‘Light’n Up’s Epic Shakedown to Hawaii, Part 2
In the June issue of Latitude 38 we shared part one of Jonathan “Bird” Livingston and Gary Clifford’s shakedown of the newly built Express 27 Light’n Up in the 1984 Pacific Cup Race. We thought the tale couldn’t get any better, but it did. This month we share part two in the July issue.
After the call to Carl Schumacher in part one of this story, which ran in last month’s Latitude, things got even more insane. (Stuff that Chuck would not publish.) Here is a sample of the stupid shit we survived, and why I could not send it to Chuck: We were, by any reasonable land-based definition, completely out of our minds!
A thousand miles from land and any other meaningful obstacle, Gary Clifford and I were racing an invisible opponent called “the Squall Lord,” who, as far as I could tell, had both a cruel sense of humor and an advanced degree in personal humiliation. The scoreboard — yes, we had a scoreboard — was scrawled in grease pencil on the cockpit bulkhead. On one side: the Squall Lord. On the other hand: our noble, questionably managed vessel, Light’n Up. At that moment, we were ahead, which felt less like victory and more like a clerical error.
The wind had been building from 30+ to 40 in the squalls, the kind that starts as a suggestion and escalates into a ball-busting threat. Then the squalls began marching toward us — tall, bruised-looking things, like bad ideas you should have declined earlier in life. We named them as they approached, because nothing says “good decision-making” like anthropomorphizing weather systems in the middle of the Pacific.
We’d just finished tangling with one we’d christened “Double-Dicked Debbie,” named for reasons that made perfect sense at the time and none whatsoever in retrospect. Debbie had taken her swings; we’d come out ahead. Scoreboard didn’t lie. Then we saw the next one.
“Oh, shit, Cliff. Look at what is coming!” I said, as if I were seeing 1000 Trojan soldiers running at us. We cued up the war music on the cassette deck — the Ghostbusters theme, naturally — because if you’re going to be assaulted by weather, you might as well do it with a soundtrack. There’s something deeply reassuring about hearing “Who you gonna call?” while staring down a wall of black cloud that looks as if it eats smaller clouds for breakfast.
We named the badass squall “Panty Raider” and it did not disappoint. The Squall Lord sent its Jedi master to kick our arrogant asses and teach us who da Big Kahuna was. It hit harder than Debbie, as if she’d gone home, lifted weights, and come back with friends. The boat went over, laid flat, as in, “We appear to be sailing sideways now.” Is that normal? The kite was still up, flapping like a bedsheet in a hurricane, everything snapping and cracking in a way that suggested the boat had strong opinions about our leadership.
Then I noticed something subtle, but concerning: We were sliding sideways and the sea was close to the hatch opening. Gulp! This, it turns out, is what happens when your keel — the part of the boat specifically designed to prevent this exact situation — is no longer in the water doing its job. Instead, it was somewhere above us, minding its own business, while we performed what I can only describe as a nautical impression of a tipped-over shopping cart — and Cliff and I were in the parking lot upside down.