O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [74]
Yet Long Island and the South Shore was the gold coast of gold coasts, and Islip, the world capital of yacht racing . . . out past Sandy Hook and into the winds!
America’s Cup seemed permanently ensconced in the New York Yacht Club. There were lesser sailing venues—north of Long Island to Maine and south from the Chesapeake to the Gulf, dozens of new yacht clubs came into existence—but none was so grand as the NYYC and its territory.
In the beginning, racing yachts had been modified versions of commercial schooners, and the rules of racing were lax and sealed with a handshake. Over time the yachtsmen acquired the costly hobby of building pure racing boats. Hulls, masts, and rigs evolved from sloops and cutters to a fairly standardized yawl rig of under a hundred feet at waterline, carrying a sail capacity, give or take, of ten thousand square feet.
Then came the bottomless-rules committee, which demanded of the British that they give a full and accurate measurement of their boats, six months in advance of a challenge. And other rules, all stacked against them, in their eyes.
It was the competition between American syndicates to represent the United States that advanced into the development of the big racing yachts.
The Kerr family raced around the Chesapeake. Horace was a builder of warships. It took a long time for him to get the message that hale and hardy Yankee labor could handcraft a yacht, matching the jewels that came from Scotland and Scandinavia. The Kerrs’ yachts had all sailed over from Scotland.
The family raced for years on the Chesapeake in match races for purses that often exceeded a thousand dollars. Alas, Horace yearned to get into the big action and entered in the challenge round of 1885 and was skunked by minor NYYC boats. So much for Lochinvar II.
With fewer people and better sailing waters, Newport became the new gathering place. Although New Yorkers and the NYYC dominated the Newport scene, there was room for tycoons of the Kerr ilk coming from all over the country.
Horace’s brothers, minor players in the shipyard, set up permanent residence in Newport. They were damned good yachtsmen, Donald and Malcolm; Donald as navigator and Malcolm in the sail trimming. Back in Islip, New York, a crew and a professional racing captain were hired and Lochinvar III made a decent entry into the big time.
Horace was at the helm, of course, and after he won a few match races, his ambition grew.
Horace felt that the only way to get into Cup contention would be to invent and exploit something totally unique . . . not exactly circumventing the rules, but something that could slip in under the rules until it was discovered and the rules were changed.
For the season of 1891, Lochinvar III would be carrying a secret system, spoken of in whispers as the Butterfly.
The basic thesis was that there should be an underwater device that could respond to what was happening with the wind and sails.
The Butterfly was a pair of mobile vertical trim tabs attached to both sides of the bottom of the keel, operated from cables inside the keel.
The tabs were free-floating and as sensitive to currents as the feathered ends of birds’ wings are to air currents.
Belowdecks, a system was installed to take instructions from the movements of the Butterfly tabs. A highly polished cannonball weighing a half ton, slotted into a rail, rolled instantly on command from side to side across the centerline, acting as a counterbalance when the wind tilted the boat.
. . . for the ultimate purpose of maximum rudder stability. A special crewman on deck read the Butterfly meter and moved the ball by a handle connected to cables below. One could liken it to dancing with a partner on ice without skates.
If the ball rolled