I was part of the whole Santana 35/Schock 35 evolution. I built some of the tooling for the Santana 35 in the factory on S. Greenville St in Santa Ana, CA, and raced extensively with Tom Schock and Steve Schock.
The Santana 35 is a Shad Turner design and is a direct evolution from successful Santana 20 one-design (875 built.)
Right from the beginning the Santana 35 ran into some problems: It came in overweight, it didn't have enough sail area for So California (especially the fractional kites), and it tended to be sticky downwind. So all those negatives and the boat had a punitive IOR rating--way above one-ton. The boat's contemporaries in the IOR arena were the Farr quadruplets (Red Lion, Jenny H, Mr. JumpA, and Smir-Nof-Agen) and compared to those, the Santana 35 had less sail area, shorter LOA and LWL, a blunter entry, but lighter displacement. And it owed one-tonners a "ton" of time. In general it was a fun boat to sail. We loaded one up in Long Beach (more wind than Newport Beach) with college kids with lots of small boat experience and were able to win a series or two. Good times and somewhere I probably have the photos to prove it! The whole time we were racing it we were discussing how to make it faster. It kept coming back to (a) more sail area, (b) longer waterline, and (c) a finer entry. But us youngsters didn't and the money or pull to implement that. Meanwhile, the Santana 35 did quite well in handicap and one-design fleets on San Francisco Bay where the wind is consirably stronger than So. California. However, they did start coming unglued here and there.
The next large project was the Bill Cook design, New York 36, which pretty much directly solved (a), (b), and (c) of the Santana 35, sailed faster, and rated lower.
Since most of the NY36 were sold on the east coast (NYYC members), WD did a cost study on how much it cost to truck them out there and decided to build them on the east coast. He bought some land in Bradenton (south of St. Petersburg and Tampa) and yanked his youngest son out of college to run the factory in Florida. They loaded up trailers with NY36 tooling along with a few other boats. Steve is the engineer of the family and a smart, thoughtful guy. WD was clever enough and financially pretty savvy while Tom's forte was customer interaction and sales. They cut Steve loose in Florida with minimal supervision, telling him: "Just sell boats!" Steve liked what he saw in the local MORC fleets and acquired rights to a few Paul Lindenberg designs (Schock's Wavelength series) which were moderately successful, mostly the Wavelength 24.
As orders for the NY36 tapered off, Steve found himself staring at the molds for the Santana 35 and remembering those conversations we all had while sailing. So one day he layed-up a hull, braced it up, then attacked the bow with a chain saw. His bow redesign was very straight-forward: Mock up a more vertical stem, then fair straight back to tangents on the original hull. Really just straight lines from the new stem to where they touched the hull. Did a little selective reinforcement and drew up a masthead rig and a bigger keel with 1,200 more lbs of lead. Added about a foot to the J and lopped off an equal amount from the E. Left out most of the interior bits forward of the main bulkhead.
The planking artifacts from the plug are the same on both the Santana 35 and the Schock 35 and both need to be massaged out if you want a fast bottom. But that's another story.