Race date set

Yachting in Otago Harbour.
Yachting in Otago Harbour.
Some months ago Mr Fleming Day (editor and publisher of the New York yachting magazine Rudder) offered a gold cup of the value of 100 guineas to the Otago Yacht and Motor Boat Club for competition in an ocean sailing race of 100 miles or over. 

The club has decided to hold the race on December 28, the starting-point being an imaginary line drawn between the mole light and Taiaroa Heads.

The race will be to Oamaru, where the competing boats will round a buoy and then return to Port Chalmers.

It is anticipated that it will take about 24 hours to cover the course.

The race will be held under the International Rating Rules recently adopted by the club, and as the secretary has circularised all the New Zealand clubs with a view to obtaining the names of starters a record entry is expected.

The race is arousing considerable interest amongst local yachtsmen, and fully a dozen entries have already been received, although Professor J.

R. Scott of Canterbury College suggests that a race from Otago Heads to Lyttelton would be more of a true ocean-going event.

A remarkable character was unearthed at Carcoar, New South Wales, yesterday, when a man named John Bernard Fitzgerald was admitted to the local hospital suffering from influenza.

He is 72 years of age, and for 25 years he has been living the life of a hermit in the bush.

His hair is 4ft long, and he is a giant in stature, though his principal diet for quarter of a century has been wheat and corn ground by himself in a small crusher and made into porridge.

Mr W. Clark, formerly manager of the Nymagee copper mine, says that he knew Fitzgerald many years ago at Thames, New Zealand, and subsequently at Nymagee, where he worked as a miner.

Fitzgerald was the strongest man he ever came across, for he could lift logs which two ordinary men could not upend.

 

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