Publisher
Wooden Boat Atlas is a project of the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation. It began with the designers, builders and classes behind the wooden boats still sailing on San Francisco Bay, and grows outward from there.
Sourcing policy
Nothing here is invented. Every entry carries its sources. Sources are preferred in this order: archives and finding aids; museums and the National Park Service; National Register nominations; class associations and yard histories; the specialist press; general reference works; enthusiast sites. Where a claim rests only on the weakest tiers, the entry says so.
Conflicts are recorded, not resolved. Where two sources disagree on a date, a spelling, a hull count or an attribution, both readings appear under Sourcing notes and this atlas takes no side. There are currently 137 such open questions, and they are the most useful thing on the site.
Primary documents are quoted, not corrected. Where a source is quoted, it is quoted verbatim, including spellings this atlas believes to be variants or errors. Where a likely explanation exists it is offered as a question, never as a silent fix.
Private and licensed sources
Some research draws on material this project can consult but cannot republish — chiefly the WoodenBoat subscriber digital archive, held under a personal subscription and separately indexed for this project. Where a fact comes from it, the citation is given in full — issue number, date and page — so that any subscriber can verify it independently. No text, images or plans from it are reproduced here, and such citations are marked Private access. If WoodenBoat Publications agrees to deep linking into their archive for subscribers, those citations will become links; nothing else about how they are recorded will change. See the Archives page.
The glossary
The atlas glossary is the Foundation's own Maritime Glossary, imported whole at build time so the two can never drift, plus a short file of boat-design vocabulary the atlas needs. Glossary terms are linked automatically in entry prose, on first occurrence, for the working vocabulary only — and never where a word is a class or boat name here.
Corrections
This atlas will be wrong about things. Owners, families, yards and class associations hold knowledge that is not on the public web, and a correction with a source attached is the most valuable contribution anyone can make. Open questions are listed on every entry that has them and collected on the Open Questions page.
How it is built
The atlas is generated from structured data rather than hand-written pages: designers, builders, classes, institutions, vessels, regions, eras and archives are each a data file, and a build script produces every page, index, timeline and cross-reference from them. Reverse links are automatic, so a designer added once appears everywhere it belongs. The pages are static HTML wearing the Foundation site's chrome and layout; JavaScript adds search and glossary filtering and nothing load-bearing. A single-file reader edition, with everything inlined, is generated from the same data for offline use.
Typography is the Foundation's drafting-room system — Fraunces display, Source Serif text, Archivo labels, Plex Mono annotations — on chart paper with a plan-drawing grid. Structure is verdigris; attention is the Library's green register, shared with the Maritime Glossary.
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