Sport: Off Newport

(See front cover)

The Event.

For the America's Cup—rococo, gourd-necked silver trophy 2 ft. 3 in. high, offered by the Royal Yacht Squadron for a sailing race in England in 1851, won by the yacht America, and ever since the property of U. S. yachtsmen:

A series of match races off Newport, R. I., on courses to be announced by signals from the committee boat on the day of each race, the winner to be the boat taking four races out of seven:

The contestants: two yachts built within the limit of the specifications for the Seventy-Six Rating Class under the "Universal Rule"* to race without time allowance.

The defender: Enterprise, owned by a syndicate headed by Winthrop W. Aldrich. and including Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, George Fisher Baker Jr., and Vincent Astor. Skipper: Harold Stirling Vanderbilt.

The challenger: Shamrock V, owned by Sir Thomas Lipton and sailed by his professional captain, Edward Hearn.

The Boats. Critics who say Shamrock V has no chance think so because: 1) Under the rules of the America's Cup races she crossed the ocean on her own bottom and had to be rerigged when she got here, while the Enterprise has been tuning up all summer. 2) She is sailed by an Englishman unfamiliar with the ocean at Newport, while Skipper Vanderbilt has sailed at Newport since boyhood. 3) She is sailed by a professional, and professionals as a class are rarely as resourceful as amateurs.

People who think better of her remember: 1) That in her trials in England she was far faster than all reasonable estimates of her speed based on her measurements. She beat famed Candida, a boat with five tons less displacement and 800 square feet more sail. 2) She can stand up in a wind and is wonderfully fast in light airs. One day at Newport when the U. S. contestants, holding an elimination trial, lay becalmed, she ghosted through them all as though she had an engine.

One thing no one argues—Shamrock V is handsome. Hers is a gull-shaped green body, striped with a white boot-top at the waterline, the light swell amidships giving a look of speed. Mahogany over a steel frame, with keel, stem, and sternpost of wood, a dagger-plate centreboard streamlined and built of teak, plated with bronze. Her hull measurements are within a fraction of an inch the same as Enterprise's; she carries 16 square feet less sail and has a little more displacement. She can ride an English chop on a reach and pull before the wind; what she can do in the slow swells of Newport water remains problematical. She is a modern, but not a strikingly original boat; there are comparatively few tricks in her rigging, few experiments, and it is this that constitutes her main point of difference from Enterprise, the most radically experimental racer ever built, and one of the most expensive.