In real life, Stabila's yacht was the Zopilote, a 48-foot Pacemaker Sportsfisherman which had been extended by two feet and equipped with a whopping US$85,000 in electronics (in 2016 dollars). Zopilote belonged to director and one-time race driver Bruce Kessler, who directed this episode. The yacht is extensively profiled in a five-page article in the November 1976 issue of Motor Boating & Sailing magazine. By 1985, Kessler had replaced his Pacemaker with the identically-named Zopilote, a 70-foot Delta Marine yacht in which he and his wife Joan Freeman circumnavigated the globe. After the second Zopilote foundered off the coast of Alaska in May 1993, Kessler tipped his hat at his earlier yachts with the 64-foot Spirit of Zopilote, the first yacht launched by Northern Marine.
This episode aired in 1976, the bicentennial year for the United States, thus the stars and stripes decoration on the parking meter.
The Stabila yacht is named Zopilote. Zopilote is Spanish for buzzard.
This episode features a similar situation (re: the Doberman Pinscher), to a made-for-TV film James Garner had done, in which he started in 1972; They Only Kill Their Masters (1972), about a small town sheriff investigating the possibility of a man being killed by his dog - a Doberman Pinscher.
Per the title, the 38th parallel north was used as the pre-Korean War boundary between North Korea and South Korea.