All about Sailboats

It is important to distiquish between a yacht and a sailboat. The typical sailing boat will have at least three masts with square rigging on all of them. Sailboats are powered by the wind. Before steam powered engines were invented this was the only form of travel across great distances of water. The yacht tends to be single masted and require far fewer people to sail it.

Sailing boats were also used as military ships to defend against pirates while travelling to distant new worlds to bring back treasures. There was large scale naval battles fought between France, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom during the age of sail. The Spanish Armada consisted of sailboats and the Battle of Trafalgar was also fought between fleets of sailboats.

All sailboats have certain similar characteristics. They all have a hull, rigging, one or more masts that hold up the sails to catch the wind and gain momentum and ballast to weigh the bottom of the sailboat down so that the wind does not push the boat over. They were crewed by officers and hands many of the latter often “pressed” into service . The sailors would take turns watching for privateers or pirates, or often looking out for possible plunder they could get for themselves.

Sailboats can only carry a large amount of cargo and supplies  in their hold. This area is very important for any long journey to make sure you have enough food and water supply to last the entire trip. Allowance had to made  for calm winds that could slow down a ship or stormy weather that may blow it way off course. Get this wrong and the ship  could run out of supplies and lose the entire crew to starvation. Poor navigate could lead to a ship ending up on top of a reef and capsize generally killing everyone aboard.

There are several different types of sailboats. The Barque has at least three masts, fore and aft rigged mizzenmast. The Brig, which has two masts and is a square rigged boat. The Brigantine, Ketch, Snow and Yawl have only two masts with the mizzen at different points on the boat, the snow being a trysail mast. A Dinghy is an open, one mast boat that is commonly used to travel close to shore or across small lakes.

The schooner is a sailboat that uses fore and aft sails on two or more masts. This is the most popular type of sailboat as it was created by the Dutch in the seventeenth century and further developed by the Americans during the time of the American Revolution. The most masts on a sailboat were the Thomas W. Lawson in 1902, which was three hundred ninety-five feet in length and carried twenty-five sails.