Kingarvie Heads at record speed For Salt Water Home: Schooner Days MCIX (1109)

By C.H.J. Snider

POSTCARD from down the river, from a graduate of the Junior Club, RCYC —

"We had a reach all the way, a strong fair wind, sailed all night and made Cape Vincent in 15 hours from Toronto. Good passage down St. Lawrence canals, slowed by rains. Cornwall Friday, Montreal Saturday."

So me we interrupt the venturesome voyage of Mrs. Anne MacDonell from Etobicoke to New York, or rather her diary, with some stop-press matter about another lady?

The other lady in this case is Kingarvie, not the King's Plate winner of yesteryear, who is a gentleman, but the yacht after whom the King's Plater was, by permission, named. Mr. R.S. McLaughlin, owner of the horse, was an admirer of the yacht. The ketch was launched and named years before the colt was foaled.

Lake sailors will agree that if the timing from Toronto to Cape Vincent is accurate, this is realy stop-press stuff.

Toronto to Cape Vincent is 160 statute miles, according to the steamboat schedules. To make in 15 hours requires maintaining a speed of 10.7 miles per hour.

Kingarvie is capable of that speed, for G. Herrick Duggan, her designer and owner, once drove her from Great Sodus to South Bay, averaging 11 hours per hour for five hours. The present writer, who owned her for nine seasons, on two occasions got 60 miles out of her in six hours on measured courses.

It falls to the luck of few yachts of her inches, 50 ft. waterline though she is now the largest sailer in the Royal Canadian Yacht Club to find conditions favorable for a 10-mile clip for so long a period. Commodore Jarvis' record in the Freeman Cup race of 1921, Hamilton to Kingston in his schooner Haswell, was 9.3 miles per hour for 20 hours, maybe the best long distance racing time for Lake Ontario.

Kingarvie never raced in her life. She is just a good cruiser, and has done lots of that - 40,000 miles of it.

Kingarvie was built at Port Hawkesbury, N.S., for Mr. Duggan, and he spent some time cruising in the Bras D'Or lakes and Bay of Chaleur before bringing her to Toronto by way of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Her present owner, Capt. W. Larmour, of Scarboro, is now making her maiden voyage in reverse. He expects to spend the summer where she was first cradled, and then, perhaps, for Florida, or the West Indies, or the Azores. He is a retired master mariner and textile merchant. His "crew" leaving Toronto were two brothers-in-law, Gerald Keenan and Jerry Snider Worden, and Mrs. Larmour. He expected reinforcements on the way down. Kingarvie, like her equine namesake smelling his stable, is giving them a fast ride home.

To paraphrase the auld Scotts ballad of Sir Patrick Spens:
"They housed their sales on Monenday non
Wi' a' the speed they may,
They hae landed safe in Montreal
Upon a Saturday."

And by the time this is read they may be back to salt water or even at Port Hawkesbury, which is at the end of Nova Scotia opposite Cape Breton Island. But that voyage often takes longer than two weeks from Toronto.