Steve Knauth

The presidency used to come with a yacht.

“Designed by a fish.” That’s how the Fortier 26 was described in issue 12 of Nautical Quarterly, back in 1980.

Back in 2005, Howard Newman tested a boat at the Palm Beach International Boat Show.

Don Demers’ oil painting “Rescuers from the Deep; USS Scamp” tells a dramatic tale.

Jon Baker needed a 30-plus-foot boat to safely take his family and friends on longer trips offshore. A 2010 Regulator 34 Center Console fit the bill.

The Sunny K, a Fairform Flyer Linwood 53, rides majestically across the pages in this advertisement from the late 1950s.

Wind and waves set a double-ended, lug-rigged fishing boat to plunging through the white-capped rollers off the coast of northern England and Scotland.

The Hampton boat is one of those wonderful, enduring designs that has survived for more than a century, tweaked and modified by builders along the way.

Back in the day, as yachtsmen in northern waters sat out the long winters, they thought about boats to race and cruise.

In 2001, Ed and Vivian Steele sold their business and started looking for something to do for a few years.

Anyone who’s driven down into the town of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and along the stretch of harborfront knows the scene.

A late 19th-century pilot boat rides off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, at the outer entrance to New York Harbor, in this image from the early 1900s.

The wave in the foreground dominates the scene in Paul Garnett’s dramatic Charles W. Morgan Off Cape Horn.

Boston Whaler caused quite a sensation in the early part of its distinguished 60-year history.

So many boats, so many ways to get out on the water. For Allan and Sally Seymour, it was trailer-boating with a 19-foot Boston Whaler, covering the East Coast from New England to Norfolk, Virginia.

The Titanic survivors staggered down the gangplank of the Carpathia, chilled from the cold and numbed from the sinking of the “unsinkable.”

When a couple has logged a lifetime’s worth of boating, they know what they want out of the lifestyle; they know how to be comfortable in, and on, the boat of their choice.

The 1950s and ’60s were a time of great activity and innovation in the boating world, with new boats and a new audience waiting to buy them.

They were known to the British as the “Big Class.” The America’s Cup boats of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were unruly — sometimes downright perilous — racing machines.

Would it not be well if she could contract with the Postmaster General to carry the mail from this city to Albany?

Glassy waters swirl around a buoy in the harbor at Southport, Maine.

Howard Wheeler founded Wheeler Shipyard in 1910, and for more than five decades the New York City company would be one of America’s most innovative and influential builders.

Scott Harrell loved tractors. The Edenton, North Carolina, native “delighted in mowing and moving dirt,” as one observer put it.

You can’t get much closer to the water than you do in a kayak. That kind of one-on-one feeling is what got Vickie Silvia started on boats.

The Brenton Reef Lightship Station guided vessels in Rhode Island’s lower Narragansett Bay around the clock, 365 days a year, from 1853 to 1962.

Nantucket Harbor, Massachusetts. We’re looking across the main channel toward Brant Point Light; the Coatue Wildlife Refuge is behind and to the right of this iconic island symbol, with Wauwinet in the distance.

When Boston Whaler moved from Rockland, Massachusetts, to Florida in 1991, Paul Hureau stayed behind.

The dream was always there. “For years, I would go past marinas on beautiful summer days, full of boats that no one ever seemed to use,” says Peter Clarke.

“In my dreams, I am standing a 2 a.m. wheel watch, running down some long, lonely reach of flat water, snow-capped mountains glistening in the moonlight on either side … [cruising] endlessly through the black Alaskan night,” says watercolorist Cooper Hart.

Just $250 a month. That’s what it took to buy the 35-foot Flagship Cruiser from Owens Yacht Co., a boat the company called the “crowning achievement of Owens’ revolution in boatbuilding.”

Steve Ehrler and Jan Murphy wanted to try the liveaboard lifestyle. They were looking for a good boat, about 10 years old, well equipped and well maintained, says Ehrler, 63, a former Navy submarine officer. “It also had to feel like home,” he says.

It was called the Bug. George “Pop” Corry’s little one-design sailboat, which had come off New York designer William Gardner’s drawing board in 1906, was fun to race, gave skippers an even chance to win and was inexpensive at $140.

In 1957, Charles Johnson approached John Rybovich in his quest for a motor­yacht to be the mother ship to his Rybovich sportfisher.

Come, boys and girls, just listen to this news for you and me: They’re going to send a Christmas Ship across the deep blue sea!

For Andrew Walton, becoming an artist was in the cards. “The art chooses you, not the other way round,” says Walton, who is known for his detailed renderings of ships and boats and those who handle them.

The seeds of a boating life are sown early. Brian Torrance has been on the water for as long as he can remember.

About a century ago, someone in the Singer Building on Manhattan’s West Side took a moment from his workday to point a camera out the window.

Bernard Lyman was a skilled craftsman and respected cabinetmaker in Cleveland on the shores of Lake Erie.

Here’s a whimsical painting: a 19th-century steamship in full array, with a deck awash in circus animals and performers, acrobats in the rigging. But there’s more than whimsy to Ed Parker’s art.

The cruising dream is a powerful one. Far horizons beckon with new ports of call, new people to meet. There’s the challenge of running the boat and becoming familiar with it. And the moments of sheer pleasure, just being on the water.

We all know the feeling. Walking off the dock after a day on the water, you can’t resist turning around and taking one last look at your boat.

It’s early morning on Chesapeake Bay. A skipjack with its mainsail up ghosts past Baltimore Light, heading out for a day’s oystering. The rest of the fleet shows dimly through the diffused morning sun.

The lower Connecticut River has been called one of the last great places on Earth. For boaters who’d like to explore the region, Old Saybrook, at the river’s mouth, and Essex, 6 miles upstream, are good  places to start.

Life doesn’t stay the same. Boats don’t, either.

Bottom fouling. It's a problem as old as boats.

They started out building sailboats; they ended up creating one of the most distinctive motoryachts of the modern era.

You start out small in a skiff or a runabout, exploring the local waters: the river, the bays and the coves close to home.