Kettenburg sailboats: a San Diego family yard split across two design eras
Kettenburg is a San Diego name attached to two different kinds of sailboat, built by the same family yard a generation apart: George Kettenburg Jr.'s prewar Pacific Class one-design, and the postwar K-series - the K-38 through the K-50 - designed by his younger brother Paul Kettenburg together with Charlie Underwood after George Jr.'s death in 1952. Kettenburg Boat Works built both lines under family ownership before a series of corporate sales - to the Whittaker Corporation in 1969, then to Thompson Fetter in 1985 - closed the operation for good in 1993. What era a used Kettenburg came from says more about the boat than any single company's unbroken reputation does.
Origins and ownership
George William Kettenburg Sr. brought his wife Amelia and their young family from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to San Diego around 1910, settling on the Point Loma peninsula by 1912. His son George William Kettenburg Jr., born in 1904, helped his father build a 22-foot sailboat from a set of plans at age fifteen - an early hint of the trade the family would take up in earnest. In 1918, after building a William Hand-designed speedboat, the Kettenburgs concentrated fully on designing and building boats under the banner of the Kettenburg Boat and Engine Co. - formed that year by one account, the early 1920s by another. In 1926 the company built its first sailboat, a 22-foot Alden-designed sloop commissioned by a group of local yachtsmen, setting the family on the way to becoming San Diego's preeminent sailboat designers and builders. The business purchased waterfront property in Point Loma in 1929, moved there, and renamed itself Kettenburg Boat Works.
The Kettenburgs entered the fishing-boat business in 1935. During World War II, George Jr. built ninety plane-rearming boats alongside new sailboat designs. Paul Kettenburg, George Jr.'s younger brother, had left the family firm during the Depression years to work for General Electric and later in Chicago's heating and air-conditioning trade; he rejoined Kettenburg Boat Works on Shelter Island in 1943 as a systems engineer.
George Kettenburg Jr. died of cancer in 1952 (his father, George Sr., died the following year), and the business restructured as a partnership of George William Kettenburg III ("Bill"), Paul Kettenburg, Morgan Miller, Charles Underwood, and Bill Kearns, becoming Kettenburg Marine, with Paul as senior partner. That family arrangement didn't hold indefinitely: the Whittaker Corporation, a Los Angeles technology and chemical company, bought Kettenburg Marine in 1969, and Paul Kettenburg stayed on as president until his retirement in 1979. The company was sold again in 1985, to La Jolla's Thompson Fetter, and was dissolved in 1993; by the time later chroniclers wrote its history, nothing remained of the physical yard, and George Kettenburg III had sold off the buildings.
The designers
Kettenburg's early boats belong to George Kettenburg Jr., who had no naval-architecture training and only a high-school education; the Pacific Class one-design that made the family's name came from his self-taught eye for speed and line. Everything from the K-38 onward belongs to a different pairing: Paul Kettenburg developed the lines and layout while Charlie Underwood, who joined the company that year, handled styling - a name chosen to echo the P-38 aircraft designation. George Jr. oversaw the K-38's production before his 1952 death, but design credit for it, and for every K-boat that followed, sits with Paul and Underwood.
Construction through the eras
The Pacific Class, built from 1929 into the late 1950s, was traditional wood construction: a Douglas-fir keel, steam-bent white-oak frames measuring just over an inch square on eight-inch centers, three-quarter-inch Philippine mahogany planking fastened with bronze, and spruce decks. After the war, with the yard now running as a production boatbuilder, Kettenburg adopted the efficiency of building PC hulls upside-down on a jig rather than upright in the traditional manner. The postwar K-series carried its own, simpler formula: the K-38 and K-40 were both built in mahogany on oak frames using carvel planking, a construction method the yard held to consistently across the two models.
Lines and generations
Two lines define the Kettenburg name. The Pacific Class, commissioned originally by the San Diego Yacht Club and first delivered in 1929, was the first one-design racing sloop built for Southern California waters - a class boat of which roughly 83 hulls were built before the line closed out in the late 1950s. The postwar K-series - the K-38, K-40, K-41, K-46, and K-50 - followed a different brief: cruising yachts the Kettenburg Boat Works and Owners Association's own history describes as seaworthy, easy to handle, and fast enough to win a number of races.
Who Kettenburg is for
A Kettenburg is a piece of San Diego one-design and offshore racing history split cleanly down the middle of a single family: George Kettenburg Jr.'s self-taught, prewar Pacific Class on one side, Paul Kettenburg and Charlie Underwood's postwar K-series on the other, both built by a yard that changed hands from family ownership to the Whittaker Corporation to Thompson Fetter before closing for good in 1993. Buyers drawn to the name are buying into which half of that story a given hull belongs to.
