Pacific Northwest

The Northwest built working boats first and yachts second, and it never entirely stopped thinking like a fishing port. Halibut schooners were built by the hundred on Puget Sound from about 1910 — owner-operated, wooden, longlining to Alaska — and the Bristol Bay gillnet fleet stayed under sail until 1951 because the canneries and the regulations required it.

The yacht tradition grew alongside it in a very tight geography: the yards clustered on Lake Union, and the designers knew each other. Ted Geary was MIT-trained and dominated R-boat racing before drawing the Geary 18 to teach children. Ed Monk Sr. apprenticed at Blanchard and then under Geary before producing three thousand designs and two books that taught the region to build. Bill Garden drew more than fifty designs before he was twenty-four and spent his last thirty years working from a private island. Ben Seaborn drew a Swiftsure winner as a teenager and later gave the plywood era the Thunderbird.

The postwar revival is the region's second act, and it is institutional rather than industrial. Port Townsend — a Victorian port that had been passed over by the railroads and therefore never modernised — held its first Wooden Boat Festival in 1978 and founded a boatbuilding school in 1981. It is now the place American shipwrights are trained, which is why so many of the people keeping the San Francisco fleet afloat learned their trade eight hundred miles north.