Yachting and Yacht Clubs

As the Dutch found preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the initial yacht was a leisure craft used mostly by royalty and later by the burghers for the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, coming out of private games. English yachting began with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his restoration 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 then named Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, ruled 1685–88), built more yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and the same way back, on a £100 punt. Yachting rose as popular with the affluent and nobility, but after that time the habit did not last.

The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was instigated at about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard association, with much naval panoply and gravity. The closest thing to racing was the “chase,” in which the “fleet” pursued an imagined enemy. The club endured, for the large part as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, after joining with other clubs, it became known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).

Yacht racing was seen in some ordered method on the Thames in the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland founded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV ascended to the throne in 1820, it was then called the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded with a racing dispute, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht association had been started 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 perpetual location of British yacht racing. The association at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, likewise at the ascension of George IV. Every member was required to have boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing matches for high bets were held, and the social life was superlative. Eventually Royal Yachting Club boats were raised in size to over 350 tons.

In North America, yachting was first accomplished with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and continued when the English took dominance. Sailing was mostly for fun and reached its epitome in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which traveled on the Mediterranean Sea and set a standard of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first continuing American yacht association, the Detroit Boat Club, was started in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens founded the New York Yacht Club aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts took the design of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century until the later half of the 19th century. The design of bigger yachts was first largely affected by the success of America, which was designed by George Steers for a club headed by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) was named after its victory at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and manufactured in a contemporary sense, with just a model being used. Not until the latter half of the 19th century did what was labeled naval architecture come about. Not until the 1920s did the use of the science of aerodynamics do for the craft of sails and rigging what such study had done earlier for hulls.

Because nearly all sailboats had been individually custom-built, there was a desire for handicapping boats as this was before the one-design class boats were built. Thus, a rating rule was created, which ended up in the International Rule, adopted in 1906 and edited in 1919. In the present day, one of the most rapidly growing areas in sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are built to standard specifications in length, beam, sail area, and other aspects (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing for such boats can be had on an even keel with no handicapping necessary. A perfect example is the uniform International America’s Cup Class taken on for participants in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

So long as yachting was an activity primarily for the aristocracy and the rich, money was no issue, and the size of boats grew, in both length and weight. The ascendancy and desire of smaller craft came in the second 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 hardiness of smaller yachts. Later in the 20th century, notably after World War II, smaller racing and pleasure yachts became more common, down to the dinghy, a favoured training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, yachts of less than 3 m were setting sail single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.

Kinds of power yachts
Post the decade 1840–50, during which steam started to replace sail power in commercial vessels, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly used in personal yachts. Sizeable power yachts were progressed to a high standard, and long-distance sailing was a favoured activity of the affluent. The earliest power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; these then made way to boats powered by the fully submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As in the case of naval and merchant vessels, auxiliaries with both sail and power were the yacht archetype for many years. By the second half of the 20th century, several yachts were still auxiliaries, but the majority were only power yachts containing gasoline or diesel engines.

In the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the construction of large steam yachts. Conspicuous within these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, that had triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was operated by a crew of at least 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 was used in active service during World War II.

As more sizeable and more dependable internal-combustion engines were created, many bigger boats began using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, using heavy oil for fuel, was furthered in World War I. During the decade following that, large power-yacht creation blossomed, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. From that period the largest auxiliary yacht constructed was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The manufacture of large power craft lessened after 1932, and the style after that was in preference of smaller, less pricey yachts. After World War II, a lot of small naval vessels were traded by private owners for conversion to yachts. In the late 20th century, yachting is a globally popular competition enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen who are actually owning and keeping their own small recreational boats. The amount of boats and sailors has increased steadily, not only in the traditional locations by the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.

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