Steam and Spray - a great article by Ned Hepburn (one of the Puma Ten) on The Classical. He does a terrific job of capturing the excitement of racing in Abu Dhabi on Mar Mostro in the pro-am race.
Here is one extract to give you the flavor...
Ken Read asks you to grab the steering wheel for a while and you feel how surprisingly mallable the thing is; it's not unlike steering a Cadillac. It's a giant fucking thing; wide as a card table and as tempermental as one too... you can barely keep the thing from going haywire. "Hands at 10 and 2!" you hear in your head, some distant driving instructor from a decade ago tells you. You pull hard to the right. The boat makes the sound a camel might while achieving sexual climax except LOUD and INCREDIBLY FUCKING CLOSE to you – everyone lurches in the opposite direction as the team swerves to avoid the fucking French boat; those Gallic bastards not knowing the havoc they caused on the American boat.
Check out Steam and Spray for the full article.
9 comments:
I can sure see why they picked this group to go report on the Volvo boats. The writing makes me feel like I'm right there. I just need my wife to throw a bucket of warm salt water at me and I too could be on Puma powered by Berg.
"The writing makes me feel like I'm right there."
Totally agree. That's the real test of good writing, isn't it?
"The boat makes the sound a camel might while achieving sexual climax except LOUD and INCREDIBLY FUCKING CLOSE to you"?
Camels have quiet orgasms? I'm supposed to know this?
Mr Hepburn has spent the last few days in Abu Dhabi which probably means he knows a lot more about the sex life of camels than either you or me, Michael.
Is the bar open yet?
Is a decade still ten years?
Do people in Abu Dabi need to steam their clothes? And how does Ned know what a climaxing camel sounds like?
Maybe I don't really want to know the answers to such questions.
Baydog a literal decade is still ten years but this may be a metaphorical decade.
I notice that Ned uses metaphors a lot in his article. Like 80 mph as a metaphor for 30 knots. And Miami as a metaphor for Alicante.
If it is a literal decade then it seems that Ned is betraying his age. We all tend to do that at times, don't we?
I think you're right, Mr. Salt, this does sound like a metaphorical decade.
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