San Juan sailboats: a Pacific Northwest family yard split three ways
Coral Clark, originally from North Dakota, famously answered "What's a sailboat?" when her husband Bob announced he'd bought one - Small Craft Advisor's telling of a family that got into sailing, in its own words, on a whim. That whim became a business: in 1960 Bob convinced the family to leave Toledo, Ohio, where he'd worked in the automotive industry, for the Seattle area, and the couple soon set up shop in nearby Kent, Washington, building fiberglass boats. Coral herself dated the Clark Boat Company's founding to that year, though its early years were spent on small one-design dinghies - Thistles and Lightnings among them - before the San Juan line took shape later in the decade. The first hull to carry the "Manufactured by Clark Boat Company" label was itself one of the first fiberglass Lightnings on the market.
Origins and ownership
By the time the Clarks' three sons were old enough to take on real roles, the business split cleanly along their training. Don, a degreed engineer with additional study in naval architecture, moved into design and later became company president and chief engineer. Dave, a Management graduate, ran sales and marketing. Dennis, the family's most competitive sailor, made a serious run at an Olympic berth in the Flying Dutchman class before founding the Clark Sails loft in 1971. That same year, Don's in-house design, the San Juan 21, held its first championships; by 1972 the Clarks had built 400 of them with 250 more projected, and roughly 2,600 would eventually be produced. An East Coast push followed: in 1972 Bob and Coral helped form the Blackbeard Sailing Club, incorporated in 1974 and settled on its own land by 1975. The company's run ended in the spring of 1984, when the Clarks sold to the newly formed San Juan Manufacturing, after building some 6,000 San Juans and 2,000 dinghies. That successor went bankrupt within a couple of years, splitting the molds and rights between a West Coast group and an East Coast group - the latter building a very limited number of boats at the Tanzer factory in Edenton, North Carolina - and both had ceased by 1988. Afterward, Don ran a bicycle shop in Ventura Beach, California, and Dennis owned a cabinet-making shop in Gig Harbor, Washington; Bob and Coral stayed on to support San Juan sailing in New Bern, North Carolina, for the rest of their lives.
The designers
Don Clark drew most of the range himself: the San Juan 21, the San Juan 26 in 1975, the shoal-keel/centerboard San Juan 23 and the larger San Juan 28 racer-cruiser in 1976, and the San Juan 7.7 in 1979, built specifically to fix downwind and beam shortcomings the IOR rule had imposed on the popular San Juan 24. The 24 itself was the one design commissioned outside the family: in 1972, needing the company's first true keelboat, the Clarks brought in Canadian designer Bruce Kirby, best known for the Laser, to draw a boat competitive in the IOR Quarter Ton class under two limits Don Clark set - no more than four feet of draft, no more than eight feet of beam. Kirby has called the San Juan 24 one of his favorite designs and, the Laser aside, his most successful; hull number 1000 rolled off the line in 1978. Kirby returned in 1975 to design the San Juan 30, a half-tonner. The San Juan 34 has a more tangled design lineage worth stating plainly: it began as the Crown 34, designed by Hein Driehuyzen, manager of Calgan Marine in North Vancouver, BC, and built by several Pacific Northwest companies before its molds were sold to GlassFab of Monroe, Washington (which built it as the "Sun Yacht 1030") and finally to Dave Clark, who mildly redesigned it into the San Juan 34. One further model came from neither brother: the San Juan 33S is also known as the Eagle 33, credited to designer David Pedrick.
Construction through the eras
Clark hulls were gelcoated and hand laid up, rather than built with a chopper-gun method, and decks were typically balsa-core sandwich construction. The Clarks also vacuum-bonded hulls and liners together, giving their boats one of the industry's first no-void hull-to-liner assemblies. Asked about the lay-up in a Practical Sailor review, Don Clark said sheets of mat were used along with small amounts of chopped mat laid by hand between the roving, and that few of the company's boats had blister problems.
Lines and generations
After the San Juan 21 and 24 established the marque, the mid-1970s brought a run of Don Clark cruiser-racers - the 26, the 23, the 28 - and Kirby's half-tonner, the 30. The San Juan 28 has a near-twin worth knowing: the later San Juan 29 is essentially the same Don Clark design, distinguished mainly by builder, since the 28 was built by Clark while the 29 - a 28 with a few cosmetic changes - came from the successor San Juan Manufacturing. At the top of the range, the San Juan 34, the largest boat the company built, sold in modest numbers - around 50 between 1980 and 1988. The San Juan 33 was Clark's last model, built only in 1981 and 1982, with little documentation surviving; its sibling, the Pedrick-designed 33S, stands apart as a rebadged Eagle 33 rather than a Clark original. Clark designs also traveled beyond the Pacific Northwest: the company licensed its designs for modified manufacture in the Southern Hemisphere, with both a New Zealand version and an Australian version produced under license.
Who San Juan is for
The San Juan 21, 23, 24, and 28 have long maintained active owners associations, and the San Juan 21 Class Association, formed in Seattle in 1971, spans three regions - West, Midwest, and East. The 26 and 7.7 share a combined owners group that stays active by email, and the Crown 34/San Juan 34 owners maintain a web page of their own. For a company that built for barely a decade and a half under the Clark name, that level of organized, ongoing owner interest says as much about the boats as any production number does.
