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600 Gate 5 Road (at Harbor Dr.), Sausalito, CA 94965
Phone: 415-332-3179
Neighborhood: Marinship. Website is here. Free parking in lot.
Note: The Spaulding Wooden Boat Center recently changed its name to the Spaulding Marine Center, although its mission and focus remain the same. This eliminated confusion with the Educational Tall Ship Project, which built a large wooden ship nearby.
Spaulding Wooden Boat Center (Marine Center)
Admission Costs: Admission for Spaulding Wooden Boat Center tours is free but a donation is requested (and merited, since they’re preserving our maritime history, serving the disabled — as seen in the video above — and running youth training programs).
Myron Spaulding (whose high school classmates included the grandfather of an OurSausalito.com editor) was a professional concert violinist who also loved designing, building and racing sailboats. Making violins and building sailboats are both crafts that call for a love of woodworking and extraordinary attention to detail, and Spaulding had a long career as a professional boat designer and builder in addition to his decades in the San Francisco Symphony. He passed away in Sausalito in 2000 at the age of 94, and his wife subsequently left the Spaulding Boatworks to the non-profit Spaulding Wooden Boat Center.
The Spaulding Wooden Boat Center’s mission is “to restore and return to active use significant, historic wooden sailing vessels; preserve and enhance our working boatyard; create a place where people can gather to use, enjoy, and learn about wooden boats; and educate others about wooden boat building skills, traditions and values.”
The Spaulding Wooden Boat Center offers a wide variety of education programs for kids and adults, and volunteer opportunities working on the historic boats.