Stars at Long Beach

The international championship for star boats--slim, 22-ft. sloops with tall Marconi mainsails and cockpits just big enough for two--started smoothly enough off Long Beach, Calif, last week. Young Eddie Fink of Long Beach, the defending champion, won the first race in his Movie Star II. Adrian Iselin II, the Bacardi Cup holder, who had brought his Ace, his crinkly smile, his old sailing hat and his crony Ed Willis from Port Washington. L. I., snooped out most of the light breezes in the second. Fink won the third race and seemed to be on the last tack to retaining his championship when the race committee reached a highly controversial decision: to disqualify Fink in the second race, in which he had finished sixth, for fouling Paul Shields's Gull. Shields had lodged no protest; the boats had not collided. Nonetheless, the committee said that Fink had crossed Shields at a marker and forced him to luff.

When Fink skimmed home first in the fourth race, the Coast Guard cutters and yachts along the finish line greeted him with an uproar of foghorns and whistles but it still looked as though the eleven points the committee had taken away from him would cost him his title. Starting the fifth and last race. Glenn Waterhouse of San Francisco had 51 points and Fink would have to finish four places ahead of his Three Star Two and two places ahead of Edwin Thome's Mist to win. Still em- broiled with the committee. Fink was ordered to haul Movie Star II out of the water for remeasurement. He refused to do so until the race was over.

The boats crossed the starting line heeling in a brisk wind and it turned out to be the most exciting race of the series. Nereid II of Galveston rammed La Tortue, a French boat, causing Nereid II to be disqualified and Mrs. Judith Bailey-Balken. skipper of La Tortue, to flop into the water. Sparkler II of New Orleans lost its mast. On the Cene, of Seattle, a mainsail halyard parted and the crew repaired it just in time to reach the finish line at sundown. That a skipper in home waters has an immense advantage, any small-boat sailor knows. Nonetheless, when Fink sailed across the finish line first once more, for the fourth time in the series, it was an unprecedented achieve- ment. But it did not win him the title. He was disqualified once more, this time without question, for fouling the windward mark on the 10 1/2-mi. course. The title went to Waterhouse, who won the last race by finishing three seconds behind Movie Star II. A handsome, mustachioed San Francisco captain, Waterhouse had kept well up among the leaders in the earlier races, built up a point total of 67 for the series by careful racing of which the cardinal rule was to let his opponents make the blunders. Like his crew, Woodbridge Metcalfe, he works in the State Foresters office at San Francisco.

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