Wooden Boat AtlasDesigners, builders & classes · v3.0
v3.0 · last update July 30, 2026 · 185 entries

The Wooden Boat Atlas.

A reference atlas of the people who designed and built wooden boats: designers, builders, and yards, organized by era, region, type, and class. It begins on San Francisco Bay and reaches outward. Every claim carries its source; where the record is uncertain, the entry says so.

The Wooden Boat Atlas is a reference atlas of the people who designed and built wooden sailing craft — and the motor yachts, workboats and trawlers that came out of the same yards and the same hands. It is organised the way a sommelier learns wine: not by memorising individual boats, but by building a structure into which any new boat can be placed.

It begins on San Francisco Bay, which produced its own designers, its own yards and its own one-design classes rather than importing them, and reaches outward to Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, New England, Britain, Scandinavia and the Hong Kong yards.

Every claim carries its source; where sources disagree, both readings are recorded and neither is silently chosen; where a name cannot be verified, it is flagged rather than guessed.

185Entries
85Designers
46Yards & builders
35Classes & types
245Cited sources
137Open questions

Ways in

By era Seven working periods, from Bay cargo sail to the preservation movement. By region Where a boat comes from shapes what it is. Seven regions, deep in one. By type One-designs, rating rules and the vernacular working types.

The eras

Working Sail1850 – 1900The Gilded Age & the Big Class1880 – 1920Between the Wars1919 – 1941War, Plywood & the Bay Yards1941 – 1946The Postwar Fleet1946 – 1965The Fibreglass Turn1958 – 1980Revival & Preservation1970 – present

The regions

San Francisco BayThe home water of this atlasSouthern CaliforniaNewport Beach, San Diego, WilmingtonPacific NorthwestPuget Sound, Seattle, Port Townsend, British ColumbiaNew England & the East CoastBristol, Marblehead, Boston, Gloucester, Maine, City IslandUnited KingdomThe Clyde, the Solent, the West CountryScandinavia & Northern EuropeNorway, Sweden, Denmark, GermanyHong Kong & the Asian YardsKowloon, Junk Bay, Penny's Bay

Start anywhere

Yankee
Launched the morning of the 1906 earthquake, designed by W. F. Stone. The Foundation’s own boat.
Freda
Built by a Belvedere saloon keeper for his daughter in 1885, and still sailing.
Myron Spaulding
Designer, builder, Transpac winner, symphony violinist. The Bay’s connecting figure.
W. F. Stone & Son / Stone Boat Yard
One family, one hundred and fifty years of Bay boatbuilding.
Bird Class
A brief written in Sausalito, drawn in Boston. Still racing.
Master Mariners Benevolent Association
Racing on the Bay since 1867 — the Bay’s oldest yachting institution.
Adventuress
Boston-designed, Maine-built, thirty-five years running San Francisco bar pilots.
Hurricane 30
A Nunes-built Bay class that had almost vanished from the record.

How to read this atlas

Nothing here is invented. Every entry carries its sources. Where two sources disagree — and on the Bird class, the Farallone Clipper and the Folkboat they disagree sharply — both readings are recorded under Sourcing notes and neither is silently chosen. Where an attribution could not be matched to a documented designer, it is flagged as an open question rather than quietly corrected.

Those flags are the point, not an embarrassment. They are collected on a single Open Questions page, each linked to the archive most likely to settle it — and if you can answer one, we would like to hear from you.

Full A–Z index · Archives & records · Open data · Contribute

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