Sport: Comets

To most U. S. newspaper readers, yacht racing last week was as inconsequential as a split infinitive. But for the slow-stirring, world-apart folk on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the Comet Class championship regatta, held on Chesapeake Bay, wrote the most exciting headlines of last weekend. For the Comet (originally christened Crab) is the family-tree-conscious Eastern Shore’s own baby.

The Comet was conceived seven years ago, at lazy, old-world Oxford (port of entry for Maryland before Baltimore was even a village). Well-pedigreed Mrs. Elliott Wheeler, daughter of one of the founders of the exclusive Chesapeake Bay Yacht Club, asked seafaring Lowndes Johnson, another native blue blood, to design a small boat in which her young sons could learn the ABCs of sailing. A one-design boat, 16-ft. long and patterned somewhat after the bigger Stars (22 ft.) in which Designer Johnson had become famed as a skipper (1929 world’s champion), the Comet was adopted by the U. S. yachting family in 1934 when Philadelphia Pathologist John Eiman organized the boats into a racing class.

In one-design classes, boats must be identical not only in hull lines, sail area and rigging but even in the minutest detail of equipment. These classes are increasing in great numbers because: 1) one-design boats are cheaper; 2) their racing life is prolonged, since they cannot be outbuilt; 3) the boat is reduced to an instrument (like a tennis racket or golf club) for the display of individual skill.

Though not so cosmopolitan as the 29-year-old Stars (whose constellations are scattered all over the world), nor so popular as the eight-year-old Snipes (3,700 registered boats, mostly in the U. S.), the little Comets—fast, sensitive and priced at $300—have multiplied like rabbits in the past five years. Today the Comet Class has 1,500 registered boats, shows promise of zooming to the top of the small-boat heap before its tenth birthday.

To celebrate their fifth annual championship last week the Comets went back to their birthplace. From as far north as Skaneateles, N. Y., as far south as Puerto Rico, they came: 41 of them, with skippers ranging from dainty, 14-year-old Sally Wilcox (who had her father as crew) to salty, 59-year-old Edward Merrill, last year’s champion. After three days of racing, over a six-mile course, 22-year-old Robert Levin of Beverly, N. J. hoisted the championship pennant—scoring 109½ points with his Bad News. Runner-up, only 5½ points behind, was spunky Sally Wilcox and her Scud—a better skipper by three points than oldtimer Merrill and J. Ramsey Speer Jr., chairman of the Regatta Committee.