Logarithm Victory

The starting gun boomed. Thirty-four seagoing yachts jockeyed their way across the line and out of Los Angeles Harbor to the open sea. It was the start of the first postwar 2,225-mile California-to-Honolulu handicap race.

That night--July 4-- was no night for Sunday seamen. The schooner Morning Star radioed to shore: "Heavy swells with cross-chop." Radiomen on other boats were more explicit: all hands were sick and wished they were dead. The yawl Emerald's crew let their stomachs guide them--back to port. Patolita lost her mainsail. One boat had hopefully taken along a dry-land chef. Near Catalina Island he was feeling poorly; he put to sea in a life preserver, was picked up and taken ashore in a guide boat.

The blow lasted 2 1/2 days. While fancier racing craft had to shorten sail to ride it out, the rugged 71-ft. schooner Dolphin II, owned and captained by Actor Frank Morgan, was doting on the gale. She sped westward under full canvas.

Patolita v. Garbage. The gale blew itself out, but the near-dead calm that followed was almost as bad. The luckless Patolita radioed that she was having a race with her own floating garbage. Dolphin II found a breezier area.

Army and Navy reconnaissance planes from Oahu kept Hawaiian yachting fans posted as the boats approached. The night the leaders were expected in, hundreds of Hawaiians watched all night from the shore. At 1:52 a.m., amid shouting and honking of horns, the first sail loomed into the searchlight beam that marked the finish line. It was William L. Stewart Jr.'s big yawl Chubasco. But Chubasco, though first to finish, was not the winner. Yachting handicaps are logarithmically calculated by a complicated formula involving length, sail area, etc.; and Chubasco had a small handicap. More than ten hours later, Morgan's Dolphin II sailed past Diamond Head, the winner. Corrected time (after subtracting more than two days' handicap): 11 days 1 hr. 3 min. 59 sec.--a new record.

Steaks & Grog. Morgan* and his crew arrived in high spirits, having dipped into the ship's grog supply to celebrate. Unlike the haggard crews aboard other ships, the Dolphin's men were tanned, clean shaven and immaculate in shorts and blue jerseys. They boasted that they had slept eight hours a day most of the time, had never been lost for a minute. Some of them had felt a bit queasy at first, but later had dined heartily on 22 days' supply of steak, roasts, chicken, lamb curry, lobster salad and pie `a la mode. They had all gained weight. In spare moments they had played gin rummy and sipped afternoon tea. Nothing to it, really, indicated Actor Morgan.

*Real name: Francis Philip Wuppermann. His late parents headed the Angostura-Wuppermann Corp., U.S. agent for the sale of Angostura bitters. Actor Morgan was until recently the firm's "Vice President in Charge of Western Operations."

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