Helping Stop Hitler's Luftwaffe by Arthur McDonald

Author:Arthur McDonald [McDonald, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, History, World War II, Aviation
ISBN: 9781526764782
Google: NKVUzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Limited
Published: 2020-05-15T01:03:17+00:00

Reverse of Cigarette Card No.20 showing information about N23, Farandole.

The Burton Cup Championship for National 12 ft Dinghies, Arthur with his crew Mary by their dinghy Farandole, N23.

I made other modifications which I needn’t go into now, but altogether there were four differences in rig between Farandole and any other National-12 of which I ever heard. This must have given her an edge in improved performance over all the others, because Mary and I went down to the second championship meeting at Hayling Island at Chichester Harbour in early 1937 completely unknown in the dinghy racing world. We’d hardly ever raced Farandole before in open water and we were up against small-boat racers with an international reputation. One of these was the famous Stuart Morris, once described as the greatest small-boat helmsman of his generation. He’d won the Prince of Wales Cup for the International-14 Annual Championships, even then I think, something like nine times. There were others like Colin Ratsey from the great firm of Ratsey and Lapthorne, sailmakers, and one of the Nicholsons from Gosport, and so on, all people with international reputations. Mary and I were absolute beginners; no one had ever heard of us and we won not only the Championship race, but also the Yachting World Trophy for the best points score for the whole week.

Winning the Burton Championship race really was a bit of a fluke because I made an appalling start and, to cut a long story short, coming up to the first windward mark, beating against the tide, I was well back in twentieth or twenty-fifth place or something like that, and Stuart Morris, as was perhaps to be expected, was leading the fleet. Then something happened which had a very dramatic effect on the results of the race. The first windward mark was in the main channel running into Chichester Harbour, in which there was a very strong contrary tide, so strong in fact that a National-12 beating to windward couldn’t make any progress against it. The only way of making progress towards the mark was to do short tacks in the slack water near the shore line until well past it and then make a judgement as to when it was safe to make one long tack out and get round it. Well, Stuart was the first one to make the long tack and I watched him. He missed getting round the mark by about half a boat’s length. He couldn’t round it. What he should have done then was to have tacked back in to the shore line, gone further up on short tacks and made another try from there, but he might have lost two or three places if he had done that. So he decided to try and do short tacks out in the middle channel to get round the mark. This was a mistake. He couldn’t make any progress at all. I was far enough back, in the slack water, to observe what had happened and

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