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Bus's uncanny knack for finding that heel was quickly discovered during the 1958 America's Cup revival, when his superb International-class record won him the helmsman's job on John Matthews' twelve-meter Vim in the U.S. elimination trials. Some job. The other three boats in the trials—Columbia, Easterner, Weatherly—were spanking new; Vim was a 19-year-old ark, clearly slower than any of her competitors. Incredibly, if a crewman had not set the wrong spinnaker on the last leg of the last race of the final trials, it might very well have been Vim instead of Briggs Cunningham's Columbia that wiped up Britain's hopeless Sceptre to retain the Cup. Mosbacher could not make Vim fast, but with his immense power of concentration and fanatic attention to detail, he certainly made her feisty. He harassed opponents into errors with his ingenious, "tailing starts": laying Vim's bow practically on top of their transoms so that they could neither tack nor jibe until Vim broke off for the line. If harassment didn't work, he reverted to brute force with a crew that he had honed to perfection. "We initiated some great tacking duels," Bus recalls. "In one race we took 36 tacks on the first windward leg and 20 on the second. That was before the days of linked coffee-grinder winches, and the wind was blowing 19 knots. Our boys were spitting up blood from exhaustion." More important, their opponents were collapsing. Down to that last race against Columbia it went. Up went the wrong spinnaker—and Columbia became the defender by a margin of twelve sec.
Bus took the defeat in characteristic style—hard and silently. Not since he was a youngster and laced into a neophyte crewman for calling a line a "rope" has anyone seen Bus Mosbacher lose his temper aboard a boat. He rarely even talks above a loud whisper, prefers to give his orders in sign language. But his sense of humor in competition tends to the dry side. "This is no democracy," Bus announced when he was skippering Weatherly in the 1962 Cup trials. "However, I do like to hear any well-thought-out, reasonable suggestion. Once." Vig Romagna, Weatherly's foredeck boss (and currently second-in-command of Intrepid), recalls the day that somebody in his crew dropped a spinnaker over the side. "I rushed aft to get it hauled aboard," he says. "I was feeling terrible. As I passed Bus, he smiled and said: 'Don't jump!' "
Men, Not Machines. For Mosbacher, the 1962 America's Cup defense was 1958 all over again—only with a far more satisfying ending. Tank tests later proved beyond a doubt that Australia's Gretel was faster than the four-year-old Weatherly. But boats are sailed by men, not laboratory machines. Gretel did manage to win one race in the four-out-of-seven series—with the help of a spinnaker snafu on Weatherly and a freak wave that sent the Aussie boat surfing ahead at a crucial moment. But what Bus did to Gretel's skipper, Jock Sturrock, in the four races that won Weatherly the Cup should not have happened to a kangaroo.