Yachter’s Itinerary

Photo

THURSDAY PUZZLE — We’re sailing the seven seas today, in search of a theme.

Alex Eaton-Salners is back, and he clearly sails with a hoity-toity class of people. Our job is to figure out his itinerary, and what’s making him bounce around so much.

Today’s Theme

There are four starred clues in our puzzle today, and the answers seem to have absolutely nothing to do with the clues. “Smelled” = SCUBATANK? That can’t be right.

But it is, once you solve the revealer at 33A. The clue is “Yachter’s itinerary, maybe … or a hint to understanding the answers to the starred clues.” It’s not obvious. Then again, today is Thursday, and we wouldn’t expect it to be obvious.

The trick is to solve a few of the theme entries and then stare them into submission. Once you’ve stared them down, it should become apparent that there is something inside the theme entry that can be vaguely related to yachting.

Let’s look at 16A’s SCUBATANK again. Stare at it for a while, and the country of CUBA might emerge. So we now have SCUBATANK.

And what of the clue? Well, the clue is “Smelled.” Well, let’s see what we have left after we isolate CUBA: We have STANK, which is a synonym for “Smelled.”

But wait, as a wise man once said, there’s more. We still have that revealer at 33A. All of the countries inside the theme entries are islands. And we have to jump over those islands to complete the theme entries as clued. So that means that our yachter has been ISLAND HOPPING.

Tricky Clues

1A: A crossword trick worth knowing. ORE is often found in bands, so you’ll see punny clues like “Some metal bands?” to misdirect you.

31A: “#21 of 24” sounds really vague, but it’s not if you’ve been solving for a while. There are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, so when you see a reference to “24,” it will (likely) be hinting at that. No. 21 is the letter PHI.

2D: I knew this automatically, mostly because I’ve been living on RICOLA cough drops since mid-December.

35D: This “Ball boy?” is DESI Arnaz Jr., the son of the comedian Lucille Ball.

Constructor Notes

Not surprisingly, there aren’t too many words or phrases that (1) Contain the name of an island, and (2) Spell something else after removing those letters. Luckily, there were enough to make a workable theme set.

Along the way, I also considered using words that can precede ISLAND such as LONG (e.g., BELONGING, ALONGSIDE, or PROLONGS) or islands that aren’t commonly known as single words (such as the Isle of MAN). In the end, I decided to limit myself to single word islands, which I find the most satisfying.

One somewhat unusual feature of this puzzle is that the islands are hidden within single words rather than spanning the ending and beginning of multiple words, which is the more common (and elegant) approach to hidden word themes. Hopefully, the added bonus of creating new words with the remaining letters makes up for this shortcoming.

As more of my puzzles run in The New York Times, it’s been interesting to see the fluidity of Will’s publication queue. For example, my first seven accepted Thursday puzzles have been published in a different order than the one they were accepted in. So far the progression has been 1, 4, 3, 5, 7 with the second and sixth puzzles still unpublished (today’s grid was my seventh accepted Thursday). I’m considering only Thursday puzzles here because each day of the week has a different queue whose length varies depending on inventory levels.

From what I’ve read elsewhere, Will likes to space out certain kinds of puzzles (e.g., rebuses) while also accelerating debuts and grids that particularly catch his fancy. I suspect puzzles are also more likely to get bumped around in the queue when a constructor has multiple pending grids of the same difficulty level versus a situation where a constructor has only one.

Thanks for the ride, Mr. Eaton-Salners.

Your thoughts?