Quicklier: the making of a wizard


Whitbread Round the World Race and America’s Cup veteran Dawn Riley presents her own very personal insight into one of Wisconsin’s finest


The little town of Zenda, Wisconsin (pop- ulation 100), is famous for two things: an 8lb meteorite that was once found there, and Buddy Melges, who has long been known as The Wizard of Zenda. From his home waters on nearby Lake


Geneva, where he has been equally adept in both scows and ice boats, Melges has become one of the most successful, acclaimed and respected racing skippers in the world. He has two Olympic medals, world championships in the Star (two), 5.5 Meter (three), E-Scows (five) and Skeeter ice boats (seven). Oh yes… and an America’s Cup win as co-helmsman. He is


44 SEAHORSE


also a three-time Rolex Yachtsman of the Year. And those are just some of the high- lights of a stunning career on the water – in both solid and liquid forms. The gregarious, self-effacing Melges has


attracted the world’s best sailors to Zenda to sail his beloved scows and be thrilled by 100mph dashes across the frozen lake in the big ice boats, to hunt ducks (his other passion), and to discuss the shapes of hulls, sails and appendages in colloquial turns of phrase that are all his own. He often speaks of the need to sail ‘a little bit quicklier’. Onboard he discourages ‘chin music’, non race-related chatter. Thanks to a reliable set of sound, basic


observations, Melges is one of the few seat-of-the-pants skippers who flourished beyond sailing’s high-tech revolution. ‘Instruments are great,’ he once remarked, ‘but you have to look at the water, present the boat for Mother Nature.’ In 2010, at the age of 80, Melges won


the A-Scow Inland Yachting Association Championship. Dawn Riley has known Buddy for some 30 years and explores the magic of this sailing legend.


Mystical and magical, but what’s behind the curtain? Gloria Melges realised he was special early – way early. In the early 1960s Buddy was just some guy who showed up at a Star regatta at Columbia Yacht Club in Chicago, Illinois. He arrived driving a 1947 Mercury convertible (black with a white top) and was towing a borrowed Star boat painted with a sparkling turquoise hull and a white bottom. Gloria noticed the boat and the man and


within 24 hours realised she had a choice – she could continue to date Gary Comer, with whom she had won the last Star regatta and who would go on to become the founder of Lands’ End Clothing, or take a second look at this new guy. Gloria


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