Nancy’s China

The Nancy’s China design is a marriage of the big and the small. It’s the biggest boat you can fit in a garage and the smallest boat you would want to sleep on. It’s the biggest boat you might pull with a Volkswagen van or equivalent low-powered four-banger, displacing less than 800 lbs, but it’s fit for some pretty big water, with a sailing rig that easily spills excess wind and a slug of ballast to help hold you upright. It’s sufficiently romantic, too: salty, wooden, pretty, but built with the modern stitch-and-glue method that designer Sam Devlin of Olympia, Washington, has taken to far greater lengths during the past 30 years.

Dave Wagner

At only 15'2" of overall length, Sam Devlin’s Nancy’s China design is meant to live comfortably on a trailer. Dave Wagner of Georgia showed how even a small boat can be fitted out as a proper yacht.

Necessity was the mother of this invention. Devlin lost contracts to build three larger sailboats when then-President Ronald Reagan froze the Federal Reserve. His customers couldn’t get loans to finance their boats, so Devlin designed a smaller, more spare boat that could be bought with cash. Soon after, First Lady Nancy Reagan paid several thousand dollars for each setting of new White House china, igniting a storm of controversy. The cost of just one place setting would pay for one of Devlin’s boats, inspiring the name Nancy’s China.