Sport: Two to Make Ready

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As the time for this weekend's starting gun approached, the word in Newport was "Weatherly in four" in the best-of-seven competition for the America's Cup. Weatherly was ready. Well tuned by the trial races that made her the U.S. defender, she lay in the ways at Newport Shipyard undergoing final polishing, then was set in the water for minor ballast shifts. At week's end her crew arrived to pace out the dwindling days before the meeting with the Australian challenger Gretel. By contrast, the Australian 12-meter lay inert under the hurried tread of a dozen shipfitters who had come aboard for final, perhaps desperate, changes.

In a month of sailing against the trial horse Vim, Gretel had shown an alarming tendency to heel over in heavy weather. Hoping to correct it, Sir Frank Packer, head of the syndicate behind the Australian contender, ordered her 90-ft. aluminum mast stepped forward 19 in. Her rigging had to be reset, her deck drilled and patched, her vast sails recut. When Gretel slipped off the ways, she still had to test her sheets, still had to learn if the new rigging would let her steer easier in fresh breezes and add a crucial fraction of a knot to her speed.

To beat Weatherly, Gretel will have to be superb. All along, the challenger has looked good on the outside, from the cut of her new mainsail to the long curve of her bow. But her weather helm had caused enough concern to signal last week's mast shift. If the shift works, Skipper Jock Sturrock and Gretel's crew will be sailing a new boat; if it does not, the Australians will remain hapless in unruly seas.

After a two-week rest, Skipper Emil ("Bus") Mosbacher and Weatherly's ten-man crew got together again in Newport at week's end. Mosbacher watched Gretel under sail after the mast shift and politely pronounced her "very good, very fast" in tacking and jibbing drills. Then he set about the business of putting Weatherly back in the water for the final days of practice on the sail trimming and flying starts that made the yacht unbeatable in the trials.

Despite the odds against him, Packer showed that he still kept faith. While Gretel was still out of the water and her mast not yet set, word came from Australia that he had jumped at the 5-to-4 odds Australian bookies are giving against him to bet $22.500 on Gretel's victory.