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The Long, Strange History of Yacht Clubs

From a Russian tsar's private fleet in 1718 to Monaco's members-only clubhouse today, the yacht club has shaped the boats on the water and the people admitted ashore.

At the Monaco Yacht Club, the social hierarchy starts at the necktie. The club’s dress code requires a member’s tie pin to sit within 10 centimeters of the knot, reserves gold and silver buttons for officers and permits white trousers only until Sept. 30 each year. Even the library, with 1,600 nautical books, sea charts and the carved wooden half-hull models that owners donate to their clubs, requires a jacket and bans computers. On Sept. 22, roughly 300 invited guests will gather inside Norman Foster’s ship-shaped clubhouse for the Monaco Yacht Show’s Grand Opening Night, as about 120 superyachts are already on display below in Port Hercule. Beneath the members-only rooms, some of those yachts carry cinemas and personal submarines.

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Founded in 1953, the Monaco club is a newcomer in a world that likes its pedigrees barnacled. Three dates, however, compete for the yacht club’s origin story: First, Russian tsar Peter the Great organized a pleasure fleet on the Neva in 1718. Six Irishmen formed the Water Club at Cork in 1720, according to a membership list drawn up decades later. And 42 English gentlemen founded The Yacht Club, now the Royal Yacht Squadron, in 1815. Read together, the claims describe an evolution from a fleet under command to a membership governed by its own rules and eventually to an institution that helped organize racing.

Who Invented the Yacht Club

Long before any club existed, there were the boats. Yacht descends from the Dutch “jaght,” a fast boat that drew little water and could run close to shore, built to carry dispatches or important passengers. When Amsterdam presented Charles II with Mary in 1660, the gilded yacht carried six guns, a flat hull suited to Dutch shallows and leeboards, the pivoting fins hung over each side to stop her sliding sideways. A year later, Charles raced his brother James from Greenwich to Gravesend and back for 100 guineas. 

Peter the Great’s fleet, the Nevsky Flot, was a state obligation rather than a club anyone joined. His decree of April 1718 distributed 141 small vessels among courtiers and officials, ordered Sunday exercises by flag and cannon and fined anyone who failed to turn up, though absentees could send children, relatives or servants in their place. Owners were told to maintain the boats the way they maintained their carriages rather than their farm carts, as something to keep up........

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