Sport: Off Cohasset

Jockeying for the start of the first of six races for a “women’s national sailing championship” off Cohasset, Mass. last week, Skipper Lorna Whittelsey of the Indian Harbor Yacht Club’s crew had a piece of hard luck. Two of the other six boats in the race—sailed by crews from Bellport, L. I. and Cohasset—collided with her, sailing broad off when she was closehauled. The judges disqualified Bellport. An Edgartown boat won, sailed by Clara Dinsmore. In the afternoon, with airs so light that the 17-ft. Manchester one-design sloops were sometimes impossible to steer, Bellport drifted into a marker, received another disqualification, withdrew. Ruth Sears, who had finished second in the first race, found a puff on the last leg of the three-mile triangular course and won. Next day the breeze was brisk in the morning, light in the afternoon. Ruth Sears won the first race, Lorna Whittelsey the second. In the third race of the day the Sears boat only needed to finish two places ahead of Miss Whittelsey for enough points to win the series without the formality of a sixth race. It looked as though she would get them when as the boats rounded the last mark, she was far out in front and Lorna Whittelsey was third, a good quarter-mile behind Edgartown. By making up that quarter-mile— largely because the Edgartown had somehow picked up a piece of driftwood with her keel—Lorna Whittelsey kept her chance alive but it was a chance as faint as the breeze that had given it to her. In the sixth race, Ruth Sears would have had to miss the one point a boat gets for finishing to lose the championship. Instead, while Lorna Whittelsey was winning and hoping, Miss Sears coasted cautiously around the course for a fourth place and the cup that Mrs. Charles Francis Adams put up in 1925, 30½ points to Miss Whittelsey’s 28¼. Distantly related to Boston’s famed society athlete Eleanora Sears, Ruth Sears won the championship for Cohasset in 1925 and 1926, has not competed for it since 1927. Added to her sailing skill last week was her knowledge of conditions. She does most of her racing in a Manchester boat, knows Cohasset harbor well because she has sailed there since she was six. In Cohasset, Ruth Sears is almost as famed as Lorna Whittelsey is at Greenwich, where she started to sail at the same age, with her father, Yacht Designer Henry Newton Whittelsey. Miss Whittelsey has won the Adams cup four times but even if it really represented the women’s national sailing championship it could scarcely be considered her greatest achievement as a skipper. In 1931 she skippered a 58-ft. sloop on the Newport to Vineyard Haven run of the New York Yacht Club’s cruise. Last year she captained a crew of three men and won the interclub championship on Long Island Sound. In the summer she sails in overalls. In the winter she races regularly with the “frostbite” fleet, in 11-ft. dinghies. Last winter, during a gale that only two other dinghy skippers would risk their boats in, she hit a mooring spile, had to be rescued. This made her a member of the “Loons”—frostbite skippers who have survived tipping over in the Sound in midwinter. Last week she became a member of a more dignified organization—the Women’s National Yacht Racing Association, formed by the skippers who were at Cohasset, to run championship races next year.