Have A Wetass Weekend…



(Thanks to Tony Bessinger)

Ping-Pong Is A Serious Sport?: Sure it is. Just check out this one rally (with full commentary…in Chinese).

J22 Worlds–Gold Bashing: A great day of racing Thursday with decent winds and 3 tough races. Team Wetass started the day in 57th, and finished the day in 57th. We had one pretty good race, finishing 26th out 64, but had a penalty added to our score (13 places) as a result of being over the start line early in the previous race. D’oh. Racing was intense, with lots of testosterone fueled rage at every mark, where dozens of boats would converge at the same time and start yelling at each other. We mostly stayed out of trouble, but were fouled by a Canadian boat at one mark. Amazingly, the guy did his penalty turns and then apologized to me about 10 times after the race (and stuck around as a witness in case someone protested me after I was forced into another boat in order to avoid driving my bow through his rudder). There’s a reason Canadians have a reputation for being decent to a fault. Today we’re out to get some great starts (which have been few and far between), even if it means risking being over early. One good thing about being near the bottom of the heap is that there’s nowhere to go but up, really, so it’s easy to take risks…



Team Wetass (Bow A8) At Speed: “Heh-heh. I finally figured out a way to beat all those motherf*ckers who’ve been kicking our asses all week…”

(Photo: Paul Parks)

Jack Nicholson Has A New Job…: Got some serious sailboat racing to do today (see below), so no time for a full menu of Wetass materal. But in the meantime, check out this video clip. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the Wetass genre (Wetass has a genre? Of course…) but it’s f*cking funny…

J22 Worlds–Hello, Gold: Well, we’re in…barely. When this regatta started Team Wetass’s main goal was to try to get into the top half of the fleet, so we could get our butts kicked by the top J22 sailors in the world for two days (Thursday and Friday). The top 64 teams would be in the Gold fleet, and after 3 races on Day 1 we were in 57th place. Day 2 (yesterday) was light and shifty. The Race Committee got two races off and then had to abandon them as the wind shifted wildly, making a joke of te course they set. They finally got a third race off, and it was oh so painful. Wind very light, current ripping down the course, boats creeping along. These are the worst conditions to sail in, and anything can happen, so it’s a total crap shoot. We arrived at the first mark in decent shape (top third of boats) but then went the wrong way on the run and found ourselves sailing against a 2 knot current at the bottom mark. Since we were only going about 1.5 knots we never got there, and watched most of our fleet (which went upcurrent first) round and sail off. All we could do was sit near the leeward mark, drink beer and hope the 2-hour time limit for the race would run out before anyone finished. Out on the course, the conditions were so heinous and stressful you could hear the sound of heads exploding. The Race Committee refused to abandon the race, and so the abuse started up on the radio. “Race Committee, we have just been passed by four anchored boats,” was one helpful hint that a lot of the fleet wanted the race cancelled. Eventually, the time limit expired with the lead boats well away from the finish, and racing was abandoned for the day. Our first day position stood, and Team Wetass snuck into the Gold Fleet. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good…



We’re out there somewhere…

(Photo: Paul Parks)

Bond, Annabelle Bond, Conquers Everest: Well, she did it. Annabelle Bond got to the top of Everest, and now her dispatches (May 15, May 16, and May 17) chronicling the climb are in. Read all about the fixed ropes, the way the Sherpas herd everyone up, the tears at the top of the world, and the blisters on the way down:

“I SOON MANAGED TO GET CHULDEN ONE OF THE SHERPAS TO PACE ME AND I PRESSED ON UPWARDS INTO THE WINDY NIGHT UPTOWARDS THE BALCONY. AS WE WERE THE FIRST GROUPS TO GO THE SNOW WAS PRETTY DEEP WHICH MADE IT REALLY ARDUOUS AS YOUR FEET SUNK IN WITH EACH STEP. ALSO, EVERY TIME I THOUGHT ABOUT TURNING BACK I LOOKED AT THE LONG LINE OF FLASHLIGHTS BEHIND ME AND DIDNT FEEL LIKE EXPLAINING WHY I WAS TURNING BACK AT THIS EARLY STAGE TO EVERYONE, AFTERALL ITS REALLY A ONE SHOT MOUNTAIN AND THAT BORE HEAVILY ON MY MIND!!…I WAS NOW WITH ERNESTO AND NURU WHO HAD MY OXYGEN WHICH I WAS WATCHING LIKE A HAWK AND WHENEVER I COULDNT SEE HIM I WOULD YELL AT HIM TO WAIT FOR ME!! I KNEW I WAS READY FOR A CHANGE SOMETIME SOON AND I HAD NO INTENTION OF RUNNING OUT. FINALLY WE REACHED THE SOUTH SUMMIT WHICH WAS AMAZING AND YOU REALLY FEEL LIKE YOU ARE GETTING CLOSE. I STOPPED AND SWITCHED OXYGEN TANKS AND MADE A MENTAL NOT OF HOW LONG I HAD WITH THE NEW TANK AND WE HEADED TOWARDS THE HILARY STEP. ANDRONICO, MISAIL, KIKO AND PALDEN WERE A LITTLE BEHIND US.I GASPED WHEN I SAW THE HILARY STEP, NOT THAT ITS TECHNICALLY DIFFICULT BUT ITS IMPOSING AT THAT HEIGHT AND THERE ARE TWO BIG ROCKY CONES THAT YOU NEED TO NAVIGATE PRIOR TO ARRIVING ON THE LONG SUMMIT RIDGE. OUR SHERPAS TASHI AND LAKPA RITA FIXED THE ROPES ON THE HILARY STEP AND THE SUMMIT RIDGE AND SOON I WAS MAKING MY WAY TO THE HILARY STEP CAREFULLY JUMPING OVER ROCKS AND CREVASSES TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THE FIXED LINES AND DESPERATELY TRYING TO AVOID WALKING ANYWHERE NEAR THE TERRIFYING LOOKING CORNICED RIDGE THAT DROPS DOWN INTO THE KANGCHUNG FACE”

The Everest industry. It ain’t necessarily pretty, but it’s damn efficient…



“Hey, check it out! My summit pose!”

Wetass Video Of The Week–Dive Of The Century: TWC Assistant Editor (Video/Tax Dodging) Dave Ross scores again. Check out this incredible, mesmerizing video of a man who dives into the water from, oh, maybe 3,000 feet up…



“Jeez, I hope I pushed off hard enough…”

J22 Worlds–Life On The Bubble: After one day of round robin racing, Team Wetass is in 57th place out of 130 boats. The top 65 get into the Gold Fleet for the final two days of racing, and there is one more day of qualifying races today. Holy Harken. Better get a little lucky. If we manage to sneak into the Gold Fleet–and sneaking is what Team Wetass does best–we’ll spend the rest of the week sailing the course with some world-class sailors, trying not to be DFL (that’s Dead F*cking Last for non-sailors). If we don’t make the Gold Fleet, at least we’ll have a chance of sailing around toward the front of the Silver Fleet. Either way, plenty of beer will be drunk…



2002 Worlds: This sort of captures the chaos and crowding at the start…

De Kersauson And The Giant Squid: The New Yorker has the blow-by-blow on The Admiral’s unusual encounter last year with a monster from the deep:

“On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground…Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. “It was bigger than a human leg,” Ragot recently told me. “It was a tentacle.” He looked again. “It was starting to move,” he recalled.

He beckoned Kersauson, who came down and crouched over the opening. “I think it’s some sort of animal,” Ragot said.

Kersauson took the flashlight, and inspected for himself. “I had never seen anything like it,” he told me. “There were two giant tentacles right beneath us, lashing at the rudder.”

The creature seemed to be wrapping itself around the boat, which rocked violently. The floorboards creaked, and the rudder started to bend. Then, just as the stern seemed ready to snap, everything went still. “As it unhooked itself from the boat, I could see its tentacles,” Ragot recalled. “The whole animal must have been nearly thirty feet long.”

The creature had glistening skin and long arms with suckers, which left impressions on the hull. “It was enormous,” Kersauson recalled. “I’ve been sailing for forty years and I’ve always had an answer for everything—for hurricanes and icebergs. But I didn’t have an answer for this. It was terrifying.”

Very wierd. The rest of the story, about a squid hunter from New Zealand who is trying to find a baby he can grow in captivity (finding a full-size Giant Squid is almost unheard of), is worth a read, too. If he succeeds, I can see a horror movie in the making…



“I thought it was going to be pretty tasty, but it was sprinkled with French guys who hadn’t bathed in a really long time…”

TWC Quick Hits…:

Man Who Cooked And Ate A Plateful Of Cicadas Almost Dies: Doctors diagnose allergic reaction. Wife puzzled by his sudden strong desire to burrow into the ground for 17 years…

Fishing Charter Sinks Off San Francisco; Passengers Really Stoned Or Just really Laid Back: “I did a Greg Louganis swan dive,” says one. “I didn’t think we were going to die, but it sucked,” says another. “The fish went down with the ship.”. Dude, you were worried about the fish…?

Aging, 52-Pound Pacific Octopus Finally Gets Laid: Sees last chance with female visitor, puts eight arms to good use, and fogs up his aquarium. “They both were gripping the back wall of the tank. He just about covered her completely”…



“Baby, I’ve been waiting all my life for this…Ever hear of a little thing called the Octopus Kama Sutra?