About forty Yankee One-Designs were built between 1937 and 1963, racing in fleets up and down the New England coast. In the late 1960s, as yacht clubs switched to lighter fiberglass designs, the YODs were sold to private families.

​

Today roughly ten Yankees still exist, scattered across the United States, France, Australia, and New Zealand. Nearly ninety years after the first one launched, they are still racing — and still winning — in handicap races and classic wooden boat regattas around the world. A handful of others are known to exist but have not been seen in years, and the search for them continues.

​

The reason that so few Yankees have survived is because Burgess designed them to be as light as possible, with roughly a ten-year lifespan — and the original fleets sailed them hard, breaking frames at a legendary rate.

​

The reason that any of these boats are still with us today is due to the devotion of the sailors who loved them: rebuilding them, strengthening them, and building new ones. Boat builders have figured out how to keep the frames from breaking, and the most recent Yankees were built to last 100 years.