Off on a Breeze

Sailing is one sport in which an athlete is supposed to improve with age. Cornelius Shields, the grand master of U.S. sailing, is 67, and he insists: "I learn something new each day." At 40, Emil ("Bus") Mosbacher is practically a prodigy. Yet last week, as the America's Cup 12-meter trials got under way in the wind-rippled waters off Newport, R.I., Mosbacher turned in a performance that would be difficult for anyone to beat. As skipper of Weatherly, a good, but never before great yacht, Mosbacher drove her to four brilliant victories in a row against the roughest competition U.S. yachting could offer. Eventually, he lost to Columbia, the 1958 America's Cup champion, and then, by a close 43 sec., to Nefertiti, the highly touted newcomer designed by Marblehead Sailmaker Ted Hood. But before that he had humbled Columbia once, Easterner twice, and soundly trounced Nefertiti by 5 min. 43 sec.

So Many Ifs. In winning, Mosbacher showed the kind of daring that would be foolhardy in another sailor. At one point he drove Weatherly through an opponent's windless lee in a maneuver about as difficult, wrote one reporter, "as driving a golf ball through a wall." But sailors have come to expect that of blocky Bus Mosbacher. A master strategist, famed for his starts, Mosbacher likes to think of himself as a quarterback, figuring the odds against every gamble. "A sailing race," he says, "is like a football game: the quarterback must watch everything--not just the end to whom he's going to pass. If it's rough, you must watch the sea. If it's fluky, you must watch for direction changes, keep an eye on the cat's-paws. You must watch the balance of the boat and trim the sails. The scene is always changing; every puff of wind means something in relation to your opponent."

The son of a New York and Texas oilman, Mosbacher started sailing at four, in a cat-rigged, flat-bottomed shell boat. "I used to think it was great fun to turn the boat over," he says, "until everybody stopped helping me right it again." At 17, Mosbacher won the junior championship of Long Island Sound, went on to sweep the International Class championships and just about everything else in sight. In 1958, the first time he ever handled a big, 12-meter America's Cup yacht, Bus took venerable Vim--oldest (by 19 years) boat in the U.S. trials --all the way to the finals before he was nosed out by Corny Shields and Briggs Cunningham in Columbia. Last summer, he signed on as skipper of Chandler Hovey's Easterner, a boat that had not won a single race in the 1958 trials; with it, he beat Columbia and Weatherly his first time at the helm. But when Owner Hovey would not give him a free hand to select a crew for this summer's trials, Mosbacher quit and joined Henry Mercer's four-year-old Weatherly.

Stripped to the Bone. The Weatherly that Mosbacher piloted last week was not the same sluggish boat that wound up ahead of only hapless Easterner in 1958. Her stern overhang had been lopped off; she had a new, flatter keel that was designed to point her mast higher (to take advantage of steadier breezes that blow well above the water), make her faster beating to windward. Racing boats are like racing cars--the lighter they are, the faster they are--and Weatherly was stripped to the bone. Halyard and lift winches were removed from the mast and fastened to the deck. Unnecessary bulkheads, deck rails, and the masthead wind indicator (weight: about 2 lbs.) were gone. Even a beer cooler and a wooden pipe rack were sacrificed for speed.

In last week's shakedown trials, Weatherly made it all look worthwhile--up wind or down, in light breezes and heavy weather. The final trials to choose the boat that will defend the America's Cup against Australia's Gretel were still a month away, but Weatherly and Bus Mosbacher had sent the races off to a whistling start.

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