“My dad was a sailor. We had the Bird Boat about 30 years. Sunda was my second boat and when I saw her, the stern captured your breath practically, it was just like the boat built by my great grandfather, the first Marconi rigged boat on the West Coast. I had her for 30 years, doing everything that you do on San Francisco Bay. Then being a veteran, I thought I’d pass it on to Wooden Boats for Veterans so that they can continue to get veterans out on the bay.”

“My dad was a sailor. We had the Bird Boat about 30 years. Sunda was my second boat and when I saw her, the stern captured your breath practically, it was just like the boat built by my great grandfather, the first Marconi rigged boat on the West Coast. I had her for 30 years, doing everything that you do on San Francisco Bay. Then being a veteran, I thought I’d pass it on to Wooden Boats for Veterans so that they can continue to get veterans out on the bay.”

“This brings us to Freda, many people said that I could restore Freda. They felt confident, including Harold Sommers. What we did initially. We pulled off some planks, and I realized that the frames, the deck and even the cabin were shot. I broke a piece off that was black and wet inside and I said, if you go out sailing and some heavy guy gets up on the cabin to furl the sails, it’s gonna collapse. No matter what the stress, is this is the best thing we could do. Nothing is more important on San Francisco Bay historically than the Freda.”

“At the age of 18, I confessed that I really would love to do wooden boat building. I was trained by people like John Linderman and Halden Chase. Because of that, I was able to start a school in Sausalito, the Arquez school. The minute I got the job people said that I could restore the Freda. Nothing is more important on San Francisco Bay historically than the Freda.”

“The Alma is the only boat in the San Francisco National Maritime Historical Park collection that has gone sailing on a regular basis. So it gets a lot more attention. You know, people take care of it, they’re interested in it, it gets a lot of volunteers coming aboard and helping out and all that sort of thing. It’s really a very important element in maintaining an historic ship like that.

When we rebuilt her in 1992, We replaced all of the side planking and side framing. We did replace a few planks on the bottom, but the rest of the bottom, the stringers and most of the planking was as original as we knew at the time.

Probably most of the bottom planks have been replaced by now. We replaced all of the side perimeter planking and the forward rake. We did not replace the aft rake. I think that had been done, some years prior at Stone Boat Yard. We replaced all the deck.

So, you know, probably 97 percent of the elements have been replaced over the years.”

—Bill Elliot, Bay Ship and Yacht

“We were over in San Rafael and saw this schooner rig from the road. We stopped and went down and looked at it. And that’s where Brigadoon was. It’s L Francis Herreshoff’s first design. That wasn’t the boat we were looking for because it was a little bigger than we thought, but we did buy it and it’s been here at the dock ever since.”

“We did two Hawaii races, you know, ten days with a spinnaker up, forcefully pulling you toward Oahu. I invited my wife’s dad to join. One night I was on the watch with him and a squall comes up, and the wind goes from 20 knots to 35 knots like that. In the middle of all of this, a flying fish jumped off a wave, and it flew right into his chest. His first response would have been exactly the same as mine, which was to say, Jesus Christ! And he let go of the wheel. And, of course, we round it up. We wrapped the spinnaker around the head stay. We didn’t clear it till dawn the next day.”

“Evening Star has a soft spot in my heart because I used to sail it in San Diego when it was the queen of the fleet.

I found it here in the estuary. I ended up buying the boat and told him I would find somebody to continue with it. Fellow bought it, got diagnosed with kidney failure and gave the boat plus stacks and stacks of wood back to me.

There’s a real small crowd of people that can do that level of work with the exception of somebody that wants an Alden design built by Herreschoff.”

“We were sailing down the coast, going by Monterey and Big Sur and the bridges. We got past San Luis Obispo and that bay there was just, it’s like an American Serengeti. The amount of wildlife we saw there was just stunning. Dolphins, whales, birds, and all this feeding.

By the time we got down to Arguello, of course it’s blowing down there and we were hauling ass and we were making 11 and a half knots. She was really you know, like strutting her stuff.

We pulled into Coho and dropped the anchor and had Thanksgiving dinner there. And those moments of like the singularity of purpose of everybody on the boat when you’re making a passage and everyone’s minds are in it. And there’s this unanimity of purpose. Then as the adrenaline fades away and people are reading and, napping. admiring and writing and you know there’s a different part of our brains that’s activated in that space.”

“In 1997. she was advertised in Wooden Boat Magazine as a yacht ready to cross oceans.

She was a New Rochelle, and, she smelled awful. She looked decrepit, but she had beautiful Sparkman and Stephens lines. And I thought, Okay, we fixed up that old tub 35 years before. We knew how to do this. We took her to Jeff Rutherford over in Richmond for the heavy duty boat construction stuff. Jeff, refastened the bottom of that boat. He built a new rudder. When he finished with the stuff that would keep her afloat, we found a berth in Sausalito and Sue and I went up there with sandpaper and varnish and started. We haven’t stopped. 26 years later, we’re still varnishing and sanding.”

“I have fond memories of the day I went out to sail Folly for the first time. You know, I was looking for a boat. I went out, and as soon as we set the sail, I took the tiller, I was like, this is really special. You know, she was fast, she was dealing with the bay weather and waves. She was at home.”

“I couldn’t imagine not having the boat. I feel incredibly fortunate. I mean, who gets to grow up on a boat like Brigadoon? I also feel a sense of duty to keep her alive and going.

I love sharing the boat with people. It’s my absolute favorite thing to do in the world because she just has a way of making people smile. You know, there’s something charming about her and, and approachable and I love. being able to share that. I also have this fear of, if we were to sell Brigadoon, that she would go into the hands of a very wealthy person who would keep her stuffed away in their private collection and she wouldn’t be shared with people.”

“I grew up in Eckley, on the Carquinaz Straits. Our family boat was a pumpkin seed design sloop, gaff rigged from 1906. I love the smell of a wooden boat and the feel always spoke to me.

In 2004, I got Sequester a 1940 Tahiti catch built by the Sea Scouts in Antioch. Nobody showed up to the auction and the price kept coming down and down. He goes I can’t go any less than the price that I paid for the brand new Yanmar that’s in there. We had a good laugh after he found out he bought that engine from my dad. So, we bought the engine back and got the boat with it.”

“We call it developed shapes you know when you twist a product It develops into the shape that you’re trying to produce. What we do, is we template the inner surface of that plank. You gotta trust your batten, you gotta trust your template.
If you build a template that exactly represents the inside surface of that plank, and then you lay it on your piece of stock, and no matter what it looks like, you know that that’s what laid on there.

When we have to repair ’em, we’re doing it the hardest possible way. Every single plank we put in is a shutter plank. I mean, occasionally we’ll do four planks, so two of them aren’t shutters. You know, that’s what makes it interesting and I wouldn’t do anything else.”

“During COVID, there were a lot of shutdowns here. There’s a group of people in the industrial community here that got together and said, what can we do to help?

Number one, was creating face shields. In the end we created about 15, 000 face shields and they went all over the country, mostly to local hospitals and places like that. Number two was hand sanitizer. It didn’t cost anybody anything. Coca Cola donated the plastic.

During COVID downtown shut down, Caledonia Street shut down, and the city’s income came from the businesses in Marin Ship. That saved Sausalito’s economy.”

“I’ve always been on Brigadoon. I think the story is that the first time I was on the boat, I was a month old, swinging in a hammock down below. I’ve always just been enthralled with the boat I’ve been crewing since I was a young teenager and started skippering nine years ago.”

“When it comes to Rolex Big Boat Series, I said, here I am, I’m going to race this thing. Susan Ruhne, who’s the chair of the Big Boat Series said, why don’t you find five other boats like this and show up? I went and called Terry Klaus and he said, sure. We got Dewey Hines who owned the Ocean Queen V. We found John Eagleson over at San Francisco Yacht Club and he’s got Water Witch, a beautiful boat that he had just finished restoring.

We showed up at the starting line in front of the clubhouse and the Rolex sponsors were there with all of their guests and all the guests went, well wait a minute, what are those? After that we were in, because the Rolex guys, saw their customer demographic fit what those boats look like.”

“The C A Thayer was built by Ben Dixon in 1894. She was originally designed to carry lumber from Port Blakely, Washington, down to San Francisco. When vessels like the Thayer were built, it was a very, very efficient process. I mean, she was built in something like six months. And at a very, very low cost. The fact that there are still so many wooden vessels around that people are talking about preserving is a sign of how durable they are.”

“When we were looking for a boat to buy, Stan Honey said that before you buy a wooden boat, you’ve got to talk to this guy Wayne Heddle. And so I called up Wayne. He said David Crosby doesn’t want to sell the boat. His parents, his wife, and his accountant want him to sell the boat. Wayne said write him a letter as to what you’ve done and the fact that you even know what a golly wobbler is. Two days later the phone rang and David Cosby says, come on down to Santa Barbara and we’ll look at the boat. We went down to the boat and we shook hands on the thing.”