Yacht Club Membership Card Printing

The front carries the club name and burgee, the member’s name, a membership number, their category — berth holder, crew, cruising, racing, cadet, country or social — and the year. Where a club runs offshore passages, deliveries or crewed charters, the member’s qualification level is worth printing too: Day Skipper, Coastal Skipper or Yachtmaster tells a passage planner or a race officer what they need to know without a conversation.

Larger boats sail with a rotating crew, so clubs and marinas sometimes need to confirm who is aboard and in what capacity. A crew member’s card handles that far more gracefully than a name on a list in an office.

Reciprocal visiting rights are the detail that sets yacht club cards apart. Yacht clubs habitually honour each other’s members, which means your card will at some point be presented to a steward at a club that has never seen it before. That is an argument for a clear, conventional layout with the club name, the year and the category unmissable — and for printing the reciprocal arrangement on the reverse so the visiting club knows where it stands.

A yacht club card leads a different life from a dinghy sailor’s. It spends a week at a time in an oilskin pocket on passage, and between trips it sits on a chart table or in a locker under a coachroof window, where the sun comes through for hours a day all summer.

That second one is the underrated hazard. Ultraviolet light fades printed inks, and a card that has spent two summers in the light on a chart table can end up noticeably washed out. On our cards the design is sealed beneath the surface of solid 760-micron PVC rather than printed on top of it, which protects it from UV as well as from salt and abrasion.

Salt is dealt with by the same construction. There is no laminate film for salt to work in behind, so a card can be rinsed in fresh water at the end of a passage and put straight back in the oilskin pocket.

Embossing is the one yacht clubs ask for most, and it suits them. Raised characters, exactly as on a credit card, in black, metallic silver or metallic gold, on the bottom half of one side. There are two character heights: 5mm, which takes 22 characters on a line including spaces, and 3mm, which takes 27. A member’s name embossed across the foot of a card is a small piece of ceremony that fits a yacht club rather well.

For flag officers, life members and past commodores, a metallic base card — gold or silver across the whole surface with the design printed over it in full colour — makes the distinction obvious. The only thing to design around is white, since there is no white base beneath the metallic for white text or images to show through. Metallic foiling is the more restrained alternative where you want only the burgee to stand out; it needs simple line art, as foil lays down as flat solid colour.

More practically: variable data can print each member’s own boat name and sail number on their card, a 5mm punched hole or 15mm x 3mm slot takes a lanyard for regatta officials, and an RFID card or barcode handles pontoon gates and the compound. RFID comes as 1K or 4K Mifare or Fudan, supplied unencoded for you to write.