TO THE LADIES

(text and pictures reprinted from the 1938 Log)

Women are playing a constantly greater part in every phase of modern sport but in none more so than in yachting. And in the sailing of small racing yachts no international class has a larger percentage of feminine participants than the Star Class. The seagoing gals on salt water and fresh, at the tiller or on the jib sheets, in local races and in larger interfleet and even international events, have shown and are showing in increasing numbers that they can take it. In many flotillas the fair sex is providing the enthusiasm which builds for future progress and in others the ladies are doing the real work of running the fleet.

Taking a world‑wide view of our Class, there are few fleets in which they are not well represented. Surely they are helping to build a better Class and even more surely are they making Star Class activities afloat and ashore more colorful and enduring. So we say - TO THE LADIES.

(In the September, 1940 issue of Starlights there appeared notes by Barbara Nettleton from PS (picture 3 below) and Elizabeth Miller from NOG (pictured in the second composite photo).

Items from Barbara Nettleton, the fair skipperess of Puget Sound usually gets more attention than we have had space for lately. So we will let the typing secretary from Seattle have the floor on color schemes: "We have quite a rainbow this year. I'm getting a terrific ribbing for my paint job as usual. (There is more than one way to take that, Barbara). As the only girl in the fleet I took the opportunity of being original and Alberio appeared painted a dizzy coral pink. The boys can't stand it and have dubbed her 'Finger‑nail polish scow'. When she's alongside Herb Ihrig's crimson Goony we have something. But the shades of green and blue and varnish and white make us quite a gang. The old boys in the yacht club scorn us." We hope to have more analyses from our Pacific Coast color authority on style motifs for the new year with special emphasis on use of the spectrum.

Elizabeth Miller writes very frankly from New Orleans of a problem they have there and we hope to print their solution to it, if and when they arrive at one, as it is a condition which many if not most of our fleets have at this time.

"Plans to attempt the bringing together of a fleet now so large that it shows signs of splitting in to 'the fast boats and the slow boats' are now being considered. There is the same discouragement present which appears in any fleet if there is a corner on the market for winning the silver. In a fleet which has heretofore been very close in its sailing activities, never knowing who would win until the gun was fired, this present state of affairs is discouraging and disconcerting, and we hope to work out some plan by which this might be remedied."