Under way.

Nothing left at the old yard

The last piece is moved. Over one long weekend the six smaller spars went to their new berth in private storage (two of us managed them easily enough), and then the masts, which were another matter entirely. Borrowed mast dollies, a crew answering a help-wanted email, and one memorable corner where staying on the sidewalk beat stepping the whole parade up and down driveway curbs. On Monday we could finally write the email we’d been waiting to send: Masts moved. Nothing left at KKMI.

Six years of storage at the old yard ended with a thank-you note and a final invoice. Her eight spars now rest wrapped and racked with the new suit of North Sails and her rigging; they come to Sausalito when the work calls for them, and not a day sooner. The masts will want some woodwork before they’re stepped again; that’s on the survey list, along with a spot near the waterline the diver flagged this spring. We’ll be looking hard at both when she comes out of the water.

Phase 1 is funded and begun: haul-out, a professional survey of the hull and the completed structural work, and stabilization. Ross, Andrew, and Graham are working out the schedule for the ways, and the Foundation’s new bank account opened this week in Sausalito, two blocks from the boat. When she comes out of the water, we’ll be here with cameras.

Emptying the warehouse

The yard is filling up with her things. This weekend the parts came over from Point Richmond to Sausalito: the removed bulwarks, the cap rails riding a truck rack, the long trim, and her carved name board, face down and none the worse for it. Thanks, Andy.

Then the lumber: eighteen boards of tight-grained, clear, air-dried Douglas fir, planking stock sourced years ago and saved for exactly this. Fourteen came over the first day, the last four right behind them, and by Tuesday the whole stack stood stickered at Richardson Bay Boatworks, waiting on the survey. More than a thousand board feet. As one of us put it when the last board landed: what an amazing stack of fir.

The yard sets a date

Word from the yard: Andrew Sommer expects to haul Yankee and begin work around the tenth of June. That single sentence organizes everything else: the survey scope, the consolidation schedule, and the moment this Logbook has been building toward: her lines out of the water, in the light, for the first time in years.

Meanwhile the untangling of six years of storage continues. The first locker is emptied and closed. Among the finds: her mainsail — and a mystery, a very old transom board that’s been riding along in storage for years. Nobody now aboard is sure which era of her it served, or whether it served her at all. It’s a nice piece; we’ll figure out where it belongs, or at least where it hangs.

Honest note for the record: the masts will need some woodwork before they’re stepped: a couple of rot areas to be scarfed, and a masthead repair. Nothing a proper spar bench hasn’t fixed a hundred times in this town, but it goes on the list, because the list is the point.

Taking the helm

Every voyage begins with a crew signing on. In late March the West Coast Seafaring Society’s board met, elected officers, and put the Yankee restoration under new operational direction, with John McNeill, who has kept her story alive for decades, staying aboard as advisor, and Jon Price carrying the Society’s books forward as Treasurer. A new public identity for the work, the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation, was set in motion the same week. Days later, the boat herself moved. That’s the kind of week it was.

The first gifts arrived before we’d asked anyone for anything, and they came from the two men who’d kept her alive through the quiet years. There is no better endorsement of a plan than that.

The paper is coming aboard too: the Society’s files, boxes of family history, a shared archive of photographs from friends of the boat, and the ship’s own logbook, sixty-one years of it, 1937 to 1998, photographed page by page. Race results pasted in by the crew, Walter Cronkite’s signature from a Stag Cruise, seventeen names on a Master Mariners crew list. It is becoming the spine of the history section of this site.

The crossing

After six quiet years, Yankee went somewhere. We brought her across the Bay from Loch Lomond Marina in San Rafael to Richardson Bay in Sausalito, a short trip by any chart, and the longest she’s made since the pandemic paused her restoration in 2020. She took the crossing dry and easy, past Angel Island with the Golden Gate standing off her bow, her crew waving at the camera boat like it was 1957 again.

A boat under way again — the whole project in one morning.

Days earlier, the Society’s board had handed the project its new mandate; this was the mandate made visible. Going somewhere, with people aboard who mean to keep her moving: the restoration restarts where the working waterfront still knows how to do it.

We shot photographs and video the whole way across. The film from the crossing is being cut now; it will be the first episode of the video series, and we’ll link it here when it’s live.