In September 1983, a 12-metre yacht called Australia II won the America’s Cup yacht race, its peculiar ‘winged keel’ slicing and tacking through the oceans of Newport to narrowly defeat New York Yacht Club contender Liberty and end the host club’s 132-year winning streak. Three months later, the Australian dollar was ‘floated’ on the world currency market. The coincidence of these two ‘wet’ events — one literal, one metaphorical, both usefully geophysical — is central to the so-called ‘rise and fall’ of Australian businessman, Alan Bond (1938-2015). ‘Bondy’ was a controversial public figure: he led multiple America’s Cup attempts — including the Australia II syndicate — while instigating numerous coastal property developments in Western Australia, before being jailed for corporate fraud in the 90s. Bondy and his ‘socio-spatial exploits’ straddle the entrepreneurial and the criminal, exemplifying the murky ethics of ‘actually-existing’ neoliberalism in the early years of Australia’s financial deregulation. But it is through the spectacle of (oceanic) sailing competition that Bondy best performs his (earthly) property speculation. And so, I use Steinberg and Peters’ 'wet ontologies' (2015) to think-with Bondy and the sea, in and around 1983. Here, the yacht race is an instance of oceanic territorialization and planetary commodification with ongoing geopolitical implications, but also lingering otherworldly imaginaries. In the televised drama of the 1983 Cup, technological innovation (a winged keel) collides with — and slips past — bureaucratic obstacles (the rules of the game) rousing splish-splashy controversy in the temporary cybernetic occupation of an unruly ocean. Real estate imaginaries, meanwhile, transcend the material container of the ocean and the temporal container of the event, lurking in the anticipation and aftermath: from Sun City at Two Rocks, to Observation City at Scarborough, ghosts of Bondy’s boats and hopes are conjured alongside hotels and homes to commodify the coast.