“I guess not,” Tom responded, easily. “Father and I went all over them last spring, when we did the rest. They’ll swell after they’ve been in the water a few weeks anyhow. Sometimes when you caulk a boat up too tight, she’ll spring on you.”
“All right, then, but just look at the paint, will you? It’s fairly peeling off in some places, Tom. You won’t find any of the Orienta boats looking like that.”
Tom looked at her, his eyes beginning to twinkle as his father’s did.
“I know what you’re up to,” he laughed. “You’re going to race in the regatta!”
Polly said nothing, but she kept on her course of fitting out for the race. The Orienta was to open its club house the first of August for the regatta season. It had been open as a club house since the first of June, but officially it welcomed the sailing world from the first of August until the fifteenth, the day of the first run. Even from the porch of the little cottage on the Knob, the girls could look across the bay to where the handsome red and white club house stood midway between the hotel and the row of summer cottages that straggled along the north shore all the way to the Inlet. As long as the girls lived on Eagle Bay, they never knew the name of the little river that rambled down between the bluffs and mingled with the channel waters. Everyone called it the Inlet, so they did too.
At one side of the club house was built a tall yacht shed, for the housing of such boats as were left there in the winter time. The best ones came up from the south, Dorothy said. Not way down south, but around Boston harbor, and Long Island, and New York. Her father’s big sloop would be the flag ship at the regatta, she told them, for he was the commodore of the challenging club.
“They don’t have a flag ship at a regatta,” Tom had interposed. “I never raced in one, but I’ve watched them ever since I was knee high to a toadstool. There’s just the racing yachts, and the judge’s boat, and they divide them into different classes.”
“I thought that was what they called it,” Dorothy said, in her pretty, half serious way, and Tom walked away, grinning blandly over the ways of girl people in general.
The Admiral had written that he was surely coming north regatta week, and Polly felt a growing emulation in her breast, a feeling of pride in the Polly Page Yacht Club, against this mighty rival.
“Let’s go over there and watch them overhaul their yachts,” she said finally, the day before the opening; so they tramped around the shore road to Orienta Point. Almost the first persons they saw were the Vaughan girls, sitting up on the broad veranda with a lot of ladies and young girls.