Look out on San Francisco Bay: Sunday is opening day for sailing

San Francisco Chronicle​

26-04-2025

This will be the last Sunday in April, a good day for a great tradition on San Francisco Bay: the opening of sailing season.
It started more than a century ago when the drawbridge that closed off Belvedere Lagoon was opened so that sailboats big and small could venture out into open water after a winter in quiet anchorages.
San Francisco has been a working port for 250 years, but sailing for pleasure was always part of the scene. There are thousands of vessels on the bay, from high-tech super yachts to kayaks and paddleboards. Opening day celebrates them all. A parade of boats from Crissy Field to Pier 39 starts at noon. A fireboat always leads the way, and maybe 100 boats follow along in a ragged single file, flags and pennants flying.
Opening day is a good time for a little salty talk. I had lunch just the other day with Vince Casalaina, a filmmaker working on a documentary about classic sailing vessels from San Francisco Bay. He believes these boats, built of wood long ago, have lives of their own. They are not like the high-tech sailing machines in favor now.
Casalaina is a bit of a classic himself: He's old and a bit grizzled now. He's had a long career in television and film. He got his first taste of boating as a kid sailing a small boat by himself in Newport Harbor in Southern California. He liked the wind in his sails and the freedom sailing brought him. The feeling never left him.
He was a TV director, made documentaries, won an Emmy. And one day, drawn back to the world of boating, he saw an announcement on Latitude 38, the sailing magazine, looking for crew for a race on a J/24 sailboat. 'They put me on the bow,'' he said. Up front, with the wind in his face, he saw the racing boats with a filmmaker's eye.
A J/24 is a fiberglass sloop, popular in the Bay Area. Casalaina became interested instead in classic boats, wooden boats. They had stories, and lives apart from the crews that sailed them.
He's making a film: 'Wind in Their Sails: Death and Resurrection,' featuring three San Francisco Bay classics.
I wanted to hear the sad story first. That would be the yacht Vadura built in Scotland on the River Clyde in 1926. The Vadura was built for an Italian princess, they say, long and slender with a single tall mast. After service in Europe, and after World War II the vessel sailed to the South Seas — Tahiti, Bora Bora, Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, New Zealand, later the Caribbean, later yet Southern California. In its day the Vadura was a luxury yacht, where the professional crew catered to every whim. 'What a beauty she was,' said an old sailor.
The Vadura's last port of call was Sausalito, where the old boat anchored in Richardson Bay, left there for years. Over time, the hull was still sound, but the decks leaked, rot set in and the boat began to die of neglect. 'It kept getting worse and worse,'' Casalaina said. It was nearly 100 years old and needed a lot of work, but nothing serious happened. People lived aboard, but they weren't in a position to save the vessel.
There are a lot of sad stories about the Vadura posted on the forum page of Wooden Boat magazine. 'She was a derelict on the bay,'' Casalaina said. Finally, in February 2024, the classic was towed away to be dismantled in an East Bay boatyard.
That was death.
For resurrection, Casalaina offers the story of the yacht Freda, built in 1885 on Beach Road in Belvedere by a saloonkeeper named Harry Cookson and named for his daughter.
The Freda is 52 feet long, broad in the beam and long in the tooth. It's believed the Freda is the oldest sailing yacht on the West Coast. The boat has had more than 10 owners, three or four names, and more lives than a cat. The Freda has been rebuilt, and restored many times. Harold Somer, a tugboat skipper, rescued the Freda from a backwater 40 or so years ago; it was rescued and restored again in the 1990s, but it sprang a plank one night in 2005 and sank in the San Rafael canal. Usually that's the end for a vessel of that vintage. But the boat was pumped out, patched up and towed to the Spaulding Marine Center in Sausalito and rebuilt to sail again, a project that took eight years. 'Resurrected,' Casalaina said, 'for a second time.'
The theme of this year's opening day is 'Generations on the Bay,' and the best example is the big handsome schooner Brigadoon, 65 feet long and 101 years old. The boat was designed by the famous L. Francis Herreshoff, launched in Lynn, Mass., in 1924 and named Joann.
The boat had a number of East Coast owners until Sterling Hayden, the sailor and actor, bought it in the 1940s and renamed the boat Brigadoon, after the Broadway musical about a mythical Scottish town that appears every 100 years. He brought the schooner to California and sold it. At various times, the Brigadoon was owned by developer Gary Reese and by singer and songwriter Dino Valenti of Quicksilver Messenger Service. He sold it nearly 50 years ago to Terry Klaus and his late wife, Patti.
The Brigadoon has been in the family ever since, sailing and racing on the bay. The Brigadoon has entered the Master Mariners race every year and is expected again this year, racing against other classics at the age of 101.
At the helm will be Klaus' daughter Lindsey, who grew up on the boat and runs it now. 'They are passing the torch from one generation to another,' Casalaina said.
'Life, death and resurrection,' Casalaina said. 'That's my story.'