Thirty-eight feet of mahogany over oak, conceived by two Bay physicians who wanted one boat that could race the Bay, race offshore and cruise. The most contested attribution in this atlas.
The brief came from Bay sailors — the physicians Jesse Carr and Ed Bruck — in the late 1930s: a boat that could do Bay racing, ocean racing and cruising without compromise in any of the three. The result was 38 feet long, Philippine mahogany over steam-bent oak, on a 7,200-pound iron keel, carrying 595 square feet in the original rig.
Who drew it was long disputed, and the dispute turns out to rest on a misread sentence. One class history describes the starting point as 'the 1937 Donald Abbott-sponsored, Sparkman & Stephens-designed Weekender' — Abbott commissioned it, S&S drew it, and Stephens Brothers stretched it to 38 feet. Read carelessly, that line makes Abbott the designer, which is how this atlas and others first recorded it.
What is not disputed is how the class came to be built. Myron Spaulding pitched it to the Nunes Brothers in Sausalito at about $4,900 a boat. Nelson Jones took it to Stephens Brothers in Stockton, who bid $4,750. Six boats were built in 1938 and six were racing by spring 1939.
The class was reorganised in the mid-1950s as a development class, and the masthead rig conversion — pioneered by Lou Riggs in Circe with the sailmaker Pete Sutter — was finalised by Theo Stephens on 5 August 1964. Debit won the San Francisco Bay Championship in 1974, against boats thirty years newer.
- Builder
- Stephens Brothers Boat Builders, Stockton, California
- LOA
- 38 ft
- LWL / Beam / Draft
- 28'3" / 9'6" / 5'9" (per one class site)
- Displacement
- 18,000 lb
- Sail area
- 595 sq ft original; roughly 700 sq ft after the masthead conversion
- Construction
- Philippine mahogany on steam-bent oak, bronze fastened, full iron keel
- Largely reconciled 29 July 2026. The two rival accounts are compatible. The class history's exact words are 'the 1937 Donald Abbott-sponsored, Sparkman & Stephens-designed Weekender' — so Abbott commissioned the boat, Sparkman & Stephens designed it, and Stephens Brothers stretched it to 38 feet. Earlier readings of the same sentence turned Abbott into the designer. The remaining uncertainty is how much Stephens Brothers changed.
- Number built: 'at least 16, with only five more after 1958' by one account; 19 by another.
- Build span: 1938 with racing from 1939 by one account; 1940–1962 by another.
- Spelling: a 1954 San Francisco Chronicle listing uses 'Farallon Clipper'; the class sites use 'Farallone'.
- The bidding story — Spaulding pitching the design to Nunes Brothers at about $4,900 a boat against Stephens Brothers' $4,750 — appears only on the class's own websites. No independent source was found. It is a good story and may well be true; it is not corroborated.
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