The Vineyard Trophy, 1934

Starting at six o'clock in the evening of 31 August, twenty one yachts participated in the third annual race from Stamford, around the Vineyard Haven lightship of the point of Cuttyhun Island at the entrance to the Vineyard Sound, and return – a distance of 232 miles. The weather with mostly light airs, some calms and a few patches of coastal mist, did not favour the schooner rigs. The winner was Walter Wheeler's Cotton Blossom II, well sailed under conditions that suited the "old" Q-class racer.

Stormy weather, barely three months after her launch by Nevins at City Island, had a reasonable race in the hands of her owner, Philip LeBoutillier, placing 4th in B class and fifth overall, but was pipped by Alsumar skippered by his son Philip Jr.

Alf Loomis in his Hotspur

Alf Loomis (Alfred Fullerton Loomis (23 August 1890 - 26 March 1968), the well known yachting writer and editor, indulged in a little self-deprecation after being last in his class - which had happened to him before. But he kept his sense of humour, writing in the November issue of "Yachting":

I made the customary apologies to my crew.

On the way out when we were still hopeful I had said I thought the Bally Hoo would beat us because she was faster and closer winded than Hotspur. But on the way home, when we sat on deck in the warm sunshine and chewed the fat, Phil Roosevelt offered a more comforting suggestion. He said that Bally Hoo is a famous example of a racing hull designed without figuring in the prismatic coefficient^[1] of the keel. He inquired whether Linton had figured the prismatic coefficient of the keel in designing Hotspur, and when Linton said he had I knew where to find my out. I haven’t the faintest shadow of a notion what a prismatic coefficient is, but anybody with a grain of sense can see that there’s no use in hauling a boat before a race to scrub barnacles off her keel when the designer has festooned it with prisms that won’t wash off.

So the next time I race I’ll ask for a set-up where prismatics are segregated from non-prismatics. Also I’m going to forget about that four-point wind shift, and in working to windward do the exact opposite of what I think is right. But I’m never going to alter my conviction on the advantage and the solid satisfaction of racing a single-sticker. Fourteen yachts of twenty-one starters finished the third annual Vineyard race. Numbered in the first ten on corrected time were nine sloops and cutters and one yawl. The last four were schooners. Maybe it wasn’t schooner weather.

Notes:

[ Back ] Footnote 1: "prismatic coefficients" in many forms are used by naval architects to try and assess drag under various speeds and conditions. In his book The Hotspur Story suggests that designer Linton Rigg was more practical than mathematical; on a last minute whim they added six inches of oak between keel and ballast which suggests that even radical changes to a keel prismatic coefficient were not at the forefront of his thoughts.
John Linton Rigg was born in Jamaica in 1896. He grew up on the east coast of the USA, learned to sail on the Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River, and completed an engineering program at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry in Philadelphia. During the late 1920s and 30s, he successfully brokered yachts in New York city. In the 1950s, he moved to the Bahamas and founded the National Family Island Regatta, then to Carriacou (Grenadines, West Indies), built his own Mermaid, a 44' gaff-rigged cutter of the "inter-island trading" type, and in 1965 was instrumental in establishing the remarkable (and continuing) Carriacou Regatta.