Southern California

Southern California industrialised pleasure boating before anywhere else in America, and the reason is climate: a season that never ends and harbours that were being dredged and subdivided exactly as the middle class acquired disposable income.

The results were fast wooden one-designs built in series. The Snowbird of 1921 taught Newport Harbor to sail — more than five hundred wooden hulls, and a junior regatta that peaked at 163 boats in 1957. George Kettenburg Jr. built his own PC at Point Loma in 1929 and turned his father's engine shop into the most admired racing builder on the coast; the PC, the PCC and the K-38 defined West Coast racing for forty years. At Wilmington, Hugh Angelman drew the Sea Witch and gave the coast its romantic cruising archetype, clipper bow and all.

Then the same region ended wooden series building. Jack Jensen started moulding hulls at Costa Mesa in 1957; Bill Schock founded his firm in 1958; Bill Lapworth's Cal 40 of 1963 was light, fibreglass and faster than anything it displaced, and after that the argument was over. Southern California invented the modern production sailboat and, in doing so, closed the era this atlas is mostly about — which is why it belongs here as much as any wooden-boat region does.