Thirty feet of gaff-era racing cruiser drawn in Boston to a brief written in Sausalito, and still racing as a fleet on the Bay a century later.
The Bird is the best illustration in this atlas of how a design actually happens. It did not begin with a designer. It began with a requirement: members of the Pacific Inter-Club Yacht Association wanted an affordable racing cruiser that could handle Bay chop, and a small group — the shipwright J. Herbert Madden Sr., the P.I.Y.A. representative Clifford A. Smith, and the Sausalito naval architect Fred Brewer — sketched what they wanted.
That sketch went east to John G. Alden's office in Boston, where it was worked into a formal design, No. 157, drawn by Alden's associate Sam Crocker and dated 1 September 1921. Whose boat is it? Sailboatdata credits 'Fred C. Brewer / Alden Associates'. Class history credits the committee for the concept and Alden's office for the design. Both are true and neither is complete.
The class was originally the San Francisco 'S' class. It became the Bird once the early boats were given bird names — Osprey, Puffin, Cuckoo, Robin, Polly. W. F. Stone & Son built Nos. 12, 16, 18 and 19 in 1928–29. Robin, No. 18, won the San Francisco Perpetual Challenge Trophy in 1936, 1937, 1956 and 1957.
Curlew (No. 2, 1922) is the second boat ever built in the class, and she, Cuckoo (No. 16, 1929) and Hummingbird (No. 22, 1929) are all still sailing on the Bay.
- Design
- Alden design No. 157, drawn by Sam Crocker, dated 1 September 1921, from a Bay committee brief
- LOA / LWL
- 30.08 ft / 24.67 ft
- Beam / Draft
- 7.67 ft / 5.25 ft
- Sail area
- 408 sq ft
- Displacement
- 9,000 lb
- Rig
- Fractional sloop, long keel, wood
- The specific attribution — Alden design No. 157, drawn by Sam Crocker, dated 1 September 1921 — rests on a single enthusiast blog and an aggregator that appears to draw on it. Neither Alden's published biography nor the MIT Museum's Alden collection was found to corroborate the design number or the date. Treat it as the best available account rather than an established fact; the MIT Alden collection would settle it.
- First-built year is given as 1921, 1922 and 1923 by different sources.
- The builder of boat No. 1 (Osprey) is given as Madden & Lewis of Sausalito by one source and W. F. Stone & Son of Oakland by another.
- Total hulls built is given as 24 by one source and 30 by another.
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