Yachting and Yacht Clubs
As the Dutch rose to preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the initial yacht became a pleasure craft used first by royalty and secondly by the burghers on the canals as well as the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing yachts was incidental, borne from private games. English yachting started with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his restoration to the English throne 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 called Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, reigned 1685–88), ordered for additional 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 became popular for the affluent and aristocracy, but after that point the habit did not last.
The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was instigated around about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard group, and had large naval panoply and rigour. The closest thing to racing boats was the “chase,” for which the “fleet” pursued a fictional enemy. The club went on, for the large part as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, by joining with other clubs, it became the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing was first seen in some ordered manner on the Thames in the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland instigated the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV came to sovereignty in 1820, it was called the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded following a racing dispute, 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 patronage made the Solent – the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight – the continued site of British yachting. The organisation at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the ascension of George IV. Every member was required to possess boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing matches for large bids were held, and the club life was lovely. Eventually Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to over 350 tons.
In North America, yachting was first accomplished 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 apogee in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which cruised on the Mediterranean Sea and set a benchmark of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first continuing American yacht group, the Detroit Boat Club, was instigated in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens founded the New York Yacht Club aboard his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
The first sailing yachts followed the style of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through the later half of the 19th century. The style of large yachts was first heavily affected by the victory of America, which was created by George Steers for a syndicate 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. Earlier yachts were not designed and crafted in a contemporary sense, with only a model for an outline. 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 such science had earlier done for hulls.
Because almost all sailboats had to be individually custom-built, there arose a desire for handicapping boats as this was before the one-design class boats were built. Thus, a rating rule was written, which is found in the International Rule, taken on in 1906 and edited in 1919. In the present day, one of the fastest flourishing areas in the sailing industry is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are created to standard requirements in length, beam, sail area, and other areas (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing between such boats can be done on an even basis with no handicapping at all. A great 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 done mostly for the aristocracy and the rich, cost was no object, and the size of boats grew, in both length and weight. The rise and desire of smaller yachts came 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 voyage around the world (1895–98) led single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray made plain the seaworthiness of small yachts. Later in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and pleasure yachts became commonplace, down to the dinghy, a popular training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, yachts of less than 3 m were traveled in single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Kinds of power yachts
After the decade 1840–50, when steam began to replace sail power in market craft, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were employed more and more in personal craft. Bigger power yachts were progressed to a high standard, and long-distance cruising became a favoured activity of the affluent. The first power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then gave rise to yachts powered by the fully submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As well as naval and merchant yachts, auxiliaries with both sail and power were the yacht fashion for a number of years. By the later half of the 20th century, many yachts were still auxiliaries, but the larger part were solely power yachts containing gasoline or diesel engines.
During the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the design of large steam yachts. Notably among these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, containing triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was operated 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 was used in active service during World War II.
As more sizeable and more reliable internal-combustion engines were created, many bigger yachts were using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, employing heavy oil for fuel, was furthered for World War I. In the decade following, bigger power-yacht manufacture grew, reaching a climax in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. In that period the best auxiliary yacht constructed was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The building of big power yachts declined in 1932, and the trend thereafter was toward smaller, less pricey craft. From World War II, a lot of small naval craft were traded by private owners for conversion to yachts. By the late 20th century, yachting had become a globally popular activity enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen who are actually sailing and upkeeping their own small pleasure yachts. The amount of boats and sailors is increasing steadily, not only in the traditional areas by the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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