Feature

Yacht Club

But before then, there's plenty of time for Dark and Stormys, the official quaff of Bermuda. "When I was young and couldn't afford very much," Bishop says, explaining the yachtsman's code, "the skipper took care of you. He didn't pay for transportation, but while you're there, you had your meals and entertainment."

"There aren't many wives or racer chasers here," Robyn Specthrie says from the railing overlooking one of The Coastal Queen's two bars, referring to the women who crash the yacht club parties.

"I come off the boat with swamp butt and wind-blown hair," Specthrie says. "But you can always tell a racer chaser, they've got nice clothes on and they're coiffed." The lack of women in racing is brought home again each day as the boats circle between races while men casually stand with their flies undone peeing over the side of the boat.

The morning of the final race, there is little wind. With Brown-eyed Girl and Gold Digger tied for the lead, there's no room for error; it's a match race. The tiniest opening will give one boat the entire race. Gold Digger's crew is well trained and has been sailing together for a number of years, which significantly increasing its advantage.

The boats head out to the racecourse in near silence as each member of the crew goes over his mistakes in previous races. Berman, trying for any last piece of knowledge that might give him an edge, calls Nashua, New Hampshire, on his cell phone, hoping to get a weather update.

In the sixth race, tempers really fray -- with the seasoned sailors finding it hard to conceal their exasperation. "C'mon! C'mon! You're not sailing this boat!" Berman bellows. "Let's get back in this race."

"Like they've gotten anything right so far," one of the crew grouses.

"Hey!" Berman says, looking up from the companionway and his cell phone, "have a heart. These guys probably make all year what you earn in a month." His tone is sympathetic to the forecasters. Before he got involved in sailing full-time, Berman was a commercial-real-estate broker living in the Village. When the market tanked in the late eighties, Berman decided to make a life out of his hobby. Now he runs Yachtsoft.com, a company in Great Neck that outfits vessels with technology.

When wind enough for the final race eventually comes, Gold Digger's superior training and experience win out. Both boats start well, but Gold Digger gains a slight advantage downwind and exploits it to full effect. After the crucial moment, which is over before most of the crew realize it, Berman refuses to give up, calling for tack after tack upwind and an endless series of jibes downwind that Gold Digger, the lead boat, is obliged to mirror.

"Between now and the finish," Berman says as he increases the frequency of the turns, "we can only keep doing it and hope something breaks on their boat."

It's 9:15 on a Thursday morning in late July -- almost a year to the day after the weekend in Newport -- but the weather feels more like April or October. Feigel stands impassively in the rain as traffic clogs the Throgs Neck Bridge several hundred feet above him. But Feigel isn't concerned about the commuters because he's got a clear lane down the East River and only a tugboat coming up in the other direction to worry about.

Down below, Berman has three laptops open on the nav station, calibrating instruments and running charts that show the boat's exact position and speed within the tides and currents of Long Island's waters. Brown-eyed Girl is making her way through the heart of New York City to arrive at the starting line for this year's Around Long Island Regatta, a 190-mile race from just off Sheepshead Bay in the Atlantic Ocean, around Montauk and Orient Point, and back down Long Island Sound to Hampstead Harbor.

During the trip from City Island, the weather begins to clear and they get a rare and peaceful view of the city. On the lawn of Gracie Mansion, three large dogs disport themselves by racing up and down an open patch of green. At the 59th Street Bridge, the FDR is stalled out in the morning rush. ("You gotta love going faster than the traffic," Tom Cagnina says.) And along the embankment, a few morning joggers and a nanny or two with strollers parked at the railing wave to the passing boat. Brown-eyed Girl passes under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, where a photo shoot involving a yellow motorcycle and dry ice is under way in dumbo, and behind Governor's Island before ducking a large ship moored just under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. It's a little after noon when the sailors begin to converge on the starting line. In staggered intervals, the 126 Around Long Island competitors start in classes according to their size and speed, with the faster boats, like Dinhofer's, at the end.

In the near-perfect conditions, Brown-eyed Girl sets off at 3 p.m., sailing closely by three of the five J/44s. Though they are racing against the entire fleet on a handicap system, the well-matched 44s struggle to gain yards and even feet on one another throughout the afternoon and into the night as they skirt the Rockaways, Jones Beach, Fire Island, and, finally, the Hamptons.

Aboard this time is Tim Mahoney, a former J/44 owner who lost his boat, Saline Solution (he owns salt mines in the Dominican Republic), in a storm in 1996. With Wall Street in hibernation and Benna about to deliver twins, Dinhofer is looking to share expenses with someone like Mahoney, who will race the boat. "At this point, I'm looking to get a partner," Dinhofer says.

It hasn't helped that the spring series and Block Island Race Week were plagued by stumbled maneuvers and awkward crew work. But tonight everything's going right. Around eight in the evening, the wind dies a little, and Brown-eyed Girl is quick to make the decision to hoist a larger headsail, which gives the boat a brief but decisive advantage.

When Mahoney takes the 10 p.m.2 a.m. watch at the wheel, Brown-eyed Girl is burying the competition. A confident and calm sailor, Mahoney widens the lead before returning the boat to Dinhofer and Cagnina, who've found their groove. Through the night, they sail against the computer, calling out numbers from the readouts and matching their performance against target speeds, which the computer generates from the wind conditions.

Just before 9 a.m., Brown-eyed Girl rounds Montauk Point, calling in its position by cell phone to the race committee at Sea Cliff Yacht Club. The two trailing J/44s have slipped off onto another tack, and Dinhofer and Berman spend the next hour busily trying to determine where the competitors might be -- ahead or behind? For all the sophisticated equipment aboard, there's no way to tell whether the boats remain a threat.

"Why don't you get your wife to call Sea Cliff and pretend she's married to someone on Charlie V," Berman jokes about one of the missing boats as he heads below to retrieve a pair of binoculars. "Then she can ask when they expect the boat back and what time it rounded Montauk."

"We tried that two years ago," Dinhofer says, laughing. "They left an answering machine on the phone line so you couldn't ask." Berman scans the horizon ahead of the boat and behind it.

"You should really get a pair of gyroscopic binoculars," Berman says. "You can see twice as far. I can get you a pair for $1,200." Then he gives up on trying to figure out if a very similar-looking boat is actually one of the missing J/44s. (It isn't.)

"You know, with the GPS and the weather reports and the gyroscopic binoculars," Dinhofer says, "you've taken all of the guesswork out of this."

Five hours later, both boats have been located several miles back; ahead there are only two other boats. But it will take another ten hours to finish, including a tense bout of maneuvering as Brown-eyed Girl and three other boats desperately try to cope with a last-minute wind shift within a mile of the finish line.

Just before midnight, a tipsy blonde woman with corkscrew curls shouts, "Welcome to Sea Cliff!" as one of the nearly dozen women on the committee boat raises a chromed shotgun and fires a round, signaling that Brown-eyed Girl has crossed the line first in its class. Eventually, the corrected time will give Dinhofer and Mahoney first in their handicap fleet and second overall.

An hour later, the crew members have freshened up in the basement of Sea Cliff Yacht Club and sat down for a drink on Dinhofer. Though he's pleased with his boat's performance, he's having doubts about returning next year: "I think we're done with this regatta. We've won everything we can win here."

A few days after the race, Scott and Benna are considering selling the boat.

"It's getting harder," Benna says. "Being on a boat with a toddler is not a nice thing. Ally's always going for the water. She's in a life jacket, but I'm still worried."

"If I don't sell it, fine," Dinhofer says. "I still have a great boat. If I do, I'll never have to say, 'Someday, I'm going to own a big boat.' I've done it -- and maybe I'll get another one when I'm 50."