Built by a Belvedere saloon keeper for his daughter in 1885, and still sailing — by widespread account the oldest active private sailing yacht on the West Coast.
Harry Cookson kept a saloon in Belvedere and built boats part-time. In 1885 he built one on Beach Road, in the cove near the W. S. Stone yard, and named her after his daughter. She was rock-elm framed and Douglas fir planked, dish-shaped, with a centreboard and a tiller, and she has been altered a good deal since — twin iron shoes, wheel steering, and for a period a yawl rig.
That she survives at all is the work of two restorations. Harold Sommer, who skippered the Bay's last wooden tug, rebuilt her in the 1950s, after which she raced with the Master Mariners. Half a century later the Arques School of Traditional Boatbuilding spent fifteen years on her, and she was relaunched from the Spaulding Marine Center in 2014.
She is the atlas's demonstration case. Everything else here — the yards, the classes, the drawings in archives — exists to produce and preserve objects like this one, and almost none of them last 140 years.
- Builder
- Harry Cookson, Belvedere saloon keeper and part-time boatwright
- Where
- Beach Road, Belvedere Cove, near the W. S. Stone yard
- Named for
- Cookson's daughter
- Construction
- Rock elm frames, Douglas fir planking, dish-shaped hull, centreboard, tiller
- Restorations
- Harold Sommer in the 1950s; a fifteen-year rebuild by the Arques School, relaunched from Spaulding Marine Center in 2014
- Whether Cookson designed her as well as building her is not established.
- The claim that she is the oldest active private sailing yacht on the West Coast is widely repeated but was never independently adjudicated against rival claimants; every account appears to trace to Spaulding and Arques material.
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