It’s a Tough Sail, and Only a Few People Buy the Idea

At the Southeast 17th Street causeway over the Intracoastal Waterway, many worlds meet. To the southwest, cruise ships dock, chock-a-block with multinational clienteles. From the northwest, charter fishing boats rumble away from hotel marinas and private piers toward Port Everglades Channel and the fishing grounds offshore.

To the northeast stands Pier 66 Resort and Marina, all spit and polish, fern bars and waterside cafes, and primary layover facility for the fleet in the Whitbread Round the World Race.

To the southeast stands a lesser hotel and a flamingo-pink shopping center. At the lesser hotel, the Best Western Marina Inn, part of the Whitbread overflow will dock this week. At a small, smelly bar tucked away in the pink shopping center, an ersatz treasure hunter named Dick Vogel was holding court late one night last week.

Vogel’s tales of treasure were nonsensical; his admiration for the Nazi infantry in World War II was vocal and comparable in zeal only to his distaste for the Whitbread race.

“Whitebread, who cares about the Whitebread?” Herr Vogel said. “Bunch of slimy limeys and (assorted other racial epithets) chasing each other around the world. Who cares? What’s the point?”

In the bar that night while Vogel presided was a knot of journalists in town to cover the Whitbread. The correspondent from Britain’s The Independent sat quietly while Vogel railed about gold coins and emeralds (“an Englishman is never unintentionally rude,” he said several times), but Vogel’s assessment of the Whitbread set him off.

“But that is--quite exactly, really--the point,” the correspondent from The Independent said. “Slimy limeys, Italians, Swedes, Dutch, Finns, Americans, Kiwis, Australians and Germans racing around the whole bloody world. Not for money--for a chance to win a few silly, plated trophies and the privilege to be able to say they have done it.”

The point seemed quite exactly lost on Vogel. Treasure, after all, to many is something you can pick up, rub between your fingers and admire or sell. Perhaps the point is lost on many other Americans as well.

There will be some who notice that Steinlager 2 and Fisher & Paykel, each a multimillion-dollar campaign with major corporate sponsors, are neck and neck over the last four legs of the race. Others may have taken note that there is no American entry and there is one all-woman crew. But few will be able to tick off the ports of call, the large or small tragedies and triumphs in 33,000 miles of racing.

To many of the crew, being there at all is treasure in itself.