Yachting and Yacht Clubs
As the Dutch came to dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the early yacht was a leisure craft used mostly by royalty and secondly by the burghers on the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing was incidental, borne from private challenges. English yachting started with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his reaffirmation to the English monarchy in 1660, the city of Amsterdam sent him a 20-metre (66-foot) pleasure boat with a beam (maximum width) of 5.6 m (18 feet), which he named Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, ruled 1685–88), made more yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and back, on a £100 wager. Yachting rose as fashionable with the affluent and aristocracy, but after that point the fashion did not last.
The first yacht group in the British Isles, the Water Club, was started in about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard association, and held great naval panoply and gravity. The closest thing to racing boats was the “chase,” in which the “fleet” pursued an imagined enemy. The club persisted, largely as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, by joining with other societies, it became the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing began in some ordered fashion on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland founded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV came to the throne in 1820, it came to be called the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded after a racing argument, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht organisation had been formed at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1815, and royal funding made the Solent - the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight - the perpetual setting of British yacht racing. The organisation at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, likewise at the accession of George IV. Each member was required to own boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing races for high bets were held, and the social life was superlative. Ultimately Royal Yachting Club boats increased in size to bigger than 350 tons.
In North America, yachting began with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and continued when the English had power. Sailing was mostly for pleasure and rose to its epitome in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which traveled on the Mediterranean Sea and created a standard of luxury and sophistication for the later yachts in the area from the late 19th century. The first persisting American yacht organisation, the Detroit Boat Club, was formed in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens instigated the New York Yacht Club while on board his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts took the lines of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through the latter half of the 19th century. The craft of sizeable yachts was first heavily affected by the win of America, which was created by George Steers for a syndicate started by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) found its namesake after its win at Cowes in 1851. Earlier yachts were not designed and manufactured in a contemporary sense, with only a model for an outline. Not until the second half of the 19th century did what was known as naval architecture come into being. Not until the 1920s did the application of the science of aerodynamics do for the craft of sails and rigging what it had previously done for hulls.
Because almost all sailboats had been individually manufactured, there arose a requirement for handicapping boats as this was previous to the one-design class boats were designed. Hence, a rating rule was created, which ended up in the International Rule, accepted in 1906 and revised in 1919. In modern times, one of the fastest growing areas in the sailing industry is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are built to standard dimensions in length, beam, sail area, and other elements (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing for such boats can be done on an even playing field with no handicapping required. A great example is the generic International America’s Cup Class taken on for racers in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
As long as yachting belonged primarily for the royal and the rich, money was no object, and the size of boats grew, in both length and weight. The ascendancy and desire of smaller craft happened in the latter half of the 19th century in the sailing of the Englishmen R.T. McMullen, a stockbroker, and E.F. Knight, a barrister and journalist. A journey around the world (1895–98) sailed single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray made plain the seaworthiness of less sizeable yachts. Later in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and pleasure boats became more popular, down to the dinghy, a popular training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, boats of less than 3 m were setting sail single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Kinds of power yachts
After the decade 1840–50, in which steam was set to take the place of sail power in market boats, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were favoured increasingly in pleasure vessels. Sizeable power yachts were furthered to a high degree, and long-distance sailing turned into a preferred pastime of the rich. The first power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; these then made way to boats powered by the wholly submerged screw or propeller sort of propulsion. As well as naval and merchant yachts, auxiliaries possessing both sail and power were the yacht archetype for a number of years. By the later half of the 20th century, many yachts were still auxiliaries, but the majority were only power yachts that had gasoline or diesel engines.
During the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the design of more sizeable steam yachts. Conspicuous among these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, containing triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was manned by a crew of at least 150. The Mayflower, commissioned by the United States Navy in 1898, was the official yacht of the president of the United States until 1929 and gave active service for World War II.
As bigger and more reliable internal-combustion engines were developed, many big yachts started using them for power. The development of the diesel engine, using heavy oil for fuel, progressed from World War I. During the decade following, large power-yacht creation blossomed, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. From that point the best auxiliary yacht manufactured was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The building of larger power boats fell away from 1932, and the fashion after that was toward smaller, less expensive yachts. After World War II, a lot of small naval boats were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. In the late 20th century, yachting has become a internationally loved competition enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen who are actually manning and maintaining their own small leisure yachts. The popularity of boats and owners is increasing steadily, not only in the traditional locations on the beach but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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