The Burgee
The Tale of Our Burgee
A burgee (pronounced as in “Brrr-Gee, it’s cold!”) is a triangular flag used to identify a yacht club. (If you’re really into this kind of thing, a triangular flag identifying a unit of United States Power Squadrons or the Coast Guard Auxiliary is called a “pennant.”)
Good flag design requires a burgee to be unique and identifiable at a distance. It should also be “readable” from both sides, and the canvas strip along the hoist (the vertical part of the flag that attaches to the staff) should not be part of the design. The NPBYC burgee violated all of those rules. It was meant to be a white “N” against a blue background, with a white horizontal stripe running the length of the burgee and divided a top yellow half from a blue bottom half.
The letter N can’t be read from both sides, nor is it unique. And whoever designed the NPBYC burgee used the canvas strip as part of the design – making it the first leg of the N.
Since you don’t really notice that strip when you’re looking at a flag, what people saw was a slanted white V – which is what you get when you take away the front leg of an N. It didn’t work.
Fortunately there was a solution: a 1959 copy of Lloyd’s Register showed a blue North Palm Beach Yacht Club burgee with a white ship’s wheel around a boat outlined in a sunrise, and the letters NPB in a fat block style that was “modern” in the 1950’s. All we had to do was go back to the original burgee, lop off the letters, divide it vertically and plug in the existing blue and gold colors. We had a new 1997 burgee that met all the rules of good flag design and preserved the history of the club from its very founding in our community to the present day. It was Instant Heritage – and it was instantly and unanimously approved by the members at a meeting in the Herb Watt Building (“Ah, those were the days!”)
