A yacht is a recreational boat. It designates two rather different classes of watercraft, sailing and power yachts. Yachts are differentiated from working ships mainly by their leisure purpose. It was not until the rise of the steamboat and other types of powerboat that sailing vessels in general came to be perceived as luxury items. However, since the level of luxury on larger yachts has seen an increasing trend, the use of the word yacht to mean any sailing vessel has been diminishing and is more and more limited to racing yachts or cruising yachts.
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A yacht is a recreational boat. It designates two rather different classes of watercraft, sailing and power yachts. Yachts are differentiated from working ships mainly by their leisure purpose. It was not until the rise of the steamboat and other types of powerboat that sailing vessels in general came to be perceived as luxury items. However, since the level of luxury on larger yachts has seen an increasing trend, the use of the word yacht to mean any sailing vessel has been diminishing and is more and more limited to racing yachts or cruising yachts.
Yacht lengths generally range from 40 feet (13 m) up to hundreds of feet. Luxury craft smaller than 40 feet are more commonly called "cabin cruisers" or simply "cruisers." A mega yacht generally refers to any yacht (sail or power) above 100 ft (34 m) and a super yacht generally refers to any yacht over 200 ft (70 m). This size is small in relation to typical cruise liners and oil tankers.
History
Construction materials and techniques
Until the 1950s, almost all yachts were made of wood, or steel in larger yachts, but a much wider range of materials is used today. Although wood hulls are still in production, the most common construction material is fibreglass, followed by aluminium, steel, carbon fibre, and ferrocement (rarer because of insurance difficulties). The use of wood has changed and is no longer limited to traditionally board-based methods, but also includes modern products such as plywood, veneers and epoxy resins. Wood is mostly used by hobbyists or wooden boat purists when building an individual boat.
Sailing yachts
Sailing yachts can range in overall length (Length Over All—LOA, in yachting parlance) from about 20 ft (6 m) to well over 100 ft (30 m), where the distinction between a yacht and a ship becomes blurred. Most privately owned yachts fall in the range of about 25–45 ft (7–14 m); the cost of building and keeping a yacht rises quickly as length increases. In the U.S., sailors tend to refer to smaller yachts as sailboats, while referring to the general sport of sailing as yachting. Within the limited context of sailboat racing, a yacht is any sailing vessel taking part in a race, regardless of size.
Modern yachts have efficient sail-plans, most notably the Bermuda rig, that allow them to sail towards the wind. This capability is the result of a sail-plan and hull design, typically a sloop rig, that utilizes Bernoulli's principle to generate lift.
