Joy of
Yachting

The most demanding
test bed on the
West Coast.

Lively now sails from San Francisco Bay — strong tides, steep chop, winds that can go from nothing to 25 knots between the Gate and the Bay Bridge, and on clear days, a horizon that points straight toward Hawaii, the South Pacific, and everything beyond.

She is at home in all of it. On the Bay she is fast and nimble, the hard chines that gave Haberman's original greyhound its slicing windward ability still doing exactly what Farr intended. On a reach in a building breeze she accelerates the way only a hull this light and this long can — suddenly and decisively, leaving other boats behind before they have finished trimming.

A record that stood
for ten years.

The story of Lively begins long before her keel was ever designed — it begins on the water in the 1980s. As a young sailor on San Francisco Bay and the Pacific offshore circuit, John Townsend crewed aboard Zeus, a Mac 65 skippered by Hal Nelson, one of the most accomplished offshore ocean racers of his generation. Zeus was a record-setting machine, consistently first to finish on the Pacific racing calendar.

Townsend's first 65-footer was Blackjack, which he campaigned for the Transpac — the iconic double-handed offshore race from Long Beach to Honolulu — with co-skipper Carl Nelson. Blackjack finished first overall, double-handed, and set a class record that stood for ten years. That result required a complete engineering rethink: a new high-performance rig from Ballenger Spars, optimized keel configurations, and a new-design rudder conceived by naval architect Bob Smith and hand-built by Kelly Howel of Santa Cruz Yachts.

At sixteen years old, Townsend had a dream: he would own a 65-foot sailboat. That dream took root on the foredeck of Zeus. It never left him.

32 years on the
Pacific offshore
circuit.

Between campaigns, John Townsend never stopped working on boats. He was based at Nelson's Marina, building, refitting, and maintaining multiple vessels alongside a community of serious offshore sailors and craftsmen. He later moved primary yard operations to Svendsens Boat Works in Alameda — a full-service professional yard where demanding offshore work is the standard.

During this period, Townsend maintained a dedicated shop space at DOER Marine in Alameda, running fabrication and build work on Lively alongside project work with DOER — an Alameda-based company founded by oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, and one of the world's leading designers of advanced underwater vehicles with over 200 vehicles built.

He was also engaged by David Hall, founder of Velodyne Lidar, as design consultant and contractor for the Martini Project — a series of prototype marine vessels utilizing active electro-pneumatic suspension systems to eliminate seasickness and maintain platform stability in offshore conditions. The engineering standards required for that work operate at a level most boat builders never encounter.