Sport: Gem of the Ocean

She was superb: her losses mostly had to be marked off to crew mistakes, and her victories largely came from her built-in speed. Sleek and sturdy, white-hulled Columbia was clearly the fastest boat throughout the elimination trials to pick a defender for the America's Cup. Last week she won two of three races from 19-year-old Vim, her final opponent, and the selection committee judged Columbia the gem of the ocean, fit to meet Britain's Sceptre this weekend in the start of the four-out-of-seven series that will be raced alternately over triangular and windward-leeward courses ten miles off Newport, R.I. (see map).

Columbia won her deciding race without the help of canny Corny Shields, the 63-year-old grey fox of Long Island Sound, who quit his advisory role to whip her crew into shape and to take the helm himself for the final trials (TIME, Sept. 15). Shields stepped aside because of the strain on his ailing heart, but at week's end was hopefully determined to race against Sceptre as a relief helmsman to famed Yacht and Auto Racer Briggs Cunningham, 51, Columbia's regular skipper. And the cockpit crew will be completed by the retiring, reticent intellectual who is most responsible for Columbia's basic speed: Designer Olin Stephens, 50, world's best yacht architect.

Heavy Weather. As the designer of the 19-year-old Vim, until this summer the finest 12-meter yacht in the world, Stephens had a good head start when he settled down last winter to create the 12-meter Columbia. The new boat posed special problems. In the summer, when the trials would be run, the breezes off Newport can be as soft as a whisper, but in September, cup race time, freshening winds often turn the waters into a white-capped obstacle course.

The design Stephens finally picked, after long sessions with seven models in the testing tanks at Hoboken's Stevens Institute of Technology, shows he had his weather eye cocked more on September than on summer. "Columbia differs from Vim only in a matter of inches," says he. But inches are as vital to a racing hull as to a fashion model. Columbia's bow sweeps gracefully into a full-bodied hull—a shape that helps her go swiftly to windward against a running sea. Stephens' calculations show that Columbia should do her best in the heavy weather that often blows off Newport in late September.

To this basic design Stephens added the lightest equipment money could buy, e.g., an extruded aluminum mast, was thereby able to put the boat's weight where it would do the most good: a 20-ton keel to keep Columbia from heeling excessively under a stiff wind. So carefully did Precisionist Stephens figure his boat's total weight that he even weighed the paper drinking cups and the Tollhouse cookies that went aboard. He added sails for every kind of weather—four mainsails, twelve jibs, eight spinnakers. When he was done, the Columbia's syndicate, headed by Financier Henry Sears, had a majestic 6g-h. yin. overall racing machine, and a bill of some $400,000.