Built in Maine for the Arctic, worked for thirty-five years as a San Francisco bar pilot schooner, and has spent the last seventy teaching young people to sail on Puget Sound. A National Historic Landmark, and still sailing.
Crowninshield drew her for John Borden, who wanted a boat for an Arctic expedition. That plan failed, and she was sold instead to the San Francisco Bar Pilots Association — which used her for about thirty-five years, into the early 1970s, running pilots out to ships standing off the Farallon Islands. It is hard to imagine harder service for a gaff schooner: the bar, the Gate, and the Potato Patch, in all weathers, all year.
She moved to Puget Sound about 1952 for youth sail training under Youth Adventure, Inc., and is now operated by Sound Experience out of Port Townsend. She was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989 and is one of only two NHL sailing vessels still active on the West Coast.
She belongs in this atlas twice over — as a Bay working vessel that most Bay histories omit because she was never a yacht, and as the link between three of its regions: designed in Boston, built in Maine, worked in San Francisco, preserved in Washington.
- Designer
- Bowdoin B. Crowninshield
- Builder
- Rice Brothers, East Boothbay, Maine
- Commissioned by
- John Borden, for an Arctic expedition that did not proceed
- Bay service
- San Francisco Bar Pilots Association, about 35 years to the early 1970s
- Now
- Sound Experience, Port Townsend; National Historic Landmark, 1989
- Length is given as 133 ft by one source and 85 ft by another — probably sparred against hull length, not reconciled here.
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