Word: sail
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Britain, Cowes Week is to yachtsmen what Ascot is to the horsy set. Last week hundreds of sleek racing craft, white and scarlet sails shining in the sun, gathered on the Medina estuary at Cowes on the Isle of Wight for one of Britain's biggest regattas since King George V went there to sail in 1935. This time, too, there was racing royalty on hand. The sports-loving Duke of Edinburgh left his queen at home, and by helicopter hastened out to the royal yacht Britannia, happy to escape temporarily from Buckingham pomp and ceremony. At sundown...
Shotgun Watches. Just 14 hours behind the white ketch, the 75-ft. schooner Constellation crossed the line. She had carried a spinnaker all the way-a tricky test for her helmsmen. They had to fight the wheel so hard to keep the big-bellied sail full that sometimes, with two men working at once, they could stand only 15-minute "shotgun" watches without relief. On corrected time, no boat seemed to have a chance to catch the Constellation, and Dutch Captain Frank Hooykaas did a happy jig of victory...
...Half a mile from the finish in the last of nine races for the Syce Cup and the Long Island Sound women's sailing championship, pint-sized Toni Monetti, 18, who won the midget title only five years ago, messed up a jibe and lost most of the lead she had built up on the first leg. Without wasting a moment, the Skidmore College sophomore went forward to untangle the sheets of her Lightning's big spinnaker. She finished in time to sail home third, earning just enough points to bring the Syce Cup home...
...capstan so that on the second high tide, the Endeavour was pulled free. Even then the ship would have sunk to the bottom if Cook had not been canny-and humble- enough to accept a timid midshipman's suggestion that he draw a dung-and-oakum-smeared sail under the ship and over a shattered spot in the bottom. Pressure clotted the sail to the hole, and the Endeavour and her men were saved. Though the East Australia coast was only 25 miles away, Cook's wisdom, the midshipman's wit, and even the crew...
...cartographer in Wolfe's campaign up the St. Lawrence against Quebec. Cook was 40 when he was chosen to skipper the Endeavour. By London's top scientists, the Fellows of the Royal Society and the Admiralty, he was handed a twofold mission: 1) he was to sail to Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus "over the disk of the sun"; 2) he was to search out "Terra Australis Incognita," a vast body of land presumed to extend westward from the tip of South America because it was theoretically necessary to counteract the weight of the Northern Hemisphere...