Bubba’s Opinions Reach the Top?
A
couple of weeks after New Year’s, it’s my guess, was when I ventured into The Blue Moon Bar. I remember that it was a cold day for Florida. I also recall that interminable and totally unimportant post-season football games had stopped. There was no football on the bar’s TV, a relief. If you look closely at a postseason game, you can tell when a television executive has booked a stinker. The announcers may sound enthusiastic, but the crowd is not. The reason? No crowd. So few people came to the game that the TV cameras never show the dearth of fans. It would be embarrassing. As I said, it was a cold day for Florida. Actually, had I been living in Aspen again, I would have considered it time to get in the lee of a warm building and let the radiated warmth of the sunlight off the building keep me comfortable while I took off my parka, sweater, turtleneck and Tshirt to get a tan on my upper body. Back in the old days, some of us who lived in that Rocky Mountain town got prescriptions for a drug called Meloxin, something I think is no longer manufactured. Meloxin stimulated the production of melanin, the pigment agent in the skin, and it was possible to have an end-of-summer tan in about three or four days. The prescriptions were easy to get. There was a doctor in town, who later became the mayor, who would write anything you asked for. Meloxin was small potatoes for him. Dexedrine? No problem. No one had heard of Percodan back then. Maybe it hadn’t been invented yet. On cold days like the one I mentioned above, Doobie sometimes served up a concoction that totally took the chill off. She heated up apple cider in her microwave in individual Styrofoam cups until it was steaming, pulled the cup out, added a shot of rum and a pat of butter and then dusted the melting butter with cinnamon. When you sipped it, the hot cider and rum and melting butter slid down one’s esophagus and warmed the cockles of one’s heart. One’s
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www.thenauticaltrader.com 14
February 2013
SOUTHWINDS
cockles, incidentally, are located very close to the aortic valve. Not many doctors know this. As I sat down at the bar, I told Doobie I needed an apple-buttered rum to take the chill off. She nodded her head, pulled out a jug of cider and went to work. I was sitting next to Bubba Whartz, live-aboard, livealone sailor who was builder, skipper and owner of the ferro-cement sloop Right Guard, constructed a number of years ago. Whartz was drinking beer. I am not certain if his choice of a cold beer on a cold day was just to prove he was man enough to take it, or whether he was so deep into a beer groove he couldn’t climb out. “Hey, Bubba,” I said. “Hey,” replied Bubba. And he added, “Nice job.” “Nice job for what?” “For publicizing my intelligent and reasonably articulated opinions about how kiteboarding in the Olympics sucked and was totally unmanageable as an Olympic sailing event,” Whartz replied, tugging on the bill of his red baseball cap, the one with the Peterbilt emblem on it. “I did that?” “Yes, you did,” said Whartz. “It appeared in that magazine you write for, Winds of the South, last July.” “You mean SOUTHWINDS?” I corrected him. “Whatever.” About this time Doobie put a steaming cup of rumlaced cider down in front of me, and I immediately took a sip. The chill I had carried inside with me from outside evaporated like expectations of passion do when one meets a blind date who weighs 300 pounds and doesn’t shave under her arms. “Bubba, I am having trouble placing the story in my mind’s eye,” I admitted. “In the story you quoted a lot of the objections I had to admitting kiteboarding to the Olympics. They were all wellreasoned, logical objections,” Bubba said. “Boardsailing was getting tossed as a result, after being an Olympic sailing class for decades. However, someone in the hierarchy of the Olympic organization had to have read your article, thought that my comments had real weight, showed the story to others who reached the same conclusion, and kiteboarding was abandoned for the 2016 summer Olympics, in Brazil, I think, and boardsailing was reinstated. And it was all because of what I said to you and what you wrote in Winds of the South.” “SOUTHWINDS, Bubba,” I said with more emphasis. “Isn’t that what I just said?” “No, it was not.” “Sorry,” Whartz apologized. “I had a long night last night. But aren’t you proud that people way up in the higher echelons of the competitive sailing world read what you write and pay attention to what I say? I mean, here we are just www.southwindsmagazine.com