A heavy fog lifted around the Golden Gate Yacht Club on Sunday morning – literally and figuratively.

After 15 years, the America’s Cup trophy will return to its namesake country, and specifically to the little-known San Francisco group that sponsored the U.S. effort.

“My life just changed,” said Robert Mulhern, general manager of the yacht club. “It wakes up the club, brings it to another level.”

As word spread that software tycoon Larry Ellison’s BMW Oracle Racing trimaran had clinched the world’s top yachting race, members began to congregate at the squat yellow clubhouse near Crissy Field. Bloody Marys flowed well ahead of a 3 p.m. party.

The group, with about 250 members, snagged the sponsorship in 2002 when it was nearly broke. Talks had broken off between Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle Corp., and San Francisco’s prestigious St. Francis Yacht Club.

Now, the scrappy Golden Gate outfit has found international fame, and Mulhern spent Sunday fielding congratulatory calls from as far away as Munich.

Most of the Golden Gate members – wearing BMW Oracle jackets and hats and trading notes on sails and masts – had watched online as the action unfolded in the Mediterranean near Valencia, Spain.

“The racing, I thought, was just amazing,” said Carolynn Dean, a member from Sausalito. “No one’s ever raced boats like these.”

The winner gets the honor of hosting the next America’s Cup, a contest typically held every two to three years. Whether or not it will drop anchor in the Bay Area was a simmering topic of debate among the sailing aficionados.

Paul Anderson, a club member from Los Altos, said Ellison has suggested in public statements that he will steer the race into the region. But others wondered whether Ellison’s involvement in the purchase of a $10.5 million mansion in Newport, R.I. – which hosted the event for decades until the 1980s – would draw his gaze in that direction.

Heavy container traffic and notoriously choppy waters could also hinder a Bay Area defense, which, under contest rules, might have to be run in the open ocean. But the financial upside could be enormous, according to a 2007 study commissioned by financial services company Allianz, a sponsor of the Oracle BMW team.

A defense of the cup in San Francisco in 2010 – which never came to pass – would have generated anywhere from $1 billion to $9.9 billion from tourism, advertising and other economic impacts, the study estimated. The yacht club alone could have earned an additional $50 million, it said.

But that’s the next race. For a few years at least, San Francisco and the Golden Gate group can enjoy hosting a trophy from a sporting contest that dates back to 1851.

Mulhern said he already talked to a contractor about knocking out a wall at the clubhouse to replace a liquor room with a glass-enclosed shrine for America’s Cup.

“Trophy will definitely trump liquor,” he said.

E-mail James Temple at jtemple@sfchronicle.com.

Tags: america's cup, Golden Gate, yacht