San Francisco Bay

The Bay makes its own boats because the Bay is its own problem. A summer westerly through the Gate builds to thirty knots by mid-afternoon, the chop is short and steep where the ebb meets it, and a five-knot current runs under everything. Boats that work here are stiff, small for their sail area, and overbuilt by East Coast standards.

The sequence runs cargo first, then sport. Scow schooners — more than two hundred and fifty of them by 1880 — carried hay, bricks and oyster shell, and the yards at India Basin and Hunters Point existed to build and mend them. Italian and Genoese fishermen brought the felucca, which became the Monterey clipper. Chinese shrimp junks worked the shallows. None of this was yachting.

Yachting arrived with money and organised itself fast: the San Francisco Yacht Club in 1869, Corinthian in 1886, Encinal in 1890. But the Bay's real contribution came between the wars, when local sailors stopped importing designs and started specifying them. The Bird of 1921 was a brief written in Sausalito and drawn in Boston. The Bear of 1929 was drawn and built in Sausalito by the same family. The Farallone Clipper was commissioned by two Bay physicians who wanted one boat that could do three jobs.

What makes the Bay unusual is how much of that survives. Boats built here in the 1920s still race here, against each other, in a regatta that started as a workboat race in 1867. The yards that built them are mostly gone, but Spaulding is still hauling wooden hulls on Gate Five Road and the Arques School is still teaching people to plank them.