Santana sailboats: a California trailerable racer-cruiser line, built under one name for four decades
Santana is a line of trailerable and cruiser-racer sailboats built by W. D. Schock Corp, not a company in its own right — it takes its name from Santa Ana, California, where Bill Schock relocated his boatbuilding operation in 1960 to build a larger production facility, and where the line was born. The first Santana was designed there by Gary Mull, then a budding yacht architect; his 1965 collaboration with Schock on the Santana 22 set the pattern the line would follow for decades to come: trailerable racer/cruisers developed with active input from the sailors who raced them.
Origins and ownership
Bill Schock's boatbuilding legacy began in 1946, when he built an International 14 in his Newport Beach garage; he also built one of the first production fiberglass boats, the 10-foot Lehman Interclub dinghy, after purchasing designer Barney Lehman's company. In 1960, he moved the company to Santa Ana to build a larger production facility, and the Santana line was born there — its name drawn from the city, and its first boat designed by Gary Mull. Schock named that first design, exactly 22 feet overall, the Santana 22, in 1965.
The line outlived its founder: Bill Schock died in 1991, and his son Tom Schock took over as head of the company. The business itself changed hands at the turn of 2010–11, when Alexander Vucelic von Raduboj bought W. D. Schock Corp, which had 14 models in production at the time.
The designers
Tom Schock, Bill Schock's oldest son, crossed paths with Gary Mull — then a budding designer — at a West Coast regatta in 1965, and together they developed the Santana 22 as a trailerable pocket racer/cruiser. Sailors' lore holds that the two men got there by talking about how to improve on Bill Lapworth's 1961 Cal 20, built by Jensen Marine; Mull reportedly set to work once he realized Schock's real request was to design a boat better than the Cal 20. It was Mull's first big success as a designer, and it helped establish Schock in the trailerable-sailboat market — more than 700 were sold in that first production run, with four berths fit into the small cruiser.
A second design generation followed later in the line's history. Shad Turner designed the Santana 23; in the early 1990s, Steve Schock — Tom's brother — completed the design work that turned the 23's hull into the water-ballasted Santana 2023, alongside contributions from Tom Schock and Jean-Michel Bernasconi. Steve Schock also designed the Santana 23 Max that decade.
Construction through the eras
The Santana 22's hull was hand-laid fiberglass, reinforced in high-stress areas, fixed to a 1,230-pound cast-iron keel for stability and a low center of gravity. The Santana 20 saw its own construction change in 1996, when the manufacturer redesigned the deck, opening up the transom for a roomier, more ergonomic cockpit; the change didn't affect performance, and old- and new-design boats still race together in the same one-design class. The Santana 2023C's hull, later, was also hand-laid fiberglass — 18 to 20 mils of gelcoat, two layers of 1.5-ounce mat, and a layer of 18-ounce woven roving bonded with polyester resin, with extra layers built up at the keel trunk.
Lines and generations
The Santana 22 raced under the Midget Ocean Racing Class rule, and an active class association was founded almost as soon as the boat appeared, with the design accepted as one-design in both the Yacht Racing Association and the Small Yacht Racing Association — the YRA allowed spinnakers, while the SYRA held boats to their original main and 130 percent overlapping jib. Popularity spread from the West Coast to the East Coast and the Midwest. The Santana 20, nicknamed "The Original Sport Boat" or "Tuna 20," was, per SAILING magazine, among the first of that category — high-performance keel daysailers.
The Santana 23, Turner's design from the late 1970s, gave rise to the Santana 2023: a fractionally rigged, water-ballasted centerboarder sharing the same hull but significantly lighter than its predecessor and easily trailered by a family car. That production run began in the early 1990s and wound down in 1998 after 194 boats, split across the 2023A, 2023C, and 2023R models — 82, 97, and 15 built, respectively. Good Old Boat called the design team's rig set-up system the simplest and fastest of any boat in its size range.
Who Santana is for
A Santana suits a buyer drawn to a California trailerable-racer pedigree that runs across nearly four decades under one line name — from Gary Mull's one-design Santana 22 to Shad Turner and Steve Schock's water-ballasted Santana 2023 — backed by active one-design class racing rather than a single flagship model.
