Sport: Yachts

Last week the yachting season reached a peak.

Bat. At Marblehead, Mass, a cynosure was the 31-ft. Bat with the Charles Francis Adamses, father and son, aboard. Famed for flying starts and damn-your-eyes valor when it blows, the Secretary of the Navy had a bad week of it. The wind was so light and fluky that the races developed into drifting, breeze-hunting contests between the 285 yards of 33 classes assembled for the Corinthian Yacht Club’s regatta. Time and again the Bat led at the start, lagged at the finish. Before the week was out, Sailor Adams Jr. left to join Gerald B. Lambert’s Vanitie on the New York Yacht Club cruise. Perhaps thus rid of a jinx, the Bat finally won a race as the Secretary’s vacation drew to a close.

Vanitie v. Resolute. Outboards, dinghies, canoes and purring launches teemed among a great flock of sleek sailing ships in Morris Cove, Conn. (New Haven) as the New York Yacht Club fleet made ready for the gold-star event of U. S. yachting. Early one morning, a tall, slightly stooped man stepped to the bridge of his big white steam yacht Nourmahal and gave a signal. A gun boomed. Moorings were slipped and out sailed the fleet in the wake of Commodore William Vincent Astor. Among many another power craft that churned along with the fleet was John Pierpont Morgan’s rakish black Corsair steaming near the Nourmahal as committee boat.*

In daily port-to-port races as the cruise progressed—Morris Cove to Greenport, Greenport to Montauk, etc. etc.— arch-competitors were the celebrated Vanitie and Resolute, big international cup racers. The Resolute, owned by E. Walter Clarke of Philadelphia, beat Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrock IV, in 1920. Lately, and last week, she has lost consistently to the Vanitie, which Gerald Lambert bought last year from Harry Payne Whitney.

* But Mr. Morgan was not aboard in Scotland for “the twelfth.”