Page:Yachting wrinkles; a practical and historical handbook of valuable information for the racing and cruising yachtsman (IA yachtingwrinkles00keneiala).pdf/284

 XI.

THE COST OF YACHTING.

CAUTIONARY AND ECONOMICAL HINTS TO TYROS ABOUT TO EMBARK IN THE SPORT.

In a witty essay Mr. W. L. Alden, author of "The Canoe and the Flying Proa," points out that the most reckless woman is vastly inferior in wild extravagance to the ordinary yacht whose owner has enrolled her in a yacht club. It is with yachts as it is with women, he argues. A man who provides himself with a pretty wife, equipped with a sufficient quantity of clothes, might keep her very cheaply if he did not permit her to go into society, which Mr. Alden conceives is about the same as introducing a yacht to the society of other fashionable yachts. He declares that when the once modest schooner or bashful sloop has once tasted the pleasures of a regatta, she proceeds to lavish her owner's fortune with frightful recklessness. During the racing season she splits her sails as though they were lace flounces, and sheds topmasts and booms as though they were hairpins. At the close of the season he has to call in the aid of the shipbuilding profession, and to lavish