125 YEARS OF AMAZING SAILING
Editor Elaine Bunting looks back at how sailing has changed during Yachting World’s long history
Yachting World is celebrating its 125 birthday and our place as the world’s oldest yachting magazine. That world was a profoundly different one. When we were first published in 1894, Queen Victoria was on the throne and Gladstone was prime minister.
The steam turbine was not yet developed and the first radio message by Marconi still four years away. You could buy Coca-cola in bottles and the Olympics was being established on a four-yearly cycle, but women still could not vote and legislation regulating the employment of children in factories was a decade away from being written.
The influence of Britain’s naval history, its large fishing fleets and the country’s relationship with the sea was beginning to make seagoing a popular pastime. In 1894, there was no offshore racing, only the occasional event for the big cruisers. But the many sailing merchant ships and coastal working vessels meant there was a large pool of qualified sailing hands to crew on private yachts, which tended to be conversions or copies of wellfounded working boats. The author Erskine Childers, for example, made a famous cruise from Dover to the Frisian islands in 1897 in a 30ft converted lifeboat, Vixen.
Lloyds Rules for yachts arrived in 1906, and yacht construction changed. Many new designs had steel frames. One-designs, then in their infancy, became more popular. The 33ft Solent One-design, for example, dates from 1896 and many more regional one-designs sprang up, as well as yachts built to a rule, such as the 12-metres.
Popular appeal
After the First World War, modern amateur ocean racing arrived, as did small cruisers, by designers such as Harrison Butler, Captain O.M. Watts, Norman Dallimore and, in the Thirties, Laurent Giles. By 1939, designers such as Robert Clark had begun to reduce the wetted surface and displacement by cutting away at the forefoot of designs and pulling up the turn of the bilge (still plank by plank!) to give more of a fin to the keel.
The Second World War exerted its influence on design, as there was such wide experience of being able to produce large numbers of ships,
aircraft, tanks and vehicles, and designers and builders started to think in terms of production boats. The auxiliary engine had also become more commonplace – and reliable – and this was the beginning of a sustained growth in gentlemen’s motoryachts.
By the end of the Sixties, almost all performance yachts were being designed with an eye to the RORC rule, even if their owners intended to race only once a year. Freeboards had risen, rigs were now masthead, keels were getting shorter and designers toying with rudders right aft and keels with trim tabs.
Dinghy racing introduced many of the new middle class to sailing. The big success story was Barry Bucknell’s Mirror dinghy marine plywood kit design in 1962.
In 1966 the Derek Kelsall-designed trimaran Toria won the Round Britain Race. The young British designer had already proven that crossing the Atlantic from east to west aboard these strange machines was possible. This was the start of a long and enduring love affair between solo offshore sailors and fast multihulls that has led directly to the giant trimarans and foiling yachts of today. It also fanned the lasting passion for short-handed ocean racing.
In the Seventies, design ideas were liberated by new building techniques in glassfibre. The
IOR rule shaped design for almost two decades and in the midst of this, the 1979 Fastnet Race disaster and its aftermath forced scrutiny and research, and elevated standards for safety equipment.
In the late part of the Seventies and early Eighties, charter yachts grew in numbers and the first flotillas were established. Round the world cruising, though rare, became a dream and the books published by adventurers ignited the dreams of a generation of Baby Boomers. Professional sailing opened up as a full-time job, and an industry around which a career could be built.
Changing shape
Fast forward to 2020 and we are rising on another wave of change. The understanding and application of foiling technology is shaping the sport. Multihulls are increasingly popular for racing and cruising, and ‘time out’ and lifestyle cruising is booming, fuelled by a multitude of bloggers and vloggers.
Yachting World has changed, too, and followed the changes in the media. Today, we have a thriving website, part of the world’s largest yachting site, and 300,000 social followers. Our videos reach millions – our 2019 Fastnet videos alone were watched over 2.2 million times.
But still print has a special place, for both the quality and accuracy of the writing, and the skills of the stills photographer. After 3,323 issues (the magazine began as a weekly) chronicling the sport, sailing never ceases to provide us with powerful stories, and some of the most surprising adventures.