An Ocean Racer As Ruthless As Captain Bligh

Mutiny is something still ugly enough to stiffen the hairs on a sailorman's neck. Nowadays, for the most part, its connotation is historical or fictional, and the hairs that stiffen do so out of empathy for the plight of Fletcher Christian as he suffered aboard the Bounty or in horror at the twisted psycho who commanded the Caine. But last summer the word mutiny suddenly became topical as the sports pages of the nation's newspapers bloomed with rumors of a crew rebellion aboard the newest, sleekest, fanciest and (quite probably) most expensive ocean-racing yacht ever built: Millionaire Shipping Owner Sumner A. (Huey) Long's 73-foot ketch Ondine III.

The rumors began to circulate when word came that Ondine had quit the Transatlantic Race from Bermuda to Travem�nde, West Germany somewhere off The Skaw at the mouth of the Baltic and was putting into Bremen instead. As it turned out, the rumors were false. As Long himself explained later, "We'd just about run out of time when we reached The Skaw, where the first and longest leg of the race ended. Ondine badly needed a refit before she left for Australia, and her builders in Bremen were about to close up shop for the summer. Since it didn't seem likely we'd be able to finish the race and then go on to Bremen in time to catch the builders, I radioed the escort ship and told them I'd like to drop out of the race and head directly for Bremen."

The escort ship quite naturally agreed to Ondine's dropping out and agreed moreover to take 12 of her 21 crewmen on to Travem�nde for the race-end festivities. Then the Bremen boatbuilders, Abeking and Rasmussen, abruptly decided to keep their yard open a while longer for Good Customer Long—and Ondine finished the race anyway amid a new spasm of gossip.

All perfectly reasonable and explicable, so what got the talk of mutiny started in the first place? "I swear to God," said Long himself sometime later, "I don't know where people get these ideas." But the mystery was not that deep. Huey Long, a man with a compulsive will to win, has long had a reputation for driving his crews harder than any other racing skipper afloat. There were plenty of Long graduates on the beaches of the world who in their hearts had sometimes nursed the notion of mutiny, even though they had never let it mature. Their first response to news that a dozen Long crewmen were planning to leave his ship in mid-race was an instant, "Aha!" Less emotionally involved sailors jumped to the same conclusion for a different reason. The Captain Bligh of this drama, they suspected, was not a man at all, but a boat: Ondine III herself, a sailing vessel seemingly designed for the express purpose of straining her crew to its utmost.

Over the last several years most ocean racers and yacht designers have concerned themselves more with handicaps than with sheer speed. In general the speed of a sailboat depends on the length of her load waterline, i.e., the maximum length of hull submerged in the water while she is racing. But racing rules restrict the overall length of any boat to 73 feet. Of this, in conventionally designed craft a large proportion is devoted to overhang at the bow and the stern. Ondine is the forerunner of a new breed of ocean racers whose purpose is not to earn a high handicap by a tricky balancing of length and sail area but simply to go fast. "The hell with trying to beat small boats on time," says one of the prophets of the new trend. "Let's just see who can build the fastest boat."

The way to do this, of course, is to build more waterline into her, and "Pretty soon," says Long, "one of us will go all the way with a boat 73 feet overall and 73 feet on the water."

Until such a boat is built, Ondine is the next best thing. As veteran blue-water man Dick Bertram, one of her watch captains on the Transatlantic, explains, "Although she is only 73 feet long on deck, Ondine is 65 feet on the waterline, which really makes her the equivalent of an 85-footer with her ends cut off. Her sail plan, therefore, is tremendous by the standards of a conventional 73-footer."

For her crew, sailing other boats is to sailing Ondine like surfing Virginia Beach is to tackling Banzai or Sunset, only more so. Powered by parking-lot expanses of practically bulletproof Dacron, rigged with unbending stainless-steel rod, worked with merciless wire sheet and capable of withstanding all but the worst the sea can dish out, Long's new boat (he gave the old Ondine to the U.S. Naval Academy) is a floating torture test. During her maiden race in South America, Ondine spent much of her time thrashing into big seas and high winds. "Changes in the wind velocity called for so many changes of headsail," says Watch Captain Bertram, "that my crew of seven would lie in the cockpit exhausted when their watch was over."

But if Ondine makes infinite and unreasonable demands on her crewmen in the heat of competition, her designer, William Tripp, seemingly overlooked nothing that might make them more comfortable in the performance of their stern duties. Her conveniences range all the way from a retractable spade rudder for making steering easier to a sauna bath for the easing of strained muscles.

Esthetically speaking, Ondine is far from pretty to look at. Her bulbous bow and truncated stern look snubbed and graceless. But there is brutish ugliness about her that suggests the sense of power found in a bulldozer.