Sixteen San Francisco teenagers spent more than a year turning raw plywood into a 16-foot wooden rowboat, and on Saturday morning they hoisted it onto their shoulders and carried it into the bay — the first new vessel launched from the old India Basin shipyard in at least 25 years.

The launch was a warm neighborhood milestone, but it was also a debut: the boat is the first completed build in San Francisco by Rocking the Boat, a youth-development nonprofit founded three decades ago in the Bronx, and its 61st boat nationally. Rather than being sold or trailered off, the skiff will stay at India Basin Waterfront Park as a permanent community fixture, offering free public rows every other Saturday. For a stretch of Bayview waterfront that only recently became a public park, it is a rare case of a new civic space producing something tangible and locally made.

After school and on summer days over the past year, 16 local students came to a shop at India Basin Waterfront Park to loft, plane, shape and sand a boat into existence. On Saturday they finished the job the only way that counts: they carried the finished skiff down to the pier and put it in San Francisco Bay.

The 16-foot craft — a San Francisco Whitehall, the workhorse rowboat style common throughout the bay in the 19th century — was built as a replica of a 1906 vessel called the Alderbrook and launched alongside that original boat, according to KTVU, which covered the event. The students named their boat Paradise and engraved "RTB 2026" inside the hull, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. It was the first new boat launched from the historic India Basin shipyard site in at least a quarter century.

The build is the West Coast debut of Rocking the Boat, a nonprofit that has run boatbuilding-as-youth-development out of the Bronx for 30 years. Saturday's skiff was the program's first finished boat in San Francisco and its 61st nationally.

"We exist to serve young people who do not otherwise have the resources to participate in opportunities like this," Adam Green, the organization's CEO, told KTVU at the launch. "Sixteen students built this thing that is beautiful. It floats and it works."

The program's pitch is that the boat is the vehicle, not the point. Students start from raw materials and learn to draft, measure and assemble; the organization then stays with participants through high-school graduation and into college or trade pathways, according to KTVU. For families on the dock, the woodworking was the visible part of something larger.

"He has great self-esteem and feels confident," Tracy Mitchell, a grandparent watching from the dock, told KTVU. "He says he is going to be building boats. If you have a grandson building boats, you have a boat maker — and I am ready to go."

For the teenagers, the reward was simpler: getting on the water they had only worked beside. "I love rowing on the water," student Kabir Sarangan told the Chronicle. "It's so fun. You get to see the whole San Francisco."

The setting matters as much as the boat. India Basin Waterfront Park is one of the city's newest public spaces, opened on a historic Bayview shipbuilding stretch of the shoreline. Saturday's ceremony — complete with sparkling cider poured over the bow and bay water splashed on the hull — was a demonstration that the park could do more than exist. "This park produced something tangible," one speaker said, per the Chronicle. "This boat was built by this neighborhood."

That the boat is staying is the civic detail worth underlining. Rather than a one-day photo opportunity, Paradise will remain docked at India Basin as a permanent fixture, with the program offering public rides every other Saturday — turning a private, yearlong labor into a standing public amenity on a waterfront that has historically offered Bayview residents little direct access to the bay.

Mayor Daniel Lurie attended the launch, walking down the gangway to mark the occasion, the Chronicle reported — a City Hall nod to a project built almost entirely on volunteer teenage labor. A year and a half ago, as one participant put it, the boat did not exist. On Saturday it floated.