If you enter "yacht" into Google (or indeed Bing!) images you will see lots of pictures like this one. Though probably not exactly this one, which I copied from Tillerman's blog without his permission - an act of open Internet piracy which is natural to one who has flirted with the Dark Side.
Alas, fellow sailors, I think our word has been press ganged by the enemies, an insult to all that is proper. The picture above is of a motor yacht: a real yacht looks a bit like this:
One thing I noticed when doing the powerboat course last weekend is that a yacht under power steers very differently to a motor yacht.
I'm not that great at parking: no one has actually said "don't worry JP, we can swim the last few metres" but they probably thought it.
So it was good to have some excuses when things went pear shape, namely:
- When going slowly and you turn the wheel on a yacht the boat follows like its on tracks, unlike a RIB which without a keel does a bit of sliding sideways
- Yachts also have a rudder, so when the engine is neutral you have steerage way as long as the yacht is moving, unlike a RIB which has a tendency to follow the wind. I think that probably explains why RIBs etc go fast - they have to have their engines on all the time to control the boat. Which makes it lucky that:
- RIBS are a lot more bouncy than yachts.
