With a sound hull beneath her again, Yankee returned to the racing circuit. In 2005, on what her crew called a perfect “Yankee Day” (flood tide and 20–25 knots of breeze), she posted the fastest elapsed time among the gaffers in the Master Mariners Regatta and took home the Billiken Trophy, the regatta’s perpetual prize for gaff-rigged vessels. The Master Mariners Regatta, first sailed by the Bay’s working schooner crews in 1867 and revived in 1965, is among the oldest and most prestigious events for traditional sailing craft on the West Coast, drawing scores of wooden vessels each Memorial Day weekend.

In 2006, Yankee celebrated her centennial. The city of San Francisco issued a “Yankee Day” proclamation. A grand party was held at the St. Francis Yacht Club, a stone’s throw from the site of her launching a hundred years earlier, with classic yachts, former crewmates, and friends gathering to honor the old schooner, every flag flying. The yachting press produced articles across the country. The centennial year closed in sorrow: that December, Dick Ford — commodore, skipper, keeper of the log, and for two decades the steady center of Yankee’s family — died suddenly, at sixty-eight. The next generation now carried the boat.

The year 2008 brought a new suit of sails and some of the most dramatic racing results in Yankee’s modern history. In the inaugural Great San Francisco Schooner Race, created by San Francisco Yacht Club Commodore John Swain to bring the Bay’s schooner fleet back together after a century, she won the gaff division handily, the only boat to finish within the time limit. The three-race Jessica Cup Regatta at St. Francis Yacht Club that fall was even more dramatic. Yankee won the first race by a slim margin, then, in the second, shattered her main gaff while jibing at Blossom Rock. The crew retired, disappointed — until they learned the standings still favored them. Skipper John Collins (Samantha Ford’s husband), his friend Mello, and Samantha left the between-races party, drove to a hardware store, and spent the night splinting the broken spar with two-by-sixes and plywood. Rigged by morning, the improvised gaff, painted with a “Home Depot Racing” logo and a barcode, carried Yankee to victory in the final race and the regatta. It was her first Jessica Cup, and with it she recaptured the coveted Yankee Cup, originally awarded to her in the 1931 Stockton Regatta.

The Jessica Cup has been a fixture of St. Francis Yacht Club racing since 1990, when the club created a regatta for classic wooden yachts around a trophy the New York Yacht Club had presented to St. Francis in 1984.

In 2009, John McNeill was elected Commodore of St. Francis Yacht Club, and Yankee served as flagship for the seventh time. In 2012, Yankee helped establish the Invitational Classic Division of the San Francisco Bay Leukemia Cup Regatta, racing alongside such noted classics as Dorade, Santana, and Yucca — and, the family record adds, her Stone-yard sistership Martha, reunited with her on the Bay for the first time in decades.

The next generation of the family was now at the helm. In 2015, with John Collins skippering, Yankee won the Billiken Trophy again and took the Master Mariners championship banner, “a long time coming,” in McNeill’s words. In 2016, the crew and skipper for the Great San Francisco Schooner Race were entirely women, with Lexi Ford at the helm — “Wenches win too, you know,” as McNeill delightedly reported. Samantha Ford skippered in other years, and Rose O’Neill, a fifth-generation family member, had begun sailing aboard as well.

Throughout this period, the Leukemia Cup, hosted on the Bay by the San Francisco Yacht Club with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, remained a steadfast cause for the Yankee crew, honoring the memory of Liz McNeill Ford and other family members and friends lost to blood cancers. In 2014, Team Yankee raised $26,125 to finish as the regatta’s top fundraising boat. In 2015, the crew was recognized as the top fundraising team among the nearly fifty Leukemia Cup events across the country, and was given the privilege of naming a research project.

Yankee also made a brief appearance in a worldwide print advertising campaign for Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky, a gig that earned the crew, by their own account, some very nice whisky.