MAX EBB — "G
oing once... "Going twice..." "Thirty-six!" "Thirty-six thousand! Do I hear thirty seven? Standing rigging just five years old. Full instruments, recent survey. This boat is a steal at that price." "Thirty-seven!" "Going once . . . Going twice . . . Sold! To the gentleman in the yellow PFD." "Okay, what was the advertised price?" asked the buyer. "Thirty-one fifty," said the auctioneer. "Sorry, you lose fifty-five hundred points. Next up . . ." The auctioneer flipped through the listings before choosing a new boat to put on the block. "Here's a real gem for the upscale market," he said. Fifty-four feet of cruising luxury. Ketch rig, 60 horsepower Perkins, watermaker, genset, autopilot, sails in excellent condition." "I'll start the bidding at a hundred thousand," said a potential buyer. "One hundred and fifty," added another buyer, jumping right into the game. "One seventy-five," countered the first bidder. The auctioneer read off some more of the boat's attributes, which included air conditioning, a trash compactor, a bow thruster and a big-screen TV in the main salon. The bidding finally stopped at three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. "Sold!" announced the auctioner. To the lucky lady in the red flip-flops. Asking price . . . wait for it . . . Six hundred thousand!" The rest of the crew groaned. The buyer had earned two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. This was not a marina impound auction, and it was not a boat dealership fire sale. We were playing "Yacht Broker," and we were well offshore, running slowly in light air and smooth water off a tropical coastline. Faced with another week of smoky air at home, and having accumulated some vacation time, I decided to join a friend for an easy downhill cruise from one tropical port to another on a comfortable cruising boat. I was not disappointed. The following breeze was warm and mild, the air was crystal-clear and the stars were amazing, especially before the moonrise that would come later that night on my 3-to-4:30 watch. Lee Helm, as it turned out, knew one of the other crew and had come to a similar conclusion about escaping the fire smog during her winter break from Page 84 •
Latitude 38
• December, 2018
For the sailor who has everything: the rope puzzle from Lumberjack Toys.
classes. She was playing auctioneer, with a copy of last month's Classy Classifieds, and we all gained or lost points according to the difference between our winning bids and the listed asking price of each yacht she auctioned off. One thing that makes cruising very different from racing is that there is time to kill, especially with an experienced crew sailing in stable conditions. I had foolishly not brought enough to read. But Lee's game was passing the evening hours while giving us all an expert's knowledge of the current market for used sailboats. The only problem was that the last player had made such a killing on the 54-footer, the rest of us started to lose interest. That was when the owner of the boat left the game to fetch another serving tray full of fresh yellowfin sashimi. "All the maguro we can eat," boasted the navigator, who had brought the fishing gear and took credit for the catch. "This is much better than the dorado sashimi we had yesterday,"I said. "Dorado is a great-tasting fish after it's cooked, but not so good raw. Too fibrous or something." "That's exactly what Spencer Tracy's character says in the 1958 movie version of The Old Man and The Sea," added our
cook. "The movie is that authentic. And by the way, maguro is just the generic term for all species of tuna. Yellowfin is usually called ahi. I scarfed down another few chunks of ahi, so fresh that it was better without the usual soy sauce and wasabi, and tasting even better because it was not costing the usual two dollars a bite. Cassiopeia was high in the clear night sky, with the right angle to its axis dutifully pointing to Polaris, which was much lower in the sky than I was used to. No Big Dipper, however. It was well below the horizon this early in the evening in winter. "The constellations really need to be, like, updated," mused Lee. "When I look at the big dipper, I see a great big Amazon shopping cart in the sky." "I suppose Cassiopeia could be McDonald's arches," I suggested. "Auriga," said the cook as he gazed up at the sky, "is close enough to a circle to be the Target logo." "No, I see Auriga as a kite flown by Orion," said Lee. "But Orion makes me think of the movie studio, not the ancient hunter with his dogs Sirius and Procyon" said the skipper. "No, Orion is a baseball player at bat,"
