When Fink skimmed home first in the fourth race, the Coast Guard cutters and yachts along the finish line greeted him with an uproar of foghorns and whistles but it still looked as though the eleven points the committee had taken away from him would cost him his title. Starting the fifth and last race. Glenn Waterhouse of San Francisco had 51 points and Fink would have to finish four places ahead of his Three Star Two and two places ahead of Edwin Thome's Mist to win. Still embroiled with the committee. Fink was ordered to haul Movie Star II out of the water for remeasurement. He refused to do so until the race was over.

The boats crossed the starting line heeling in a brisk wind and it turned out to be the most exciting race of the series. Nereid II of Galveston rammed La Tortue, a French boat, causing Nereid II to be disqualified and Mrs. Judith Bailey-Balken. skipper of La Tortue, to flop into the water. Sparkler II of New Orleans lost its mast. On the Cene, of Seattle, a mainsail halyard parted and the crew repaired it just in time to reach the finish line at sundown. That a skipper in home waters has an immense advantage, any small-boat sailor knows. Nonetheless, when Fink sailed across the finish line first once more, for the fourth time in the series, it was an unprecedented achievement. But it did not win him the title. He was disqualified once more, this time without question, for fouling the windward mark on the 10½-mi. course. The title went to Waterhouse, who won the last race by finishing three seconds behind Movie Star II. A handsome, mustachioed San Francisco captain, Waterhouse had kept well up among the leaders in the earlier races, built up a point total of 67 for the series by careful racing of which the cardinal rule was to let his opponents make the blunders. Like his crew, Woodbridge Metcalfe, he works in the State Foresters office at San Francisco.

In outer Los Angeles harbor, 13 crack skippers last week matched wits for one of the most coveted of yachting prizes: the Star Class world championship. Star boats (22-footers costing anywhere from $700 to $2,000) are not the most popular sailboats in the U.S.* But they are the most cosmopolitan—a one-design class that boasts fleets in 40 different countries.

Last week's regatta, the 20th in the history of the International Star Class Yacht Racing Association, had no European entries. Only foreign boat was the Cuban Kurush, owned by Havana's Dr. Carlos de Cardenas. Brightest of the Cuban fleet, Kurush proved no shining star in the Pacific. Neither did Manhattan Undertaker Frank E. Campbell's black Rascal, the flying ghost that had doomed all rival Stars on Long Island Sound this summer. Even Sailmaker Harry Nye Jr.'s Gale, from Lake Michigan, the boat that won this year's Bacardi Cup at Havana, took a lot of wake last week.
In four of the five races, a Californian finished first. Myron Lehman's Scout won the first, second and fifth races, would have sailed off with the championship had he not been disqualified in the fourth race when his sail touched a windward mark. Winner of the series—with a total point score of 58—was Wench, skippered by George Fleitz, a 25-year-old Los Angeles yacht broker.

At the victory ball, Champion Fleitz, like his 19 predecessors, received a big silver cup, the "Blue Ribbon of the Seven Seas." But this year's rendezvous seemed strange to many an oldtimer. Absent for the first time was the Stars' founder, patron saint and Commodore, George A.' ("Pop") Corry of Port Washington, L.I. 

Pop Corry, now crowding 79, is the Grand Old Man of sailing. In his battered Little Dipper, one of the original 22 Stars that were built on Long Island 30 years ago, he competed in New York's Larchmont Regatta this summer (for the 43rd straight year), finished 24th in a field of 33. With a slick new sloop like Wench, the story might have been different. But the Commodore would no sooner part with his Little Dipper than the 480 trophies she won for him. In 1912, the year after the Stars were born, he won 20 firsts and five seconds in 26 races—a feat never since equaled by any Star skipper.
 
When sailing, Pop wears a stiff wing collar, smokes a pipe. "The pipe is my wind gauge," he says. "On a mild day, a change of wind may be barely perceptible but when the smoke changes on the old pipe, I can trim her in and save perhaps 50 feet. To get the benefit of every little breeze on a mild day, I smoke until my throat is sore." 

Last week, while fellow sailors breezed around Los Angeles, Commodore Corry was at home—not because he was too feeble but because his wife was ailing. For a septuagenarian, Pop Corry is unusually spry, still walks four or five miles a day—just as he has for the past 50 years—selling petticoats to Manhattan stores. His spryness he attributes to his daily practice of standing on his head for five minutes before breakfast. "Keeps me limber," says he.

* Most popular, racing class is the Snipe (15 ft.) costing from $200 to $375.