On a recent Sunday inside the Golden Gate Park clubhouse that’s home to the 128-year-old Model Yacht Club and its collection of handmade wooden vessels, the next generation of mariners and their DIY yachts were in full production mode. Call it Model Yacht Club 2.0 — the bottle yacht.
Everywhere inside the clubhouse, which itself dates to 1940, parents and their kids were transforming water bottles into hulls, pieces of plastic into sails and miscellaneous parts into rigging. Under the tutelage of mentors of various skill levels, the aspiring buildings were crafting boats that would eventually sail in adjacent Spreckels Lake, which was built in 1904 expressly for model boat sailing.
“The joy is seeing families have a chance to come together to learn together to build something together,” said Kate Ettinger who runs the program called the Bottle Yacht Regatta…