Wooden Boat AtlasDesigners, builders & classes · v3.0

Atlas / Classes & Types

1907 – present · Europe and worldwide

The Metre Classes

The International Rule, ratified 1907

Not a class but a rule — a formula relating length, sail area and girth that produced the 6-, 8-, 12- and 15-Metre boats and, with them, most of what people mean by a beautiful yacht.

Ratified
October 1907 at a Paris conference; groundwork laid at a London meeting of eleven nations in July 1906
Institutional result
Created the IYRU, now World Sailing
Scale
About 6,000 Metre-rule boats built since 1907; roughly half still extant

Wooden Boat Atlas v3.0 · built 30 July 2026 · a project of the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation · licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 · open data · corrections