One day around 1925 — the date varies in family documents — a schoolboy named Robert D. Ford was bicycling home along the San Rafael Canal when he came upon Yankee sitting there, apparently abandoned. He hurried home to his father and uncle with what has become one of the most quoted lines in Bay sailing lore: “I’ve found our boat!” (See Appendices for fact-check notes on the purchase date.)

Arthur and Sydney Ford negotiated with Charlie Miller and purchased Yankee, bringing her to the St. Francis Yacht Club. Yankee was among the original StFYC fleet, and she remained in her berth on the westernmost dock of the new marina — a hundred yards from where she had been launched at the Stone Yard — for nearly ninety years.

The Ford brothers were active racers and cruisers who continued Miller’s tradition of coastal voyages to Southern California, where they reportedly once entertained the actress Mary Pickford and her business partner Douglas Fairbanks. They were men with a healthy sense of fun — including a failed attempt to steal the fog bell off Angel Island, an escapade that ended with a swamped dinghy and a bracing swim back to the boat.

Arthur Ford, known to all as “Skipper,” was a legendary helmsman. His reputation rested on an extraordinary knowledge of the tides and currents inside the Bay. While other boats headed for the middle of the Bay to catch the afternoon westerlies, fighting the flood current, Skipper would ghost up the city front in the last of the ebb, gin cocktail in hand, and arrive at the finish well ahead of the fleet. His philosophy of crew selection was equally firm: those who put in the work maintaining the boat earned the right to sail her when racing began. (See Chapter VII for more on Arthur Ford’s racing.)

In 1933, Yankee was stolen from her marina berth. The thieves sailed her out through the Golden Gate — bold seamanship in itself — but got no further than Ocean Beach, three miles south, where they abandoned her. She was driven ashore in the surf off Fleishhacker Zoo. Rolling in the breakers, she took on a great deal of sand before being dug out and towed off after several attempts. The only structural damage was to the forward bulwarks. The prevailing suspicion was that the caper had been concocted by Stanford students on a lark. Sand from that episode has continued to turn up in remote corners of the bilges for decades afterward.