One year after being rocked by the earthquake, picked up, and finished, the Yankee won the 1907 Farallones Race, the first ocean race every sailed out of San Francisco Bay. Before it became a St. Francis flagship under the current family of owners, the Yankee had only one skipper, the redoubtable Captain Charles E. Miller, who undertook a voyage south in 1912. It was a great adventure for the day. The Yankee made stopovers in coastal towns and in the Channel Islands. After a stay in San Diego -- and some races proving that the tall-rigged, local boats were indeed faster in light air -- Miller headed for home. Here is an excerpt from his account, as the Yankee cleared Southern California waters:
"At nightfall we were ten miles off Point Conception, and it was with fearful hearts that we watched the mercury tumbling again. Jack Brunswick surveyed the horizon. "Looks like it's going to start again," he said. We were in for a battle, and we knew it. The wind started moderately. In an hour or two it had increased in force until it was a gale. It whistled through the rigging and dashed spray over us until we were drenched to the skin. The sea rose fast and soon we were thrashing into it at terrific speed -- rail buried -- decks awash, and everything straining to the breaking point. All about us was an inky blackness. It was a weird and wonderful sensation -- the creaking of ropes, the straining of the hull, and the constant hiss-boom as the Yankee's prow crashed through the battering waves. Toward midnight the fury of the sea became so bad that the
Yankee began to labor and wallow. Smothered under full canvas, she was heeled at such an angle she could no longer rise quickly, and the enormous sea breaking over the bow raked her fore and aft and pored into the cockpit in great streams. "All hands on to reef!" I called. "One or two?" shouted Charles. "Double reef," I yelled back, and we all sprang to our places, tackling the big sail with frenzied energy. The task of reefing at sea is never child's play. It was almost impossible to keep one's footing, and more than once we had to let everything go and throw our arms around the boom to keep from being washed overboard by seas which had us almost entirely submerged. It took us an hour to shorten sail, but immediately the
Yankee pulled herself together and began to make better way. Although she still buried her nose under an occasional swell, the cockpit was quite dry. We were so tired we could scarcely stand up. Dawn broke at last, and never was the day more welcome. The sky had cleared, but the gale still howled as if it was determined to get us. Whitecaps stretched in every direction. We kept out to sea, and by noon we had no sign of land on any quarter. We took the sun and found we were in latitude 34-36 and longitude 120-43-30, eighty miles at sea and a long way from our destination. The sea calmed considerably in the afternoon, and the angry waves gave way to long, sleek swells. We felt safe in venturing closer to the coast. A few miles in, we encountered a fog that blanketed us on every side and made for cautious going. At the end of the third day, however, we made out Piedras Blancas [some 95 miles north of Point Conception after three days of beating upwind; Ed.], and by nine o'clock that night we were in San Simeon Bay and anchored in smooth water. We spent the night within a stone's throw of the spot where my father and mother were shipwrecked on the clipper "Pioneer" in 1852 after a voyage from New York."
Captain Charles E. Miller
