Not so long ago, a veteran sailor brought his modern yawl in from a race on San Francisco Bay with one spreader broken and a j

Not so long ago, a veteran sailor brought his modern yawl in from a race on San Francisco Bay with one spreader broken and a jib fairlead torn loose.' Searching for some war to describe the force of the wind, he said, with awe, "Why, even the Birds were luffing their mains."

On this evidence everyone around the yacht club bar promptly agreed it must have breezed up to at least 40 .knots. When these doughty 30-foot sloops condescend to luff, it's dusty indeed.

This role of the Bird boats as impromptu anemometers is somehow fitting, for no boat better epitomizes the windy sailing conditions of San Francisco Bay conditions described as either wonderful or gawd awful depending upon " the degree of masochism possessed by the describer. To many a yachtsman, no boat of comparable size now sailing, better meets these particular conditions than the Birds

All this veneration is the more surprising when one considers that the Birds can be described as ancient, cheaply-built, ungainly-looking boats with ridiculously out-moded rigs and lines, that none but an owner could love. The basic dimensions sound reasonable: 30'1" x 24’ X 7'8" x 5'3". But the shallow hull is topped oft with a raised deck that breaks sharply abaft the mast in order to devote the after two-fifths of the boat to a huge cockpit with a narrow well. The overall effect is that of a flapper's pointed slipper. Add to this the fact that the boats have been so heavily ballasted forward that the once-straight sheer, sags downward to the stem, giving them a despondent look not unlike that of a sick shark.

The rig causes yacht designers to shudder. It consists of a relatively huge main and a club footed jib not much bigger than a napkin. The stubby, solid mast, about as thick as a small telephone pole, rises 32 feet above the deck.

The heavy boom, more than 20' feet long, extends well out over the wide transom, necessitating running backstays. The boom is only a foot above the deck and has a habit of sweeping the cockpit clean of the unwary when coming about. There are no jumpers. The mast is stayed forward by both a jibstay, attached some 20 feet up, and a forestay which goes to the truck. The forestay is secured to the stem fitting by a pelican hook, which must be released and the forestay carried aft to the mast every time the spinnaker is set. It is also a dandy idea to get the forestay back in. place before turning to windward.

The hull and-rig are ideally combined to keep the crew alert and clean. Being down by the bow, a Bird tends to scoop up a certain amount of green water in a chop. With nothing between the cockpit and the bow but an unbroken expanse of deck, a goodly portion of this water winds up in the laps of the crew. Here is where the low boom has another important effect on the crew, for very little spray can escape the main. Thus the crew gets not only a frequent bath but also a constant shower.

Of course, the waterlogged crewman can always duck below to stand up and shake himself; he can stand up, that is, if he is less than four and a half feet tall. But if nothing else - and there usually is nothing else - the cabin offers a .fine place for a daytime snooze, there being in most Birds neither ports nor deadlights nor a forward hatch to relieve the interior gloom.

From all this one would think the Birds were designed more than 35 years ago. They were. Not only were they designed then, but virtually all of them were nailed together not much after that. In all, 25 Birds were built. It is a source of some amazement that 22 of these antique vessels not only are still afloat, but form one of the hottest, racing classes on San Francisco Bay.

What has undeniably saved the Birds from the kindling pile is a quality best summed up by the slogan of the class that appears on its page in the Northern California Yachting Year Book: "Nothing sails like a Bird." To this might well be added, "... on San Francisco Bay." For even the most fanatic Bird sailor doesn't claim his boat would cop many trophies in Southern California waters or even on Long Island Sound.

But San Francisco Bay offers its own challenges. Every afternoon during the summer, with the regularity of Old Faithful, the westerlies rush, in through the Golden Gate at a customary 18 to 25 knots. On race afternoons, for some reason, it always seems to be blowing 30. The tide also always seems to be ebbing, the science of oceanography to the contrary. With the entire Bay and its tributaries draining through the narrow Golden Gate to the sea, a five-knot current is not rare. The result of all this water going one way while all this wind goes another is a steep, short chop fit only to test the holding qualities of a skipper's skill.

Indeed, on running into these conditions, racing machines from other parts sometimes have a tendency to lie on their beam ends and imitate a yo-yo while' drifting inexorably out to sea. Meanwhile, the Birds sail by, going like freight trains. .

It would be nice to say that the Birds skim over these unpleasant waves like their namesakes. They don't. They. go through them. But it is the relative ease with which they do - and have done so for the past 35 years -that has won the Birds a peculiar blend of astonishment and admiration, not unlike that which Archie Moore enjoyed in the world of prizefighting. What makes a particular boat go well in particular conditions is always a dandy subject for a few weeks' debate. Suffice it to say that the two features of the Bird boat most often cited by local experts are the high ballast-displacement ratio and, strangely enough, the old-fashioned, outmoded rig.

The original plans of the Bird called for a keel weigh; of 3780 pounds and a waterline length of 22 feet. Over the years Bird owners have added another 1000 pounds of inside ballast, bringing the waterline to 24 feet. This gives the Birds close to 4800 pounds of ballast out of a total displacement of somewhere around 9000 pounds - or a ratio of better than 50 per cent. The predominant feature of the rig, with its relatively short mast and long boom, is, of course, the low aspect ratio of not much more than three to two. These two ratios add up to one specific quality: stiffness. :

Just who was responsible for this design which seems so outlandish today is a matter of dispute. The most prevalent and appropriate story is that they were designed by a drunken English remittance man while in his cups. This version is probably apocryphal. The consensus of old timers holds that the Bird design was commissioned by a syndicate of the San Francisco Yacht Club in 1923. The first one was built by Herbert Madden of Sausalito to plans drawn up by Fred Brewer, a naval architect who was then working in Madden's boatyard. The design, some say, was not too different from the old Victory class from Long Island Sound. The syndicate accepted the first boat and then sent, the plans back. East' for revision by John Alden. Alden, the story goes, added some weight to the keel and made numerous other changes, only some of which were accepted by the syndicate. Whatever the confused circumstances' surrounding their birth, photographs show the Birds have not changed a whit in any important respect during the past 35 years. At least.- four attempts have been! made to give them a modern rig with a decent aspect ratio and permanent backstays. Two boats were re-rigged and two were built with taller masts and shorter booms. Everyone agreed that it certainly was nice not to fiddle with running backstays nor to duck every time on coming about. But just about everyone also agreed the boats didn't sail nearly as well, arid the new-fangled ideas never caught on. "It isn't that, we haven't learned anything about naval-architecture in 35 years," a Bird boat owner will tell you. But from his gleeful grin it seems clear that he isn't a bit sure we have.

The ability of the Birds to take heavy going has become legendary, and it Is significant that they have no sissified innovations like reef points or storm sails. There was the time it was blowing 60 on the run home from the Lightship and a stout crewman had to be stuffed in the companion way of one Bird to keep the cabin from filling. Or the time shore stations clocked gusts up to 30 as the racing fleet beat its way back from Vallejo at the north end of the Bay. "We did bury the lee rail a few inches on that one," concedes . John Ford, a long-time Bird sailor generally regarded as one of the best racing skippers on the Bay. And, of course, while the rest of the fleet was frantically reefing and changing jibs during these affairs, the Bird: simply sailed along – there being little else they could do about it. This inflexibility of sail area pertains to light winds as well as strong. The Birds carry neither genoa jib, ballooners nor other methods of increasing fore-and-aft canvas. In five knots or 50 they carry the same tiny, self-tending jib. The reasons for this are many, .one obvious one being that with all the other unpleasantness a crew faces on a Bird, changing sails and manning jib sheets would constitute an invitation to mutiny.

While this fixed sail area - a total of 408 square feet - undoubtedly hurts the Birds in light airs, it hurts each of them equally. And in these days when no respectable racing machine leaves the dock without a dozen bags of sails aboard, the economic advantages are obvious. There is also a far more subtle attraction in this system for the skipper. He is spared that awful dilemma between setting the number two genoa with .three rolls in the main or the number three genoa with two rolls in the main. The Bird skipper simply "straps her in and lets her go, fair weather or foul.

Despite the awkward looking rig, the self-tending jibs make the boats surprisingly easy to handle. Birds without reefing gear or storm sails have cruised as far as Catalina, some 400 miles south, single-handed. In one race on the Bay last year, an irate Bird skipper whose crew failed to show up sailed the course alone, even setting his spinnaker which indicates the boats have a certain measure of stability downwind. Needless to say, he didn't win and it should be added that he had a mite of trouble getting the spinnaker in, but he at least showed his errant crew he could live without them.

In. this respect, skipper Ford, who winds up with the class championship as often as not, raced for years with two not-very-knowledgeable young ladies in his crew, much to the chagrin of the hairy chested types he beats. On windward legs, he herds the feminine crew below to cut windage !

And, if nothing else, bouncing around in the cabin of a Bird for a couple of hours while being regarded as so much pig lead is an excellent way to test a pretty young thing's contention that she just loves sailing. Because they have been around so long and because their owners have usually numbered many of the finest jailors on the Bay, the Birds have served as a training ground for a whole generation of local yachtsmen. The phrase "he sailed in Birds" has become a peculiar sort of accolade. To qualify a potential crewman by saying, "He sailed in Stars' is to indicate he is a red-hot sailor with a good knowledge of the art, but to have sailed in Birds is to have passed the post-graduate course. The diploma means the student not only knows sailing, he knows sailing on the Bay with its fine winds, rough water and tricky currents. He knows that it ebbs first near the San Francisco shore. He knows the flat spot behind Angel Island. He knows the eddy in the flood current near the north end of Golden Gate Bridge and a hundred other secrets the Bay slowly divulges to the racing man.

With many a leading yachtsman regarding Birds in much the same way as an old grad looks upon his alma mater, it is no wonder the boats have achieved a unique niche in local yachting circles. Indeed, it is almost surprising that: there is a hardy little band of heretics who .don't think the Bird is the greatest sailboat now afloat.

“They were a good, simple little boat in their day, but we could do a lot better now," says Lester Stone, proprietor of the historic Stone & Sons boat building firm in Alemeda, which built four Birds back in the 1920s.

Yacht designer Myron Spaulding agrees. "Bird sailors would skin me alive for saying it," he says with a grin, "but they are far from ideal boats. They lack: buoyancy forward, the rig is inefficient and the accommodations are ridiculous: " One reason they are so popular is that they are one of the few classes designed for the Bay. Yachtsmen would rather import a boat that's proved itself somewhere else than have one built with local conditions in mind. I think it's a sad mistake."

Spaulding cites the case of the Rhodes 33s, slender, beautiful 33-foot-overall sloops designed by Philip Rhodes, which have made a name for themselves in Southern California. "After a few races on the Bay," says Spaulding, "the owners added 1000 pounds of inside ballast to stiffen them up. This made them stiff enough all right-. .In fact, their masts began snapping like toothpicks and the insurance companies insisted that the rigging be redesigned to meet the added strain."

While Spaulding may not be a Bird fanatic, it is significant to note, that he is a veteran racing skipper, he once sailed in Birds. "I went from a Bird to a Six-Meter," he recalls, . there was a fast boat. “Of course," he adds with that nostalgic look that old Bird sailors often get, "I'd be going to windward in a slop in the Six-Meter and, you know, there would be that old Bird of mine sailing damn near as fast” It is significant to note that the Six-Meters, the R boats, and a number of other hot classes of yesteryear have all but disappeared from the Bay, while the Birds go sailing on.

Today, the Bird Class Assn. is admittedly worried about, the future. Most of the Birds are 30 years old and none ;are getting any younger. No new ones are being built, for while the yachting fraternity may revere the Birds, they are not letting sentiment unsnap their checkbooks. The First Bird built in 1923 was turned out for $1800. Estimates on duplicating her nowadays range anywhere from $10,000 to $12,000. The trouble is, as designer Spaulding notes, that "for a. few thousand dollars more, a man can get a boat of comparable size with full cruising accommodations."

Most of the Birds have had engines installed at one time or another, but only seven-boats have retained them. Most of these Birds with engines don't race. Their owners are hopeful that all Birds will install engines or, at the least, allow them handicaps for their propeller drag: This, they argue, would promote a greater turnout on race days and insure added longevity for the class as a whole. These efforts have so far proved unavailing. The majority of Bird sailors appear to belong to that breed who feel that anyone who can't sail five tons of boat into a narrow berth against a stiff wind doesn't belong on the Bay in the first place. Then, too, despite their surface worries, most Bird owners seem to have an inner conviction that the Birds have been a part of the Bay for so long that they always will be. And, indeed, at the present rate of attrition, they may still be sailing well past the year 2000, slogging through the fog-grey, whitecapped water, their crews cold, wet, miserable and smugly triumphant as they edge past those futuristic racing machines of the next millennium.