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Faun's owners, Laura and Micahel, have always loved pink geraniums on the aft deck.
My Boat
1926 36-foot Blanchard Standardized Cruiser Faun
T
he sparkling varnish and classic lines of this vessel turn heads wherever she goes. Approaching 100 years old, Faun is pure Pacific Northwest beauty. When the crew at 48° North learned that ownersLaura Stone Shifflette and Michael J. Passage were interested in sharing more of her story in this month’s My Boat column, we jumped at the chance.
Tell us about your boat. Faun is a Blanchard Standardized Cruiser, 36 feet long and launched in 1926. She was one of approximately 25 built, at least six of which survive today. She was designed by Leigh Coolidge and built by the Blanchard yard on Lake Union in Seattle for W.N. Winter, and named after his wife, Faun. She’s built for cruising in our local waters, but he bought the boat so he could easily cross Lake Washington from his Medina waterfront estate. The boat cost $6,000 new, which was the equivalent of two nice houses at the time. She was launched with a Van Blerk gasoline engine, but, since 1947, she has had a Chrysler Crown. Her hull is red and yellow cedar, her frames are oak, her keel is fir, and her house is Burmese teak. She still has her original cast iron stove, a Neptune. Faun’s interior spaces are wide open so you can see from one end to the other, making her an ideal two-person boat. Miraculously, Faun’s name has never been changed despite having 16 owners. It’s the perfect name for her. We, Michael and Laura, have owned her for the longest of anyone — 25 years. We keep her in Portage Bay.
How did you find Faun and what makes the boat special to you?
scheduled and completed surveys, and we owned her. It was utterly life-changing.
Can you share more about the boat’s history? Influenced by Henry Ford’s production line success, the boat building industry was first experimenting with the concept of building production boats versus custom one-offs in the 1920s. It was part of the industry’s conscious effort to make boating more accesible to the masses. Calling 25 boats built over six years “mass production” seems a stretch, but it was the first glimmer of what was to come. In fact, each of the 25 was completely customized! Nearly every boatyard in the area built vessels of similar design through the 1920s, as the design proved immensely popular. The design was based on a 1910 prototype, Klootchman, designed by Otis Cutting and built by Taylor & Grandy on Vashon Island. Klootchman met her demise early,
One Saturday in 1997, Michael suggested that we visit a wooden boat show, the Classic Yacht Association’s Bell Harbor Rendezvous. We’d been married only a year, and although we’d walked many docks, looked at many boats, and it was clear to me that a boat would be somewhere in our future, we specifically intended to NOT buy a boat that year. At the show, we sought out Faun, where a friend was aboard. I remember sticking my head in the large aft window of Faun, seeing the beautiful salon with the wicker chairs and decorative rugs, plus the amazing galley, and blurting out, “THIS boat could work for us! If it were for sale, I’d buy it!” The woman aboard popped her head up and said, “Well, as a matter of fact, it is for sale!” Two weeks later, we’d negotiated a price with the owners, 48º NORTH
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Boats of this style are often called Dreamboats, but Faun is a Blanchard.
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