Bill Lee is the designer of noted ocean racing yachts, and one of the founders of the Santa Cruz school of boatbuilding.

Known to many as the Wizard, Lee's designs achieved notoriety in the 1970s, with Chutzpah[1] and Merlin having won the Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu many times.

When Bill was fifteen years old, his family moved again to Orange County's Newport Beach where he first began to sail in El Toro dinghies at age 15.

His first job as an engineer was in Southern California in the defense industry evaluating armored personnel carriers, as well as other similar military tools.

Magic displaced 2,500 pounds and carried close to 450 square feet of sail and won the Monterey Bay series the following spring.

Witchcraft also won the Mazatlan Race in 1972 and was credited with encouraging an evaluation of Transpac handicap ratings in 1973, which resulted in penalties for low displacement boats.

These boats required fewer crew, made better use of scarce resources in their construction, and generally attracted highly skilled sailors with big-wave surfing backgrounds at breaks such as Steamer's Lane and Mavericks.

Merlin's unprecedented success on the racecourse includes winning the 1977 Transpacific Yacht Race, in which the vessel established a course record that stood for 20 years.