Word: tack
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Some of her poems bring an ache to the throat, remembered beauty to the eye, music to the ear, a fresh tack to familiar musings. Some do less. Mothers of five children are rarely the stuff of which great poets are made, as Mrs. Lindbergh herself has pointed out. Her prose is often markedly poetic; at times her poems are prosaic. But if artistry and eloquence occasionally flag, sensibility never does. At their best, her lines flash with beauty and brightness, and like
...thudding drum effect (by shoving pieces of rubber between the strings) and used it in their version of Ravel's Bolero. Their latest effort is even weirder. The tunes in Soundproof (Greensleeves, Baia, Lover) contain effects that resemble giant rubber bands being plucked, the click of a tack hammer, xylophones and harpsichords, and a sound like a Hawaiian guitar quivering on the breeze. To play these tricks, Pianists Ferrante and Teicher not only mute the strings with wads of paper, bits of wood and metal bars, but also pluck the strings while holding down keys for resonance, and even...
...time to douse his own spinnaker. Never for a moment did he really stop racing. With his light hull and yawl rig, Nick Geib could hoist plenty of canvas, and the race was a spinnaker run most of the way. He never hesitated to use that tricky tactic, downwind tacking. "We like to tack downwind," says he. "We keep her footing that way." Whenever the wind shifted a few degrees. Geib jibed, kept running dead before the breeze. The skipper had only one complaint: "During the last leg, every time I took the helm, the wind would die." Unwilling...
...rhumb-line distance to Bermuda is 635 miles, but since no sailing boat can sail the rhumb line exactly, the handicapping distance was 675. Finisterre took a starboard tack off Newport with a 163° compass course. In late evening the wind shifted to the southwest, and Mitchell's crew changed from a spinnaker to a balloon jib. As the small (38 ft. 8 in. overall) yawl left coastal waters, the crew took hourly water-temperature readings, knew they had entered the warm-water Gulf Stream when the thermometer rose to 78°. Navigation was difficult during the whole...
...same thing was happening to other competitors, and canvas was popping on most boats. Finisterre's No. 2 Genoa blew out, but the crew replaced it and bore down while bigger yachts were reefing cautiously. Said Mitchell proudly: "After the big squall, we stayed on the port tack and just drove hell out of her . . . Between noon Monday and noon Tuesday we exceeded 200 miles while boats twice our size did only 250. We were averaging eight knots...