AMERICA’S CUP ’92 : Kiwis Make Themselves at Home : Days Are Long, But Welcome Is Warm in Camp Coronado
What did you say?
They hear it a lot.
Say what again?
The accent. Everybody loves the accent. To American ears, it is a melody, a concerto. That isn’t to say it’s always easy to understand.
Pardon me?
It’s part of nearly every conversation.
The Kiwis are back, back for what they hope will be a less tumultuous tour through the waters of the San Diego harbor. Preparation is at full speed for the 1992 America’s Cup.
As they did for the Big Boat vs. Catamaran regatta in 1988, New Zealand sailors have chosen Coronado as their home away from home for what promises to be a fatiguing year of testing, sailing and training for the challenger and defender selection trials, which begin in January, 1992.
And Coronado has welcomed them like relatives visiting for the holidays. Mayor Mary Herron will present the team with a key to the city Saturday in a ceremony at Spreckles Park, complete with authentic English tea shipped in from . . . Los Angeles.
Really, since their arrival in early January, the Kiwi sailors have become regular members of the community. Regular, that is, except for the accents. The accents set them apart.
Bob, the security guard who mans the locked fence surrounding the Kiwi shipyard on the island’s northeastern shore, spent the first several weeks of December trying decipher New Zealand lingo.
“I went home and told my wife: ‘You know something? They speak English, but it’s hard to understand what they’re saying,’ ” he said. “Now, I’ve picked up a lot of things, so it’s no problem. But that first week it was hard. I was going around saying: ‘Huh, huh.’ They were probably saying to themselves: ‘Well, this guy must be hard of hearing.’ ”
At Bula’s, a bar and grill on Orange Avenue that achieved local fame for Steinlager swigging sessions in 1988, Kiwi sailors often come in for a bite to eat. Julie Jones, a Bula’s waitress, tries to concentrate on every word.
“I have a real hard time with it,” she said. “I’ve learned to get real close to their faces and just listen. And they’re trying to talk a little slower.”
John Clinton, who heads the sail design team, knows people struggle trying to cut through his accent.
“They don’t understand me,” he said. “You just have to speak slowly. It can be awkward sometimes if you’re talking about numbers. You’ve got to be careful with numbers. People can get numbers wrong quite easily.
“But as a rule, it’s pretty good. One thing Americans are not scared of is asking if they don’t understand you.”
At 6:45 a.m., with an hour of rigorous exercise staring them in the face, it’s easy to miss life in New Zealand.
During six months at home between sail campaigns, Clinton says most of the crew works about three months and takes vacation the other three. Coronado is obviously no stay at Club Med.
Fitness training runs Monday through Friday. The agenda includes running, swimming, aerobics, weight training and, once a week, a game of touch rugby.
Favorite exercises?
“I hate them all,” Clinton said. “Saturday morning’s the best one.”
Saturday morning they don’t train.
Everybody on the 45-member New Zealand team is involved, including members of the public relations and office staff and even several of the wives and girlfriends. The idea is to instill a feeling of unity, though no one seems to like the exercise any more than Clinton.
“I can’t sit here with a straight face and say it’s fun,” said Maria Ryan, the New Zealand public relations director. “It’s not fun.”
Yet it is important. Five-hour sessions on the water can be physically demanding, requiring strength and endurance. In San Diego, it’s easier than it was in Australia, where the New Zealand crew trained for America’s Cup challenge races in 1986.
Winds in Perth, Australia, averaged between 18 and 22 knots, and there were only 11 crew members on each 65-foot boat. Sixteen crew members are used on the three boats sailing here in San Diego and winds average between 8 and 10 knots. So the workload is lighter.
Still, the fitness program is enough to discourage too many late nights at Bula’s. The crew eats dinner at 7:30 and, afterward, Clinton says: “You sort of sit around for half an hour and you probably think about training in the morning and decide to go to bed.”
Follow A Avenue in Coronado all the way to the water facing downtown San Diego and you will reach “Kiwinado.” There is a sign on the building.
Kiwinado, Pop . 92, Elev . 11 .
It was donated by Steve Lindsey, the owner of Bula’s, a man who looks out for the Kiwis and helps them adjust to life in America.
By the way, the population isn’t exactly 92. It’s more like 70, but Lindsey figures 92 is an appropriate number since the Cup will be held in 1992. And one other thing. Lindsey was told the elevation was 12. He doesn’t think it’s quite that high. So he listed 11.
Anyway, the story dates back to the New Zealand challenge in 1988, when Lindsey invited members of the Kiwi team to drop by his Steinlager promotion. About 15 of them showed up, hoisted a few, mingled with the locals and stayed until 3 a.m.
Ever since, Bula’s has been the official pub and Lindsey has been their guiding light. If one of the crew members wants to buy a car, he’ll drop by Bula’s and ask Lindsey where he can get a good deal. Maria Ryan was there just the other day to find out where she could register her car.
Lindsey and some of his employees have steered the Kiwis toward bargains, including swap meets and garage sales.
Kiwinado isn’t much to look at from the outside. A fence surrounds the boat yard and the security guard, Bob, will head you off if you have designs on getting too close to the boat. One couple, hoping for a look earlier this week, were told they couldn’t go beyond the fence, which meant they could see the top of the mast and not much else.
This team is very protective of its territory and its operation. Only occasionally at the bar do a few of the secrets cross their lips, and Lindsey shows his loyalty by keeping mum.
“The problem we’ve got is, given our past campaigns, everybody tends to look at us and take note of what we do,” said David Barnes, who is in charge the water training. “Whether it be the Italians, or the French, or the Americans, they’re always keeping an eye on us.”
So the Kiwis plan to keep a lower profile than they did during the controversial challenge of 1988. Nobody except the crew is allowed on the boat. Even Peter Isler, a former member of Dennis Conner’s crew now covering America’s Cup for ESPN, has been told he can’t sail with the crew. Nothing personal. Just no exceptions.
There is a great deal of pride in this preparation and they are serious about doing it right. Even the customary trips to the bar at night have been shorter on this campaign.
“They’re fun loving people, but (New Zealand) is a big country of sailors,” Lindsey said. “So there’s five people who want to take each one of their positions. They don’t really want to go out and be hell raisers.”
David Barnes, whose father, Bob, was a commercial fisherman, started sailing competitively when he was 9 years old. Most kids in New Zealand enjoy sailing, but Barnes was a little more serious than the others.
“I was a bit fanatical, I suppose,” he said. “Just about every day after school I used to come home and take the boat out sailing. And weekends as well. I used to love it.”
Still does. That’s what makes the long hours worthwhile. Anybody who thinks this is a Sunday sail with a bottle of wine and a slice of Brie is mistaken. Members of this team work from morning to night, six days a week.
It got to the point where Barnes had to tell his engineering crew to ease up. They were working 100 hours a week and Barnes could tell heels were beginning to drag.
“You’ve got to keep an eye on them because some of them will just work themselves into the ground,” Barnes said. “You’ve got to make sure they don’t burn themselves out because, when they get to the stage where they’ve sort of had enough, it’s almost too late. And they take weeks to recover.”
This is a veteran crew, many of whom were involved in the past campaigns both in San Diego and in Fremantle. So they know what’s ahead.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier. Work is still work.
“A lot of the guys here have been doing this for the last six years,” Clinton said. “They just follow one campaign after another and they get home for six months in between time. So they don’t really know where home is. Home is their yachting campaign. But, for sure, this is quite a long one. Most of the others you get to be home more in between. So it’ll be hard.”
If you drive around Coronado, you’ll see the bumper stickers.
“I like the Big Boat.”
The Big Boat is the boat that wasn’t fast enough to catch Dennis Conner’s catamaran in 1988. The point is, Dennis Conner is from San Diego. It seems that most people in Coronado like the Kiwis.
Perhaps there is no better indication of which team owns this town than the story of Conner’s visit to Bula’s three years ago.
He came in with his crew and ordered beers for his crew.
So beers he got. Fifteen Steinlagers. New Zealand tourists took pictures of the American sailors drinking Steinlager.
As much as Coronado enjoys the New Zealand sailors, they, in turn, enjoy Coronado. It reminds them of home.
“It’s very civilized and a very nice little community,” Barnes said. “You can walk down the street in middle of the night and feel safe and that’s good. Coronado, to us, is a really nice place to stay.”
And that’s important because the stay is long, the work hard.
“The America’s Cup is not like a regular job,” Barnes said. “You’ve got to be quite dedicated to be involved because the hours can be quite long and they can be a little bit erratic.
“All these guys have sort of been through the mill before and have seen all the problems and know what to expect. That’s not to say it’s easy.”
Inside: A syndicate update. C5A