Jumping to False Conclusions

We had an Obama Moment — meaning that not knowing the facts about a situation didn’t stop us from blundering to the wrong conclusion about it — in Friday’s ‘Lectronic. Our moment came when writing about Liz Clark of the Santa Barbara-based Cal 40 Swell, which is currently in French Polynesia. We assumed that the self-portrait we ran of Liz’s bloodied face was all about her documenting a surfng incident in which she did a face plant on a reef. It turns out we were as wrong as our President had been in saying the Cambridge Police had acted "stupidly" in arresting Harvard professor Louis Gates, the President’s buddy and a campaign contributor.

Clark, who was at Catalina over the weekend with her parents on their Gulfstar 50, clued us in on the real story behind the self-portrait:

"My face was bloodied as a result of an accident in Swell‘s engine compartment. I was trying to realign my engine after remounting the new motor mounts. I pulled the rubber vibration boot out of the rear block, but it was impossible to push it back in. I had borrowed a car jack to try to push it down, and had to put a piece of wood between the ceiling of the engine room and the jack. By the end of the day I was tired and frustrated, and I put too much force on the jack. The space was really tight, and my head needed to be right next to the jack for leverage. The jack slipped off the wood and flew into my face. It was no fun. It would have been cooler if I’d wounded myself on a reef, but it just didn’t happen that way. Anyway, I went to a friend who is a nurse, and she put a butterfly strip on it. It kept me out of the water for a week, but it’s healing well."