KINGS AS YACHTSMEN

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1687, 17 November 1925, Page 6

KINGS AS YACHTSMEN

Britannia, the most famous racing yacht now in commission, is own id, as all the world knows, by the King, who is undoubtedly the most skilled and enthusiastic practical yachtman among royal personages, writes G. E. Hopcroft, in the “Daily Mail.” His father was also fond of yachting. In his younger days King Edward owned several notable racing yachts, but it was not until the Britannia first hoisted her racing flag that the Prince of Wales’s feathers carried all before them. With the schooner Hildegrade the Prince did fairly well in the ’seventies, and in the early ’eighties he owned that handsome cutter Formosa, a yacht that was highly esteemed by the watermen at Cowes. Later his Royal Highness secured the big schooner Aline-, a yacht which in the early ‘seventies was much feared by yacht-owners of the schooner class. King Alfonso of Spain is devoted to yachting and yacht racing. He has owned many yachts in the smaller classes, and it remembered that !his British-designed and built 15metres cutter Hispania did remarkably well at the International Yachting Festival held at Spithead in 1911. King Alfonso has not yet owned a big yacht of the Britannia class, but he is said to be a skilful helmsman and a- good judge of racing yachts. The former Kaiser owned a number of racing yachts, and he kept to the same name—Meteor —right up to the war. The last Meteor barely got away before the war was declared. Herr Krupp’s Germania, which usually came to Cowes with the Meteor, was captured.