Anchors Aweigh

Since February the Navy's eight-oar crew had practiced in a bathtub-sized inlet at Annapolis called College Creek. The creek, only 400 yards long, wandered around four bends and under three bridges. Navy's crew banked around the turns, used more rudder than oars, cussed the creek, and seemed to have become a crack outfit. On the broad Hudson at the Poughkeepsie intercollegiate regatta last week, the Annapolis crew proved it.

The two West Coast entrants, Washington and California, were not what they once were in the days when they monopolized Poughkeepsie. Navy's shrewd Coach Buck Walsh saw only one likely rival; he told his crew: "Watch Cornell!"

Navy was caught napping at the start, got off last. It took a quarter mile at 34 strokes a minute to work into second place. Then pace-making California faltered, and Navy took the lead. Half a mile from the finish, Cornell began its sprint. Navy's Coxswain John Gartland called for a rise in the beat. It went up to 34, to 36. For the last 20 strokes, Navy hit a brisk 42 beat. They were less than half a boat length ahead at the finish when Coxswain Gartland gave "Easy all" to his crew and got set for the traditional fate of all victorious coxswains: a ducking by his mates.

Three days earlier, two crews who habitually snub Poughkeepsie had their own closed-shop regatta on Connecticut's Thames River. The victor, for the ninth time in a row: Harvard over Yale, by a boat length and a half.

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