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There are still some big yachts. Last week several of them, led by the 161-ft. schooner Goodwill, were making port in Honolulu at the end of a 2,225-mile race from San Pedro, Calif.* Likewise, there are still some big, venerable and fairly standoffish yacht clubs, where the dues run to several hundred dollars a year, where it takes a crew of barmen to mix the drinks, and an orchestra plays, Meyer Davis-style, for the evening's dancing. But there are hundreds of other yacht clubs nowadays which offer the essentials—a place to moor a boat, a place for storing sails—for $25 a year or even less.
Says a Los Angeles yacht broker, summing up the recent changes in a couple of statistics: "Before World War II there were at least 50 really big yachts here—90 ft. or more. Today, there are only 15 left. But replacing the 35 which have disappeared are at least 3,500 smaller boats." San Francisco reports a similar trend: a rise (among registered yachts only) from 1,000 in 1940 to 2,300 today; in the same period, yacht clubs in the area have increased from 20 to 34. And West Coast sailors, unlike Easterners, who generally sail in protected waters with light or fluky winds, have to cope with a minimum of harbor facilities and a maximum of brisk breezes. Around San Francisco, where winds regularly hit up to 30 knots in the bay, any craft under 25 feet is properly considered risky. But the West Coast sailor glories in his necessities: he is an open-water sailor.
Inland, the sport is taking over waters that never saw a sail before. Near Atlanta, Ga. three years ago, a federal flood-control and power project created a winding lake, 30 miles long. By now, over what was once a land of cotton, the yachtsmen of two new Atlanta clubs can sail fleets of Thistles, Y-Flyers and Snipes every day of the year. At Wichita, in the dry state of Kansas, lives the National and Western Hemisphere champion in the Snipe (15½-ft.) Class, Aeronautical Engineer Ted Wells, who does his home sailing on tiny ( ⅔ sq.mi.) Santa Fe Lake.
The Champion. What do sailors get out of sailing? A fair amount of peace seems to be one good answer. Unlike the highways (and increasingly the fairways), the waterways still have plenty of uncrowded space. There are few serious smashups at 6 knots, and families with large enough craft can have their fun as families. But sailors themselves get tongue-tied or dreamy-eyed when they are asked why they like it. Typical answer: "It's a pretty sport, and there's nice sunshine out on the water."
Literary-minded sailors are fond of a prefabricated answer from Kenneth Grahame's classic book for children, The Wind in the Willows. Afloat one day, the Water Rat assured the Mole: "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing . . ." Unfortunately, while the Water Rat is expounding this view, he absentmindedly runs his boat on to a mudbank.
Moreover, to a good many sailors, simply messing about in boats, charming as it is, is not enough. They take their competitive instincts to the water with them. Such a man is Cornelius Shields, 58, a Wall Street stockbroker better known as "Corny"; also sometimes known (by the competitors he has beaten) as the grey fox of Long Island Sound.