The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea

With cigarette in hand and a bottle of Gatorade pressed against his crotch, Dave Marod squeezes his enormous yellow Hummer into a parking slip on Shilshole Bay Marina's L-Dock at 7:45 on a cold Saturday morning in early March.

A trifle hungover, wearing dark shades, rubber overalls, a black fleece vest, and brand-new deck boots, the 37-year-old Marod exits the Hummer and laughs about what a favored target his rig has become for eco-conscious vandals who slap stickers on his bumpers. Best one to date: "I'm Changing the Environment. Ask Me How."

Having descended the pier to slip 30, Marod loads a passel of gear onto his 35-foot Carroll Marine One Design sailboat, a premiere racing yacht that Marod scooped up for a cool $80,000 late last year. Greg Barckert was there when Marod started making waves about buying the boat during Whidbey Island Race Week last summer.

"We were up all night drinking and playing Grateful Dead covers when he mentioned the 1D 35-footer," recalls Barckert. "That boat is like a Ferrari."

"Dave's got a really hot boat—people are looking to sail on it," says Barckert's friend and fellow sailor, Rachelle O'Haleck, who describes Race Week as "basically a five-day bender."

When Marod made good on his drunken boast and announced plans to sail a 25-race campaign around the Sound, trimmers Barckert and O'Haleck signed up for two of nine available spots aboard the nautical Ferrari, named in honor of the seminal punk band Minor Threat.

Within 20 minutes of Marod's arrival, the whole crew is present and prepped to shove off. All of these sailors smoke, save tactician John Knapp, Minor Threat's resident romanticist.

"Sailing is so many things," says Knapp, a self-employed technology entrepreneur who sports a soul patch underneath his lower lip. "It's going out with your girlfriend on a Sunday morning with a couple croissants. It's dropping anchor in a beautiful lagoon in the South Pacific. Or it's going like hell at 20 knots."

But racing isn't always romantic. "If you want to know what it's like to sail competitively," says crew member Tim Cleary, "stand in a cold shower for four hours and tear up $20 bills."

Today, during this 27-mile race to Possession Point on the southern tip of Whidbey Island and back—the second in the Corinthian Yacht Club–sponsored Center Sound Series—the crew is in go-like-hell mode, as helmsman Marod didn't drop all that dime to waste his Ferrari on a bunch of pleasure cruisers.

"Some of my friends like the solitude and being one with the ocean," explains Marod. "All that shit's fine, but I just want to beat the other guy and his expensive boat."

With approximately 100 boats racing toward the lone turnabout today, Marod is competing in a top-tier class against just eight other vessels that are more or less in his "Ferrari" class. Still, there are enough variances for Corinthian officials to rank the boats according to the Pacific Handicap Racing Fleet (PHRF) system, a highly subjective standard that relies heavily on "observed performance" and "speed potential" rather than hard mathematical data.

"The bad thing is, when you cross the finish line, you don't know how you did," says Marod, alluding to the fact that a boat in his class that finishes behind him on a scratch basis may end up leapfrogging him in the final standings on account of being assigned a weightier handicap.

"I think it sucks that there are other factors involved other than the boat and the sailors in them," grouses Knapp, who favors elite handicap-free racing to the PHRF system. "Handicap racing is good because it gets more people into racing, but it can sometimes get political."

Take in a sailboat race from the shore or on television, and it's "like watching grass grow," concedes Marod's fellow helmsman, drinking buddy, and sometime racing rival, Garey Harr.

But merely observing a crew in action from a spot aboard requires the onlooker to be intense, alert, and nimble enough to perpetually traverse the bow of the boat, as weight distribution is king on a hull as light as Marod's.

"It's like a roller coaster, and you've got to hang on," explains Harr, a 47-year- old lifelong Ballardite and professional gardener who lives aboard a 27-foot Coronado at the Shilshole Marina. "If you fuck up, you capsize."

While it's not spectacularly gusty during the trip upwind to Possession Point, it is, after all, winter sailing, which means multiple layers of clothing for all but the silver-bearded crew member Cleary, who is either tough enough or stupid enough to weather the trip in khaki shorts.

Barking instructions from the middle of the bow in a vernacular unknown to land mammals is Wendell Gregory, a 58-year-old Texan who fell into the sport by default when, as an adolescent summer camper, he was forced to choose among horseback riding, archery, and sailing as his afternoon activity.

"It's not much fun to shoot at a target that doesn't move, and I can't stand horses," explains Gregory, who's stayed hooked on halyards for upward of 40 years.

Dubbed "the Boat Whisperer" by Marod, Gregory's job is "to pretty much read the wind" and advise the tactician and helmsman when to gybe—in lay terms, to shift sails for optimal wind velocity (see glossary, p. 29).