Yachting and Yacht Clubs
As the Dutch found dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the first yacht had been a leisure craft used mostly by royalty and secondly by the burghers for the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, arising as private games. English yachting began 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 presented him with a 20-metre (66-foot) pleasure boat with a beam (maximum width) of 5.6 m (18 feet), which he then named Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, sovereign 1685–88), made additional yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and back, on a £100 bet. Yachting became classy for the wealthy and aristocracy, but after that period the habit did not last.
The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was started at about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard group, and held great naval panoply and gravity. The closest thing to a race was the “chase,” when the “fleet” pursued an imagined enemy. The club went on, for the large part as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, when conglomerating with other groups, it became known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing was seen in some organized method on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland funded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV came to sovereignty in 1820, it was then called the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded after a racing dispute, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht association had been initiated at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1815, and royal patronage made the Solent - the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight - the continued site of British yachting. The association at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, likewise at the accession of George IV. Every member was required to own boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing races for great bids were held, and the social life was lovely. It came to be that the Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to over 350 tons.
In North America, yachting started with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and went on when the English took power. Sailing was largely for leisure and rose to its high point in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which cruised on the Mediterranean Sea and created a standard of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first enduring American yacht society, the Detroit Boat Club, was formed in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens began the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
Early sailing yachts took the design of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century until the latter half of the 19th century. The design of sizeable yachts was originally heavily impacted by the win of America, which was created by George Steers for a association led by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) had its namesake after its victory at Cowes in 1851. The first yachts were not designed and built in today’s sense, with merely a model used. Not until the later half of the 19th century did what was called naval architecture come into being. Not until the 1920s did the application of the study of aerodynamics do for the design of sails and rigging what science had already done for hulls.
Because most of all sailboats had been individually custom-built, there arose a desire for handicapping boats as this was previous to the one-design class boats were built. Therefore, a rating rule came into being, which ended up in the International Rule, taken on in 1906 and amended in 1919. In the present day, one of the rapidly growing areas in the field of sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are created to standard dimensions in length, beam, sail area, and other elements (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing such boats can be held on an even par with no handicapping necessary. A great example is the uniform International America’s Cup Class taken on for yachts in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
As long as yachting was an activity primarily for the nobility and the rich, money was no problem, and the size of boats increased, in both length and weight. The rise and desire of smaller yachts came in the latter half of the 19th century out of the sailing of the Englishmen R.T. McMullen, a stockbroker, and E.F. Knight, a barrister and journalist. A trip around the world (1895–98) captained single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray proved 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 common, down to the dinghy, a favoured training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, boats of less than 3 m were sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Kinds of power yachts
Post the decade 1840–50, during which steam began to emulate sail power in market boats, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were favoured increasingly in leisure yachts. Bigger power yachts were furthered to a high element, and long-distance travel was a favoured activity of the well off. The earliest power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; these then gave way to those powered by the fully submerged screw or propeller type of propulsion. As well as naval and merchant yachts, auxiliaries possessing both sail and power were the yacht standard for a number of years. By the latter half of the 20th century, a lot of yachts were still auxiliaries, but the large part were exclusively power yachts with gasoline or diesel engines.
From the last decade of the 19th century there was a push in the manufacture of bigger steam yachts. Notably within these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, that had triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was manned by a crew of more than 150. The Mayflower, purchased by the United States Navy in 1898, was the official yacht of the president of the United States until 1929 and saw active service for World War II.
As bigger and more dependable internal-combustion engines were produced, many big boats were using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, employing heavy oil for fuel, progressed during World War I. From the decade after that, large power-yacht building flourished, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. During that period the best auxiliary yacht manufactured was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The building of large power yachts declined in 1932, and the style from then was for smaller, less expensive craft. Following World War II, a lot of small naval boats were traded by private owners for conversion to yachts. By the late 20th century, yachting is a internationally beloved competition enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen individually owning and keeping their own small leisure craft. The number of boats and sailors is increasing steadily, not only in the traditional places on the beach but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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