Yankee

W. F. Stone drew her in 1905 and built her at the yard near the Presidio — the Harbor View site the firm occupied from 1899 to 1911. She was to launch on 18 April 1906. That morning the earthquake shook her out of her building cradle, and she went into the water some weeks later instead. Very few boats can date their own beginning against a civic catastrophe.

She was a gaff sloop first. Captain Charles Miller converted her to the gaff schooner rig she still carries during the 1910s — a change of the kind that would now be argued about for years, and which in her case simply became what she is.

Three owners in a hundred and twenty years: David Abecassis from 1906, Captain Miller from 1907 to about 1925, and the Ford family from 1925 to the present, latterly under nonprofit stewardship. That continuity is the reason so much of her record survives.

The racing record runs the whole length of it. She won a race before 1906 was out. She won the first Farallones Race in 1907. She took her division at the Panama-Pacific Exposition regatta in 1915. She has been flagship of the St. Francis Yacht Club seven times. And in 2015 — in her second century — she was Master Mariners champion.

In 1942 and 1943 she was painted grey and patrolled outside the Golden Gate for the Navy. She appeared in a King Vidor silent film in 1923 and on screen again in 1962 with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. She is now in Sausalito, midway through a ten-phase structural refit funded one phase at a time.

For this atlas she is a useful object lesson. She is a Bay boat, designed and built by a Bay yard, sailed on the Bay for her whole life, and still racing against boats drawn by men who had not been born when she was launched. That is the thing the Master Mariners fleet exists to demonstrate, and Yankee demonstrates it better than any other single hull.