IDEAL SPORT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26792, 8 June 1948, Page 6

IDEAL SPORT

JOYS OF YACHTING UNTOUCHED BY MACHINE AGE “Things are not very easy in the world to-day, but that is all the more reason to get as much pleasure as, we can out of the pastimes we have,” said the Governor-General, Sir Bernard Freyberg, V.C., when he presented trophies won during the past season to members of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron at the squadron’s seventy-sixth annual prize night. In this machine age people were supposed to give less time to work and more to enjoying themselves, said His Excellency. But people hardly had time to think, let alone play. They, expected machines to do all the work that muscles used to do, and they watched sport instead of taking part in it. The only things not touched by the machine age were the sea and sailing, the Governor-General continued. There was something about the sailor; he had time to think. Yachting was work that was a pleasure, and it gave a man a chance to get away by (himself and think. “ I look back on a wasted life,” said His Excellency, when he recalled that he was often asked why he did not do some yachting himself. Some of the happiest days of his life had been spent in a boat on the Wellirigtop Harbour and in the Queen Charlotte Sound when he was a young man, but during the ‘years he spent in the army after the First World War he did not have a chance to settle down. “Life seems to have conspired against me in that respect,” he remarked.