool.

Most skippers would rather hang around in the middle of the course, carving back and forth across each other's bows as if their boats were out courting. And this leg of the race can be just as cruel as a high-school dance. One minute a boat is charging for you, the next it has turned on a tight corner and swung violently away. That's when the crew glances over their shoulders, quietly measuring their gain.

Dissed like that, you're tempted to "pinch." It's a fatal mistake. When you're racing upwind, the sails catch the breeze like airplane wings; they need airflow on both sides to give you lift. But that means you have to head off the tightest possible course, just a little, and let the sails fill.

It is tempting — very tempting — to try to shorten your course by pointing on the sharpest zig that you can. But then the sails will luff, the boat will slow, and the crew that just cut you dead? They will leave you behind, hundreds more yards ahead.

Not that I speak from personal experience.

In college there was the student paper, campus politics, and I paid as little attention to the Rhodes 18 as I did to my family. But then I discovered, years later, that the annual regatta, like my family, was still there, and the sailors, like comfortable cousins, showed a reassuring indifference to anything I'd been doing during the rest of the year.

I fell in love with Rhodes racing again when I got back from Eastern Europe, where there had been precious few such "little platoons." In the early days after the Berlin Wall fell, my friends there would struggle to pull together new, small societies — a high school, a literary magazine. But the state still had to give its official sanction to everything that moved, and after years in frightened isolation, people had trouble mustering the trust to work together.

Sailing flourished on the Yugoslav coast, but then the Balkans wars broke out, and drunken gunners in the hills above the coast took delight in blowing up sailboats moored along the stony shore.

Congratulations — you're around the first mark. Now comes the race's trickiest part. You're going to sail with the wind directly behind you, so you should pop a spinnaker open in front of you, like a parachute that swallows the breeze. Yes, those spinnakers look lovely stretched down the course, each boasting its own burst of color. And yes, that Peter's blue-and-white sail out in front.

You can't trim a spinnaker with quick jerks. You have to cajole it with gentle little tugs on both corners. It's a moody sail that swoons and curls, always threatening to tangle and collapse, and in our first race my brothers and I were too scared even to try. But by the end of the regatta we were just desperate enough, and found, to our surprise, that we could get that sail to fly.

When we finished the first race in dead last, Peter sailed over with some advice.

"First — get that jenny down on the deck! Second — take the tension out of that backstay!"

"Third — get your fat asses out of the back of the boat!"

That was as much as Peter could muster before he'd sailed past. "Don't make me come back here again!" he screamed.

We got over the shock, then laughed. That night there were no grudges back on shore. The Biddeford Pool Yacht Club fed us splendidly well, and we played ping-pong, lit campfires, and fondly remembered the great shouting matches of the past.

Besides, we'll have our revenge. Oh yes. Next year the Rhodes 18 Nationals are next door in Barnstable. We'll have all summer long to get our neglected boat into shape.

Something tells me Peter's not too scared. And although we don't honestly stand a chance in hell of beating him, it's good to know he'll be there.

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