Cup Contenders

''For a week, the word Ranger has been on the tip of my tongue. If anyone asked me a question, I replied 'Ranger.' "

Victim of this innocent crotchet last week was Mrs. Harold Stirling Vanderbilt. it was caused by her eagerness to perform creditably at the launching of her husband's newest yacht. Last week, in the salty little city of Bath, Me., the moment lor which Mrs. Vanderbilt had been nerving herself finally arrived. Taking a firm grip on a ribboned bottle of champagne, she swung it briskly against the bow of what, in the Bath Iron Works, had theretofore been merely Hull No. 272. Cried she with faultless diction: "I christen thee Ranger." The hull slipped smoothly down its chute, flopped into the water, stern first, with a loud splash, and ten minutes later workmen swarmed aboard Ranger, warped back to the dock, to step her 163-ft. duralumin mast.

Three days later, Ranger started for Newport, towed by the Vanderbilt yacht Vara. Off Seguin Island, a heavy sea was running. The roll caused a turnbuckle to break on an upper shroud. This tiny mishap put additional strain on the other stays, which snapped one by one all through the night. Soon after dawn, off Gloucester, the towering mast finally crashed over the side, carrying all the rigging with it. Said Harold ("Mike") Vanderbilt: "Bad luck!" At Bristol, R. I., workmen prepared to fit Ranger with the mast that used to belong to the old Vanderbilt yacht Rainbow.

The curing of Mrs. Vanderbilt's crotchet and its consequences were easily last week's biggest sport news. One of the top sport events of 1937 will be the yacht races for the America's Cup, off Newport, starting July 31. For the past nine months, the America's Cup races have been a matter of formal correspondence, long-winded argument about rules, scale-drawings and fabulously costly boatbuilding. For the next three months all this will be replaced by sailing.

Even if Ranger had not lost her mast last week--which means that she will have to use a makeshift rig until July--it was by no means a certainty that she would be this year's Cup defender. The Cup races are preceded by trial races in which the two other candidates for the honor of defending yachting's oldest, ugliest trophy are Gerard B. Lambert's Yankee, and Rainbow, which now belongs to Chandler Hovey. Like everything else about America's Cup racing, contender trials are grand scale. The Preliminary Series, which starts May 29, is for testing rigs and training crews. It is followed by the Observation Series, which starts June 12, and the Trial Series, which starts July 3. Job of selecting the boat which will actually defend the Cup belongs to the America's Cup Committee of the New York Yacht Club. The Committee can announce its choice any time after the beginning of the Trial Series until a week before the America's Cup Races--a series of four out of seven.

Races between the U. S. contenders will by no means be the only preliminaries to this year's Cup races. One result of the pre-launching negotiations was a rule which for the first time allows the challenging yacht club to share what has heretofore been the special privilege of the challenged club: that of picking the fastest available yacht after a trial series in U. S. waters. En route to the U. S. last week were two yachts, with one of which Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith of England's Royal Yacht Squadron hopes to win this summer the prize that U. S. skippers have successfully defended since 1851. One was Endeavour II, built a year ago and raced by Skipper Sopwith in English waters last summer. The other was Endeavour I, which Rainbow defeated for the Cup in 1934.

Challenger. Racing for the America's Cup tends to become an obsession. From 1899 through 1930, proprietor of the obsession was Great Britain's famed Sir Thomas (tea) Lipton, who spent $4,000,000 on five unsuccessful tries to "lift the Mug." Skipper Sopwith challenged for the Cup for the first time in 1934. Beaten after a disputed finish in the fourth race, he sailed home in a rage, announced he would never challenge again, took almost two years to change his mind. Famed principally as an airplane manufacturer, whose first appearance on the U. S. scene was when he gave exhibition flights over Long Island in one of his own planes in 1911, Skipper Sopwith applied his technique as an aeronaut to sailing when yachts became his hobby in 1928. Having taught himself to navigate, he equipped Endeavour I with every conceivable mechanical gadget except an altimeter. Like Mrs. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Sopwith shares her husband's hobby. In addition to christening his boats, she also sails them. In 1934 she acted as timekeeper, often took the helm of Endeavour before and after races. Endeavour I proved herself much faster than Rainbow by winning the first two races of the 1934 series. She lost the next four principally because of faulty handling by Skipper Sopwith and his inexperienced amateur crew.

Like Rainbow, which Skipper Vanderbilt sold last winter, Endeavour I has changed hands since 1934. Her new owner. H. A. Andreae, loaned her to her old owner for this year's trial series with the understanding that if she proves faster than Endeavour II, Skipper Sopwith can buy her back. Endeavour II, blue like her predecessor, is 87 ft., 164 tons--4 ft. longer on the water line and 20 tons heavier than Endeavour I. Last summer she won nine races out of 18 starts, lost her mast twice, proved better in calm than stormy weather.

Until this year, most U. S. Cup yachts were built not by single individuals but by syndicates. The Sopwith system is not to build single yachts but to maintain a flotilla. Towing Endeavour I to the U. S. is the motor yacht Viva II, owned by his friend Frederick Segrist, who will help foot Endeavour I's bills. Towing Endeavour II is the Belgian trawler John. Owner Sopwith disapproves of U. S. food, so John is bringing enough British victuals (except fresh vegetables and bread) to last all summer. The two Endeavours, Viva and John are by no means the whole Sopwith Navy. Still in England are his old motor yacht Vita and his new motor yacht Philante, which will cross the Atlantic in June and on which Owner Sopwith will live this summer, using a 28-ft. runabout now being built by Gar Wood as a tender. Philante is "the most luxurious motor yacht afloat." She is 263 ft., 1.612 tons, has a crew of 50, cost $1,250,000. The interior, designed by Mrs. Sopwith, contains a tiled swimming pool, gymnasium, eight guest staterooms and a hospital. When he goes "out to the States" in June, Skipper Sopwith will sail in the Queen Mary.

Defender. To small boys who sail model boats on duck ponds, the best models are those patterned after America's Cup yachts. Currently the best America's Cup yachts are patterned after models which are sailed in a loo-ft. tank. At Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N. J., a 43-in. model of the new Ranger was tried out last autumn against a similar model of Endeavour I. Ranger proved much faster. In the Bath Iron Works, which had previously built only one Cup contender and in which last winter's most important job was five U. S. destroyers (TIME, Nov. 23), Ranger, first America's Cup yacht in 25 years to have an all-steel hull, was whacked together in 140 days. She inherited most of her sails, deck fittings and cabin equipment from Rainbow, which Skipper Vanderbilt dismantled before selling. She inherited her name from Captain John Paul Jones's flagship, captured by the British at Charleston in 1780.

If Ranger repeats her model's victory against the challenger this summer, it will be the third in a row not only for Skipper Vanderbilt but also for Ranger's head designer, William Starling Burgess. If his boat defends the Cup successfully, Starling Burgess will equal the record made by his father, Edward Burgess, whose Puritan, Mayflower and Volunteer defended the Cup in 1885, 1886 and 1887 and made him the most famed yacht designer of his era.

Starling Burgess' encounter with Thomas Sopwith in 1934 was not his first. Like Skipper Sopwith, he was an aviation pioneer. They met in 1911 when Burgess built an airplane for Sopwith from which Sopwith bombarded the Burgess home town of Boston with oranges. This was at an aviation meet in which the oranges represented bombs, and after which Flyer Sopwith received honors for accuracy in landing and throwing. Starling Burgess got the Collier Trophy for plane building in 1915. Before taking up aeronautics, Starling Burgess had spent five years building boats in Marblehead, Mass. After the War, because he found sailing more fun than flying, he resumed boat-designing. As applied to yachting. Burgess' knowledge of aerodynamics has so far proved better than Sopwith's but both are always on the lookout for new gadgets. In 1934, a deckhand on Rainbow asked the first mate how to turn a new kind of Burgess winch. Replied the mate: "Ask that -- --brain trust aft." The wind carried the remark to the brain trust, standing in the stern. Skipper Vanderbilt was indignant. Designer Burgess laughed.

A leonine Bostonian with a seagoing vocabulary and red mustachios, Designer Burgess at Bath last week got a last look at the below-waterline features of his newest creation. Ranger, larger than either Endeavour, has a long low stern, full in body a third of the way aft of the bow, no bulge in her sides like Rainbow.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.