(10 of 10)
As the final eliminations get under way this week, Bus Mosbacher is tak ing no chances on his crew's losing its fighting edge. Breakfast is served at 7:30 in East Bourne Lodge, the mansion on Rhode Island Avenue, which the Intrepid syndicate has leased for the summer as a dormitory for Bus and his boys. A cheery "good morning" greets early risers who come to the table fresh from their two-mile run, and something else is in store for the slugabeds who forgot how hard it is to sneak up a gravel driveway at 3 a.m. without waking someone important. The only way to get two cocktails at East Bourne Lodge is to be first in line: Happy Hour lasts only half an hour, and even the ice is rationed. Not that Intrepid's owners are trying to pinch pennies: last week in their haste to get her mast repaired and a new rudder installed, they were paying Newport shipwrights $12.25 an hour to work straight through the night.
There was no such frenzied activity in the Aussie camp. As a matter of fact, there was positive gloom—after flu knocked out half the crew and two of the healthy ones got into a brawl in a Thames Street rock 'n' roll joint. Figuring that a change of scenery might do wonders for their morale, Skipper Sturrock herded up all his ambulatory Aussies and dragged them off to Montreal to see Expo. The news from home at least was good. All of Australia is pulling for an upset and praying for one—including a tribe of aborigines on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, who have promised to sing a "wind corroboree" for good luck every day that Dame Pattie races.
The Aussies have another hope too. Could be that Bus Mosbacher will get seasick—which, at times, he does.
* By contrast, the full-scale replica of America that sailed into New York harbor last week en route to the Cup trials at Newport cost the F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Co. $500,000 to construct. Architects for the new America: Sparkman & Stephens, the same firm that designed Intrepid. * The Twelves get their name from a complicated rating formula that takes into consideration length, girth, sail area and freeboard, and after much mathematical hocus-pocus equals 39.37 ft., or twelve meters. * And who now has his own class named after him, the 30-ft. Shields boat, first brought out in 1963 and currently a hot favorite at $8,000 among sailors, with 147 sold so far.