It is worth pausing to consider how rare Yankee’s survival is. Of the hundreds of wooden yachts that raced on San Francisco Bay in the first decade of the twentieth century, vanishingly few remain. The wood rots, the owners lose interest, the money runs out. What preserved Yankee was not luck but an unbroken chain of people who cared — from Abecassis to Miller to the Ford, O’Connell, and McNeill families, and now to the West Coast Seafaring Society and the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation.

She is, as far as the record shows, the longest continuously family-owned yacht on San Francisco Bay: purchased by the Ford family around 1925 and held by their descendants and in-laws until the transfer to the WCSS nonprofit around 2019–2020, nearly a century within one extended family. She has been the flagship of the St. Francis Yacht Club seven times, under five Commodores spanning four generations of that family: Sydney W. Ford (1942–43), Arthur Ford (1951–52), Robert D. Ford (1972), Richard Ford (1989), and John McNeill (2009). She has raced in the Farallones Race, the Master Mariners Regatta, the Jessica Cup, the Great San Francisco Schooner Race, the Leukemia Cup, and countless other events. Her sixty-one-year logbook holds the signatures of everyone from Walter Cronkite to the children who grew up to skipper her.

She was born in the earthquake, served in a world war, starred in movies, and outlived the boatyard that built her. At 120 years old, she awaits her next chapter — and if the past is any guide, she will get it.