Word: aft
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Rugged Science. A steel-hulled, 142-ft. ketch (tall mainmast forward, shorter mizzenmast aft) with berths for nine scientists and a crew of 17, the Atlantis was still a very small ship to cope for months with the North Atlantic in all its ferocious moods. She had a rather feeble engine, but sails were her main reliance. Such a laboratory makes oceanography a rugged science. While the little ship rolls and pitches, the scientists work round the clock, snatching bits of food and sleep during quiet intervals in their experiments. Dress is informal. In the Tropics, oceanographers favor ragged shorts...
...into the next day and the dusk. By then, the heavy seas were surging with 30-ft. waves, smashing at the 31-year-old vessel. In the pilot house. First Mate Elmer Fleming, 43, heard a thud. He spun around and looked toward the stern. The vessel was sagging aft of midships. Fleming made for the radiotelephone and cried...
...chested challenger that bobbed too much in rough weather, slid off badly to windward. White-haired Cornelius ("Corny") Shields, Columbia's tactician during last summer's trials, put his racing-wise finger on Sceptre's big shortcoming: "She's too full forward and too fine aft...
Shallow-draft hulls are at their best in a following wind, and the wind stayed aft for three days. Finisterre ran downhill and showed her stern to many a deep-keeled craft that might have passed her had they been slugging it out to windward. Four days out, Finisterre got another break when the big boats up ahead ran into a calm. While they slatted helplessly, the smaller boats like Finisterre closed the gap the big fellows had opened up. On the last day, when storms made up in the southeast, Finisterre held her own in dusty going and drove...
...noted the lasting aptness of the old barnstormer's motto: you fly by the seat of your pants). I "dropped" the sinker in front of my masked face. It stayed there, floating. The merest delicate touch sent it gliding, featherlike, right or left, up or down, forward or aft. I was as happy as I would have been with a stringless yoyo. This was one place where a lead balloon would make...