Ernie Nunes's 18-footer, engineered from the start for marine plywood — a material decision that made it cheap, fast to build, and enormously successful.
- Designer
- Ernest Nunes, 1939
- Builders
- Ernest Nunes; W. D. Schock Corp (21 boats, 1963–67); Moore Sailboats, Watsonville
- Material
- Among the first one-designs designed specifically for plywood; fibreglass from 1952
- LOA
- 18 ft
- Displacement / Ballast
- 1,100 lb / 635 lb lead
- Built
- 1,060 across all builders by 1994
- Association
- Mercury Class Yacht Racing Association
Sourcing notes & unresolved questions
- Two unrelated classes share the name Mercury, both dating from 1939. The West Coast boat is the Nunes-designed Mercury 18. The other is a 15-ft Sparkman & Stephens junior boat built by Cape Cod Shipbuilding in Massachusetts. They must not be conflated.
- First-build year is given as both 1938 and 1939 in different sources.
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