Yankee 30
Reprinted with permission Latitude
38, October 1989, pages
114-117.
Three years ago when Geoff Faraghan went shopping for a used boat, he conducted an interesting mini-survey. He asked a handful of brokers to forget for a minute what was on their docks, and then to name the one or two best boats in the 30-ft. range; boats they themselves would choose if they planned, as he did, to do some serious offshore sailing. The most often mentioned boat turned out to be the Yankee 30. That was a surprise to Geoff, who admits at the time, “I’d never heard of a Yankee 30.”
He soon found out that the Yankee is (by today’s standards) a smallish 30-footer designed by Sparkman and Stephens and built by Yankee Yachts in Santa Ana, California, between 1971 and 1974. Some 20 to 30 of the 130-odd Yankees built made their ways to San Francisco, where a one-design fleet raced YRA until 1980. Some of the features that most impressed Geoff, and other knowledgeable sailors over the years, were the beefiness of the hull and rig; the boat’s terrific upwind performance, especially in chop and a breeze and the genuine duality of the design as both a viable racer and comfortable cruiser.
He bought one.
But for fate and a sweet deal on a slightly smaller boat, the managing editor here at Latitude almost bought one a few years ago, too. What caught his eye at the time was the nifty “hybrid” keel profile, which cleverly combines the low drag and maneuverability of a fin keel with the tracking and protection for the rudder/propeller of a full keel. The engine was in a smart place, too. Though sailors will damn them from dawn till dusk, engines have to be accessible, and the Yankee 30’s is one of the easiest to get at of any boat, old or new. It’s under part of the settee, right in the middle of the boat. One thing Mr. Editor didn’t care for on this particular boat was this weird engine that ran on diesel and … alcohol?
“That engine!” laughs Peter Jones, longtime owner of the Yankee 30 Emerald (hull #34), “Yankee had a terrible time with that engine. It was an Albin two-cylinder that you were supposed to be able to start with alcohol and then switch over to diesel. My boat still has one, and they’re actually good little engines, though a bit underpowered. But you had to go through a fairly regimented sequence of turning this on and that off to get one going, and sure enough, some guy blew up one of them.” (Reportedly, repercussions of the incident actually drove Albin out of business.) The ubiquitous Atomic Four replaced the little two-banger as standard issue from then on, except for a few of the later boats which came equipped with Buch diesels.
The Yankee 30 proved popular with the racing crowd when it was introduced. “They were the J/29s of their day,” says Jones, a former yacht broker. Today they remain popular boats in the used boat arena. “The average listing may be on the market for two years,” says Jones. “But it’s rare for a Yankee to last more than three months.” New Yankees sold for about $18,500. Average price of a good used one nowadays ranges from the mid 20 to low $30,000 range, depending on equipment.
About now, you may be asking yourself, “If the boats were that all-fired wonderful, why did they stop making them?”
Well, it wasn’t because the boats weren’t any good. We couldn’t find any executive types from the old Yankee company, so we can’t say much about the business end of it, either. What most devotees concede was the company’s undoing was the “Yankee ingenuity” of trying to please all the people all the time. Simply put, when the rating rules changed, the Yankee company tried to keep the boats competitive by subtly --- and sometimes not so subtly --- tweaking them. As a result, there ended up being three different versions of the boat (four if you count the “MORC” model, “wherein builders shaved 1-1/8 inches off an otherwise stock boat to get it under 30 feet), the Mark I, II, and III. These were differentiated by gradually increasing mast heights, and in the Mark III, an additional 1,000 pounds of internal ballast. The only options that actually added to the boats; long-term marketability were the choice of two different interiors, which of course had nothing to do with ratings.
The result of all the changes, at least in San Francisco, was a One Design fleet that had to handicap some of its own boats --- limiting the largest headsail, a “tall rig” boat could use, for example, or requiring a “medium rig” boat to wire its folding prop in the open position. It was a dilemma doomed from the start to failure, and the fleet gradually faded from the one design scene. A few boats continue to race actively in local handicap events.
A local Yankee 30 renaissance of sorts occurred in the last few years as singlehanders have gradually “discovered” the boat. As a result, Emerald, long a cornerstone of the Bay’s Singlehanded Sailing Society, and lately been joined by Club Dead, Faraghan’s Yankee (hull #128) and Ed Ruszel’s dark blue Chelonia (hull #100). During last year’s Singlehanded Farallones, his first in the boat, Ed says the 35 knots and big seas “were the wildest I’ve ever seen.” It was no big deal to Chelonia, though. With two reefs tucked into the main and the number four up forward, she was under such control that he could --- and did --- tie the tiller off for long periods and go below to get out of the weather.
Perhaps the most dramatic testimony to the boat’s great seakeeping ability occurred with the same boat, but on a different race: the infamous 1982 Doublehanded Farallones where four sailors died and eight boats were either sunk or driven onto the beach by a savage southeasterly. Carl Ondry and son Mark were sailing the race aboard the boat (then named Wildfire) for the first time. They’d just rounded the island when the big one hit.
“I’ve never seen so much rain,” says Carl (who’s dominated the ocean fleet for the last several years on his current boat, the Manecbo 30, Bloom County.) “It rained so hard, you couldn’t see another boat 50 yards away.” Though he didn’t learn about the destruction until after the race, he says he and Mark never felt concerned about the Yankee, which took the thrashing without complaint. They were one of only 39 finishers out of 127 starters, ending up fourth in their division.
As cruisers, Yankees have proven comfortable, capable and near ideal for transporting a normal-size couple (headroom is 6’1”) virtually anywhere they want to go. Several have sailed to Hawaii and back. One local one was trucked to Texas, offloaded, and cruised the Caribbean and East Coast to Maine and back for a year, where upon it was loaded up in Texas and trucked back to the Bay. In last month’s Changes in Latitudes, Ed and Mary Larenas wrote about their cruise to Ecuador and the Galapagos aboard their Yankee 30, Quick Silver. Next month, Tom Hughes and Sara Wright start their eight-month sabbatical to points south aboard their Yankee, Frolic. The list goes on and on.
Comfort, performance, value, versatility --- it sounds like the beginning of a car commercial. But those superlatives and more apply to Yankee’s still oft-forgotten 30. True, it may come up lacking a few of the bells and whistles when compared to a new 30-footer. But where it counts, the Yankee 30 does most things well and nothing badly. That’s the most you can ask from any boat. --- latitude/jr