I am not even sure how I wound up sailing in a North American Championship regatta, but there I was — after a brutal day of races that soaked me outside and, after what I can only describe as a Lake Erie bidet, inside as well. We drifted back to the hosting yacht club where a pleasant but serious fellow with a phone in one hand was pointing at the darkening squall line with the other. “Glad you’re back,” he said. “The radar says you’ve got about 30 minutes before that hits.” Well, if the previous three hours were the longest in my life, that “30 minutes” was the shortest; about seven minutes later, we had to tie up and abandon the boat to its fate.
Sailing is one of those sports that, were it not so damned expensive, you’d ask yourself amid the alternating soaking cold and the wicked heat: “Screw waterboarding, let’s send them sailing!” And, like other expensive hobbies such as duck hunting, golf, or almost flying into space, sailing tends to turn into a lifestyle choice. Which raises the age-old question: What do you do with a drunken sailor? Or a whole dock of wet sailors who’ve recently left their expensive lifestyle choices to the whims of Neptune or some watery goddess who feels compelled to torment sailors?
You feed them rum. It’s the drink of island paradises, prison colonies, and drunken sailors. The sailors’ rum is Mount Gay from Barbados, and it’s hard to go wrong. It tastes like, well, what rum is supposed to taste like. The company gives out just enough of its red baseball caps at regattas to make them the sought-after sailing accessory. If you’re really hep, the hat will be terminally sun damaged.
Pusser’s Rum is trying to break into the market by sponsoring regattas and making sure that the hosting yacht clubs are slinging a lot of discounted product. I’ve reviewed Pusser’s Gunpowder Proof rum here before, which tasted to me like rum-flavored moonshine. Perhaps it wounded me on some emotional level because its standard expression had hints of the same. Still, as I crowded into the yacht club with the boat owners grimly searching for their insurance agent’s phone number, they were practically giving the stuff away in nifty little tin mugs. It was called a Pusser’s Painkiller, and depending on how much pain you are trying to kill, you mix 2, 3, or 4 ounces of Pusser’s with 4 ounces of pineapple juice, 1 ounce of cream of coconut, 1 ounce orange juice, serve on the rocks, and grate with nutmeg.
I’m not really a tropical drinks kind of guy, but this was actually very good. If you are a tropical drinks sort or an avid Jimmy Buffet fan, the Painkiller is likely right up your alley, so give it a whirl while it’s still hot. For me, it killed the “moonshine” nose of Pusser’s but raised the question: If you have to drown it in fruit juice and coconut cream to get it down, why drink it at all? Well, in this case, some young thing in a regatta shirt just handed it to me, and sometimes that’s reason enough.
The squall passed almost as quickly as it came, leaving the boat dirty but unharmed. I started sailing about 10 years ago when writing a story on the Delta Sailing Association down in Hernando. I was told that I really couldn’t do the story justice unless I learned how to sail. In truth, they were really just short of crew. At any rate, a decade on and I’m up in Cleveland at the North American Championship, vividly not qualifying for the Worlds. Maybe all this inland sailing divorces you from old naval traditions because the crew I learned to sail with all drink martinis.
With gin. And they are very adamant about this.