Small Winner

The sleek little (39 ft.) yawl Malay had finished the Newport-Bermuda race, "the thrash to the onion patch," the night before. Now she edged through Two Rock Passage into Hamilton Harbor. A small sloop drew abeam, and the Malay's skipper called across the stretch of water: "Who won the race?" The small-boat sailors slid past the yawl's counter and read the name on the stern. Their astonished answer drifted back: "Malay!"

Such late-hour ignorance among Malay's crew of six should not have been surprising. One of the drawn-out processes of the Bermuda race is picking the winner. All entrants are classed according to size. Each craft gets a time allowance, figured from a complicated formula but roughly proportional to her length on the water line. Multiplied by the length of the race,--a boat's given time allowance becomes her racing handicap. Long after the race is over, officials on the committee boat are busy penciling through columns of figures to find out who really won.

Last week Malay turned the trick with a green crew in her first blue-water race.

"We did it." said Skipper Daniel D.

Strohmeier, Bethlehem Steelman and member of the New Bedford, Mass. Yacht Club, "by following two simple rules: when in doubt go to westward, otherwise sail on the tack that will take you straight to Bermuda." Malay began by standing off on the port tack until she was nearly 45 miles west of the rhumb line, a straight-line course to St. David's Head. For a day she drifted in the Gulf Stream, while the crew fished and swam. Out of the stream, Malay worked westward again before she came about on the starboard tack for the last long beat to Bermuda.

First across the finish line, after 4 days 13 hrs. afloat, was John Nicolas Brown's famed, 73-ft. black yawl Bolero, leader in two other Bermuda races. But when committeemen had done their homework, they found that Malay, 40th to finish in a fleet of 77, had been at sea for 5 days 5 hrs.

52 min. 54 sec., and had won with her corrected time of 4 days 3 hrs. 40 min. 29 sec.

She was the smallest boat to take the trophy since 1906, when the 38-ft. yawl Tamerlane won the first Bermuda race.

-- An arbitrary and slightly inaccurate 675 miles for last week's race, giving the Malay a handicap of 26 hrs. 12 min. 25 sec.

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