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chuckle. Surely he’s forgiven us by now.

There were gentlemen and there were seamen
in the navy of Charles the Second.
    But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the
gentlemen were not seamen.
    Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England , 1855
    O NE OF THE MOST persistent and defamatory myths about yachting is that it’s an elite sport. Not elite in its primary meaning of ‘the best’, but elite as in ‘a select group or class’. No journalist seems able to resist prefacing the word ‘yachtsman’ with ‘millionaire’. Any general description of a substantial keelboat must include gratuitous references to toffs swilling gin on the fantail, exclusive membership of ‘royal’ yacht clubs, mentions of faintly connected rich celebrities and endless gawking paragraphs about the ‘money is no object’ excesses of yacht ownership.
    Here’s the truth of it: boats can certainly cost a lot of money, but you usually get the sailors gratis . That’s the way the sport works, at least in the mainstream. There’s a bloke up the back who owns the yacht, pays the bills and must certainly have a healthy bank account (or line of credit) to keep campaigning his expensive toy. In return for this largesse he gets to steer the boat for some of the time. But the other eight or nine people on board – the crew who actually sailthe yacht and derive just as much enjoyment from the exercise as the owner – will usually come from far more modest backgrounds. They’re tradesmen, teachers, bank clerks, bus drivers, public servants and even the odd journalist. If you were to average the total annual earnings of a standard Australian offshore crew you’d arrive at a figure much closer to the basic wage than six figures. Genuine silvertails are a tiny minority. The stream of ribald sarcasm and cheek that traditionally flows from the foredeck towards the afterguard is a distinguishing feature of local yachting – proof of its stubbornly egalitarian foundations.
    But the same does not hold true for the UK, continental Europe and the US, and it never has. There, the tradition has been that while the wealthy owners of large racing yachts would not dream of competing for anything other than the honour, they are quite happy to pay professional crews to do the sailing for them. The great J-boats that battled for the America’s Cup between the Wars may have occasionally had a wing-collared Vanderbilt or Lipton on board, but the sheets were always pulled by an anonymous ship’s company of tough men who picked up their paychecks at the end of the day’s sailing. In Australia, where the gap between social classes has never been so extreme, yachting managed to preserve an essentially Corinthian ethic. A successful surgeon might be able to comfortably afford running a stout little 35-footer, but he’d draw his crew from ordinary blokes who’d learned their sailing in the robust, low-cost school of open skiffs. Today there are plenty of skilled, highly trained people who earn their livelihoods from sailing and boat-related business activity, but the majority of our crews are still genuine amateurs who sail for love, not money.
    And despite the millions of dollars it now costs owners to compete at the highest levels of yachting, not one local event – at least to my knowledge – offers prize money. A recent two-day regatta on Sydney Harbour sponsored by a German automotive manufacturer provided one of its new saloons to the overall winner,an unseemly development many thoughtful sailors deplored. It is the doggedly amateur ethos of the sport that helps give our antipodean brand of sailing, especially offshore racing, so much of its special larrikin flavour. We don’t need the lure of prize money to get out on the water and compete. The sailing itself, and the companionship it offers, are sufficient pleasure and reward. (And in any case, how do you divide one