BOATS
AN
IOWAN AT SEA
Thirty-three years ago, Chad Hudnut was born in a sea of grain in Montezuma, Iowa. But the farmland couldn’t hold him for long. Today he’s the boyish captain of a sailboat called Mustang, though he still carries a hint of the Midwest in his corn-blond hair, his deep blue eyes, his hoarse twang. “Hey there,” he says, smiling and offering a hand. “My name’s Chad.” He’s friendly and modest, but every August during Nantucket Race Week, he becomes a god among men.
To be fair, it’s not hard to be the standout in Nantucket, a fifty-square-mile island of cobblestones and oligarchs south of Cape Cod. The older men perch atop scrawny legs that emerge from pastel shorts and have potbellies from years of lobster and bluefish pâté. Women, even the young ones, wear pearls in a way that is not sexy. (Or is, but only in a deeply subversive way.) The burly boys who chase the younger women spend hours rolling their Georgetown baseball caps to shape the bill into a perfect arc. Hudnut, who went to a small school in northwestern Iowa, is a different breed. He wears his shaggy hair loose, and as he wends his way past the J.Crew and Ann Taylor stores on Main Street, he greets both townies and tourists with the same easy manner.
What auspicious wind brought Hudnut to these unlikely shores? After college, looking to escape Iowa, he ran a waterskiing program for rich kids in Poland Springs, Maine. For two years he lived in a cabin in the forest with a wood-burning stove and no running water. To while away his ample free time, he fiddled around on a 13-foot, 9-inch Sunfish dinghy that belonged to some friends. “The first time out,” he remembers, “I put the sail on upside down.” Through sheer persistence, he taught himself how to sail. In the summer of 1999, his friends told him that the 86-foot windjammer Schooner Appledore was looking for new hands to travel from Camden, Maine, to Key West, Florida, because the crew had quit. The captain reluctantly agreed to take him on. “The first night, we had a huge storm,” Hudnut recalls. “All these salty old New England sea dogs were getting sick, but I was just fine.” By the time the Schooner Appledore found port in Key West, Hudnut decided to give up the landlubbing life for good.
Today, like most captains, Hudnut is half Bedouin. He serves at the pleasure of Harvey Jones, Mustang’s billionaire owner. If Jones wants to race, off goes Hudnut. The circuit
usually includes regattas in Antigua, St. Bart, Nantucket, and Newport. If Jones wants to sail with his family, Hudnut reports for duty. When he’s not racing Mustang or sailing her to the West Indies, Hudnut holes up in a folksy wooden bungalow off North Orange Street. He’s a townie. If the sea is his home, Nantucket is his home away from home.
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Founded in 1659 as a whaling hamlet, Nantucket became a center for recreational sailing after the industry collapsed in the 19th century. Boston Brahmin families built “cottages” here—sprawling second homes facing the Atlantic or the calmer waters of the Nantucket Sound. Tourism has been the region’s primary industry for more than a century. During the summer, the island’s population swells from 10,000 to 50,000. Race Week is one of the busiest times. It started when Gwen Gaillard, owner of the now-defunct Opera House Restaurant, founded the Opera House Cup in 1972 after some local sailors complained
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