Word: skippers
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...destroyer, can override the sonar-transmitted sounds of distant submarine screws or reduction gears. The sun heats the thin layer of air over smooth water, and this in turn can bend radar waves. Sometimes a thermal layer, 100 to 300 feet deep, distorts sound-and a knowledgeable sub skipper plays this layer like a shield. He can confound enemy sonar by hiding in the clacking wake of a destroyer, or by backing the submarine through his own wake to lose himself in his own echo...
...less than middling middy, but his first plane ride, in a yellow twin-engined H16 seaplane, sent him soaring into a pilot's career. In 1930 he became a member of the U.S. Navy's famous Fighting Squadron 1, the High Hat Squadron (skipper of the High Hats: Lieut. Commander Arthur W. Radford). Nine of the High Hats, including Thach and Radford, barnstormed the nation in Curtiss F8C4 Hell-divers, tied wingtip to wingtip with Manila rope. Bound thus, Thach and some of his comrades astonished crowds with loops, snap rolls and high wing overs-and never snapped...
...Skipper Thach works his people hard. "We pay overtime," says he wryly, "after 24 hours a day." Task Group Alfa fuels its destroyers during mealtimes to save precious hours. He has cut his 10,000-mile outdoor classroom into four segments, runs off exercises in each one-as many as a dozen in a day and night. With the completion of each exercise, he folds his 160-lb., 6-ft. frame over the chart tables, carefully puts on his reading glasses for a close, almost wordless examination of the results. And the exercises continue unceasingly, each one posing new problems...
...while Sceptre, the British challenger, nimbly outran its own trial horse (a U.S. 12-meter named Gleam), the U.S. contenders knocked one another off in a bewildering series of form reversals. At week's end only Easterner looked a loser. Still in the running: Skipper Briggs Cunningham's Columbia, Arthur Knapp Jr.'s Weatherly, Donald Matthews' 19-year...
...races. In the last one, 21 years ago, he crewed aboard Harold Vanderbilt's victorious Ranger. After a slow start, he molded Weatherly's crew into a smooth-working unit, and his boat continues to improve. Vim's Matthews, at 24 the youngest of the skippers, is unsurpassed at beating the competition to the starting line by precious seconds, in last week's trial series trailed only once at the opening gun. But many experts still like Columbia, and 51-year-old Skipper Cunningham, with an eye toward the bad weather that often roils New England...