THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, MARCH 21, 1910. AN ATLANTIC YACHT RACE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9999, 21 March 1910, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, MARCH 21, 1910. AN ATLANTIC YACHT RACE.

The Atlantic Yacht Club of New York has offered a trophy of the value of £I,OOO, to be called the President's Cup, for an international race from Europe to New York. This would be something like a yacht race —•very much more so than the present contests for the America Cup. In those races the English challenger is handicapped out before the start by being compelled to sail his yacht across the Atlantic. The effect of that is that he has to build an oceangoing vessel for a coastal race, while the American defender is designed and constructed for the race alone, having no Atlantic to cross. No wonder the English boats have failed to regain the Cup in any of the twevle contestb they have had for it since the America captured it in 1851. And the competition is useless, anyhow. The boat that competes in it is generally—-especially oh the American side—a cigar-shaped freak, designed for an occasion and useless, except for the costly material that is in her, ever afterward. No lessons

j in seamanship or construction of any calculable value emerge from the) race, which excites no real sporting interest" owing to its foregone result and lack of pertinent bearing on the craft of yacht-racing. Ah Atlantic race would better it in more ways than one. It would be a test under level conditions, a trial of | seamanship, and would prick the enthusiasm and genius of designers and builders to produce genuine blue- | water yachts. The experiment has I been tried, though without any great success, for the Atlantic idea seems to have been dropped since the aptlynamed American three-masted I schooner Atlantic won the German Emperor's Gup in the race from Sandy Hook to The Lizard in 1905. But the America's Cup has fizzled since then, and the one-sided race now threatens, in spite of Sir Thomas Lipton's renewed challenge, to pass out of the category of things that are. On that account the Americans might prefer a real international yacht-race to i'o contest at all.