Smooth Sailing

It was the first big ocean race in eight years. The sailors, mostly salty socialites, sweated in Newport's Brenton Cove to get their 34 yachts ready. A few first-timers got jitters; in the past a boat or two had sunk on the 635-mile thrash to Bermuda.

The small boats got off in fine weather, close-hauled in a fresh breeze. Eight hours later, the big ones lit out in pursuit and disappeared into a fog bank to the southwest. The breeze stayed fresh all the first day & night, the seas quiet. Nobody got sick. Most skippers, leery of the Gulf Stream's northeastward drift, worked up to windward (but the stream carried one boat 210 miles off course). First into the stream was the 54-ft. ketch Malabar XIII, skippered and designed by white-haired John G. Alden. The flat weather gave light-air boats all the breaks; schooners do their best in heavy weather with strong beam and following winds.

As usual, nobody knew exactly where he was in the race. The New York Herald Tribune, in a burst of journalistic enterprise, sent an airborne reporter circling over the fleet ("first air coverage of such an event"). He saw a fleet of sails fanned out, with 70 miles of smooth water between the leader and the tailender. The backwash of a baby hurricane just missed the racers. Even so, one sloop's topmast was sprung.

Ghostlike Baruna, the favorite to repeat her 1938 victory, sprang a bad leak half way to Bermuda, but kept her pumps going and got all possible good out of her big Genoa jib. She got to Bermuda first (in 5 days, 3 minutes) but didn't win. By the time all the intricate mathematics of handicaps had been worked out, the prize went to the blue-hulled, 57-ft. sloop Gesture, carrying the first suit of nylon sails ever used in a big ocean race. Gesture had been the third to finish. Her skipper: square-jawed Howard Fuller, president of the Fuller Brush Co. He had won the slowest Bermuda race since the first race 40 years ago.

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