Sport: Speck

Some seven hundred miles off the New England coast a dozen passengers on the Black Diamond freighter Black Gull last week gathered at the rail to examine a speck on the horizon. On closer inspection, the speck turned out to be a boat, the size of those usually seen moored at yacht-club landings. To suggestions that he take the tiny craft in tow, rescue her crew, the Black Gull’s captain, Leonard Frisco, explained why this was inadvisable. No derelict, the boat was the German yawl Stoertebeker. With five other minuscule vessels, which left Newport a fortnight before, she was bound for Bergen, Norway, in a transatlantic sailing race.

Possibly the most hazardous, certainly the least comfortable sport in the world, transatlantic sailing appeals mostly to men .who, if they must live dangerously, have to supply their own danger. Biggest boat (72 ft. overall) in the Newport-to-Bergen race was Vamarie, owned and sailed by Caviar Tycoon Vadim Makaroff. Next biggest was Mistress, whose owner and skipper, George Emlen Roosevelt, is Commodore of the Cruising Club of America which sponsored the race, director in 20 companies, veteran of eleven blue-water races. Roderick Stephens Jr., who with his brother Olin won the last transatlantic race (1931) in Dorade, was sailing Philip Le Boutilliers new boat, Stormy Weather, designed on the same speedy lines as Dorade. Oldest boat in the race, Vagabond, was manned by Yale undergraduates. In Hamrah, Robert Ames, Boston socialite, was taking his two sons Harry and Richard and a crew of their Harvard classmates.

Smallest boat (49 ft.) in the race—sighted last week in midocean by Captain Frisco—had a skipper of a different stamp. Stoertebeker’s Ludwig Schlimbach, until he retired, used to captain Hamburg-American liners across the Atlantic. Grizzled, 59, amused at the elegance of his competitors, Captain Schlimbach arrived at Newport three days before the race, barely managed to lay in enough supplies, rearrange his rigging, borrow water lights and a code book to qualify. Joked he before the start: “Next time I come mitout a boat.”

Yachtsmen surmised that Stoertebeker, sighted once before and sailing east on the 40th parallel, was by last week about 600 miles behind the leaders who should reach port this week but who, because of handicaps, may not win the race.