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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. more...

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It was not until the ascendancy 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 start at 32–35 feet (10–11 m) and go up to hundreds of feet. A mega yacht generally refers to any yacht (sail or power) above 100' or 34 m and a super yacht generally refers to any yacht over 200' or 70 m. This size is small in relation to typical cruise liners and oil tankers.

History

A yacht, from Dutch Jacht meaning hunt, pronounced (ya't), was originally defined as a light, fast sailing vessel used by the Dutch navy to pursue pirates and other transgressors around and into the shallow waters of the Low Countries. After its selection by Charles II of England as the vessel of choice for his return to Britain from the Netherlands for his restoration, it came to be used to convey important persons.

Later, the word came to designate a wider range of vessels, almost always in private use (i.e. not used for commercial carriage of cargo or passengers), propelled by sail, power, or both, and used for pleasure cruising or racing.

Construction Materials and Techniques

Until the 1950s, almost all yachts were made of wood, or steel in larger yacht, but now there is a much wider range of materials. Although wood hulls are still in production, the most common construction material is fibreglass, followed by aluminum, 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. However, 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 feet (6 m) to well over 100 feet (30 m), where the distinction between a yacht and a ship becomes blurred. However, most privately owned yachts fall in the range of about 25–45 feet (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.

Read more at Wikipedia.org