Regions

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.

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.

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.

Two traditions grew here side by side and mostly ignored each other. One was commercial: the Gloucester schooner fleet, the most dangerous fishery in North America, which killed men in numbers and in return produced the most refined working sailing craft ever built in the United States. The other was scientific: Nathanael Herreshoff at Bristol, tank-testing hull forms and building in bronze and steel while everyone else was still carving half models by eye.

They met in one place — the International Fishermen's Trophy, raced between Gloucester and Lunenburg from 1920. That was the last time working boats raced for something that mattered, and the fact that Bluenose was purpose-built to win it is the sign the tradition was already ending.

The design offices are the region's real export. Alden, Sparkman & Stephens, Burgess, Rhodes, Crowninshield, Mower, Hand — between them they drew a large fraction of what America sailed for fifty years, including the Bird class that started on San Francisco Bay. The yards that built for them are less famous and less well recorded: Lawley at Neponset, Nevins at City Island, Quincy Adams, Rice Brothers, Luders at Stamford. Most are gone. The exceptions — Hodgdon, in business since 1816, and Brooklin Boat Yard, founded by Joel White in 1960 — are why Maine is still where you go to have a wooden boat built.

Britain did two contradictory things well. It built the most extravagant racing yachts in the world, and it built the plainest working boats — and both traditions ended up feeding the same revival.

The racing line runs through Scotland more than England: Watson opening the first dedicated small-craft design office in 1873, Fife at Fairlie across three generations, Mylne and Boyd after them. The rating rules they helped write — the International Rule of 1907, the Universal Rule that governed the J-Class — are the reason those boats look the way they do, all overhang and gorgeous compromise.

The working line is quieter and has outlasted it. Bristol Channel pilot cutters were built to stay at sea in any weather with two men aboard, because a pilot who could not reach a ship did not get paid; about eighteen survive of several hundred. Falmouth oyster boats still dredge under sail because a bylaw says they must. When the Old Gaffers Association formed at Maldon in 1963 out of a thirteen-boat race, it was these boats, not the Big Class, that it set out to save.

Scandinavia exported two hull forms to the world and a way of thinking about who boats are for.

The first form is Colin Archer's: heavy, deep, double-ended, drawn for Norwegian rescue cutters that had to stay out when everything else ran for shelter. Through William Atkin and the Westsail 32 it became the archetype of the ocean cruiser, and 'Colin Archer' now names a type more often than a man.

The second is the Folkboat — the people's boat, and the name is the argument. It came out of a 1941 competition that produced no winner, was synthesised from six finalists by a designer whose claim to it was disputed for the rest of his life, and turned out to be one of the best small keelboats ever drawn. The Danish spidsgatter rules had made the same point earlier by restricting materials to Scandinavian timber so that ordinary people could afford to race.

The racing tradition sits alongside rather than above: Anker's Dragon of 1929, Estlander's thousand yachts, Tore Holm sailing in five Olympics from a family boatyard. And the thread reaches San Francisco directly — Bjørn Iversen brought a Knarr to the Bay in 1953, and the Bay has raced them ever since.