The appeal was answered. In late 2025, Hans Hansen was introduced to the project by his father, Bill Hansen, who had sailed aboard Yankee and knew John McNeill. A San Francisco Bay sailor, Bear boat owner, and officer of the Master Mariners Benevolent Association, Hansen took the lead in assembling an advisory circle and developing a phased restoration plan.

What the new stewards inherited was better than a rescue. The hardest structural work — frames, stem, and forward planking, rebuilt at KKMI in Point Richmond before the pandemic paused the project — was already banked. Her eight major spars had been refinished; a complete new suit of North Sails stood ready in its bags; her hardware, fittings, and a store of planking lumber had been kept together through the quiet years. The boat herself lay sound but idle at Loch Lomond Marina in San Rafael. What the project needed was not heroics. It needed organization, money raised in the right order, and a yard.

The plan answers all three. It consolidates Yankee’s hull, spars, sails, rigging, and stored materials at Richardson Bay Boatworks in Sausalito (a family-run yard on the campus of the Arques School, keeping the work within the Bay’s living tradition of wooden boat craft) and completes the refit in ten deliberate phases, an estimated $160,000–$255,000 in all, refined as each phase reports. Money is raised milestone by milestone: no phase begins until it is funded, and each phase’s findings set the scope of the next. A new identity, the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation (GGWBF), operates as a program of the West Coast Seafaring Society, preserving the legal entity and its 501(c)(3) status while bringing fresh energy and fundraising capacity. The mission is deliberately larger than one boat: keeping living boats sailing, and sustaining the community of boatwrights and craftspeople who make that possible.

Motion, not memory.

The Foundation’s first principle

The working circle spans the old crew and the new: Hans Hansen as President, with Jason Chan (Treasurer/CFO), Nicholas Kolaitis (Secretary), and Will Campbell (Director); John McNeill in an emeritus role as legacy advisor and lead fundraiser, and Jon Price providing WCSS continuity; the Sommer family and boatwright Graham Wheelock at Richardson Bay Boatworks; and advisors including Hans List (Staff Commodore of the MMBA), Tom List, KC Crowell, and Mark Harris.

At the end of March 2026, days after the board handed the project its new mandate, the plan became visible. After six quiet years, Yankee went somewhere: brought across the Bay from Loch Lomond Marina to the Sausalito waterfront, past Angel Island with the Golden Gate off her bow — her first movement in six years, and the whole project legible in a single crossing. The campaign’s new logbook opened with the entry; the ship’s own log, silent since 1998, now has a successor.

The consolidation followed through the spring. More than a thousand board feet of tight-grained, clear, air-dried Douglas fir, planking stock sourced years ago and saved for exactly this, came over to the yard, stacked and stickered to wait on the survey, along with her hardware, her fittings, and her carved name board. The spars and sails moved to private storage nearby until the work calls for them. By the end of June, nothing of hers remained at the old yard.

Phase 1 is funded and under way: haul-out, a professional survey of the hull and the completed structural work, and stabilization, with the yard confirming, plank by plank, what the twenty-year record says. The survey prices Phase 2, and the pattern repeats — fund, work, report — until she swims. It is the same discipline her builders used: one honest step at a time, each one checked before the next.

In her 120th year, the course forward has been set: back to the water, and in time, back under sail.