When the United States entered World War II, the armed services requisitioned private yachts up and down both coasts for coastal patrol: the improvised force history remembers as the “picket patrol” or, affectionately, the Hooligan Navy. From San Francisco Bay, by McNeill’s account, roughly ten yachts were pressed into service; Yankee was among them. She was commissioned, painted gray from truck to waterline, and sent to sea with a naval lieutenant, a cook, and a member of the Yankee crew, Geoffrey W. Ford, in command. Their mission was to patrol the coast off the Golden Gate, watching for signs of a Japanese fleet that many Californians genuinely believed was coming. The fear was not fanciful: on February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine had surfaced and shelled the Ellwood oil field near Santa Barbara, the first foreign naval bombardment of the continental United States since 1812.

The duty proved uneventful. Bob Davis, one of the Yankee crew who served aboard, later recounted that the naval officer was perpetually seasick and the cook was useless for any task beyond the galley. The crew soon realized the peril of their situation: if they actually sighted a Japanese warship, their unarmed wooden schooner would be in the water within minutes. They therefore composed a radio message of admirable brevity for the eventuality: “Sighted ships — sunk by same.” Family tradition connects their vigil to the great naval drama that followed — and there is a kernel of truth in it, for when the Japanese fleet finally did sortie that spring, toward Midway, it was Navy patrol bombers that first found it, 2,800 miles from the coast the picket yachts were guarding. The invasion scare passed, and Yankee and the other requisitioned yachts were eventually retired from patrol duty. Her federal registry number, which family history says dates from her wartime enrollment, remains her official identity to this day. The service radio and a 48-inch brass long glass from her wartime duty were kept aboard for decades afterward, and some of the gray paint was still visible below decks well into the twenty-first century.

Remarkably, the war years were also flagship years. Sydney W. Ford served as Commodore of the St. Francis Yacht Club in 1942 and 1943, the first of five men of Yankee’s extended family to hold the office, making Yankee the club’s flagship for her first and second times even as she wore Navy gray. The club’s own chronicle records that in the 1942 Vallejo Race, “Commodore Ford sailed the club flagship, ‘Yankee,’ to a convincing win in division eleven.” War or no war, Yankee raced.