DRAWN BY W. TABER
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY WALTER BLACKBURN.
THE NEWPORT CATBOAT.
The most important and numerous yachting interest of the country, however, as would be expected, is along the northeastern seaboard, where, measured by numbers and the investment in boats, wharves, club-houses, and equipments generally, it surpasses any other district in the world. More than one hundred clubs exist between Maine and Philadelphia.
The earliest form of yacht [as Mr. F. W. Pangborn reminds us in “The Century” for May, 1892] was, of course, a rowboat with a sail.... From the primitive sprit-sail pleasure-boat comes the ever-present and universally favored center-board catboat, a type of yacht which, for speed, handiness, and unsafeness, has never been surpassed. Keel catboats are also built, but the typical American “cat” is the center-board boat of light draft, big beam, and huge sail. The two objectionable points about boats of this class are their capsizability, and their bad habit of yawing when sailing before the wind. Yet the cat is the handiest light-weather boat made. It is very fast, quick in stays, and simple in rig; but it can never become a first-class seaworthy type of yacht. It belongs among the fair-weather pleasure-boats....
RIG OF THE YAWL.
From the center-board catboat grew the jib-and-mainsail sloop, a type of yacht which has always been noted for its great speed and general unhandiness. Small yachts of this kind are always racers, and the interest in racing is sufficient to keep them in the lists of popular boats. In design they are like the catboats, the only difference being in their rig. These two boats, the center-board cat and the jib-and-mainsail sloop, are what yachters call “sandbaggers”; that is to say, their ballast consists of bags of sand which are shifted to windward with every tack and thus serve to keep the yachts right side up. A boat ballasted in this manner can carry more sail than rightly belongs on her sticks, but she cannot be very safe or comfortable. Her place is in the regatta. It is not beyond the truth to assert that the sandbaggers constitute probably two fifths of the total of small yachts. They will never cease to be popular, for the reason that speed and sport are synonymous terms with a great many yachters, and no one can deny that these boats, like Brother Jasper’s sun, “do move.”
DRAWN BY W. TABER,
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY WALTER BLACKBURN.
ENGRAVED BY A. NEGRI.