Yacht brokers say demand is through the roof, with little to no inventory and multi-month wait lists. ‘Bring me a boat tomorrow’: Inside the pandemic yacht boom In addition, when harbors around the San Francisco Bay began cracking down on squatters in boats - in part due to pressure to clear the waters for the 2013 America’s Cup sailboat race - many of them moved to Richardson Bay.īy 2015, its anchor-out population had nearly tripled compared with a decade earlier. Over the last decade, the state’s housing crisis has driven even more people onto the water. Mostly, they looked out at the boats bobbing on the bay and saw them as a romantic vestige of “a colorful past, a diversity of life and a tradition of mariners living on their vessels,” as one anchor-out told a Chronicle reporter in 2001. Land dwellers occasionally grumbled that the rundown vessels were an eyesore or got angry when a runaway craft collided with someone’s shorefront property. In 1987, with harbors up and down California cracking down on the growing numbers of people squatting in boats, local officials imposed a 72-hour limit on vessels dropping anchor in Richardson Bay.īut sporadic efforts to enforce the law were met with lawsuits from the mariners and protests from the public. I just don’t want everything to look like Disneyland.” Packs of wild dogs and barefoot children explored at low tide, and a pirate-themed band called The Redlegs played all-night parties in a decommissioned ferry named the Charles van Damme. “In Sausalito, people live on anything that floats,” read a 1951 article in the San Francisco Chronicle.Īrtists and bon vivants lived side by side with Hells Angels and characters with names like Green Death and Captain Garbage. That tension between the “hill snobs” and the “wharf rats” escalated after World War II, when the owner of Marinship, the town’s newly defunct shipyard, invited people to move into retired steam ferries and decaying barges he had dragged onto the mud flats. The conflict on the bay has its roots in a class rivalry that goes back to the 19th century, when wealthy San Franciscans built summer homes with breathtaking views on the surrounding hills while Chinese merchants and Portuguese boatbuilders settled the working-class waterfront. “It was like herding cats,” he said, adding by way of explanation: “Some of the people out here are here because they can’t get along anywhere else.” But Baker said they were overrun by “rabble-rousers,” and the group never got off the ground. (Most boats are anchored farther out than Baker’s.)īefore the pandemic, the Richardson Bay Special Anchorage Assn. Most evenings, Baker unties his blue dinghy and motors the 500 feet or so to shore, where he showers and checks his email at a property management company that pays him $800 a month to work as a part-time security guard.
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To the flinty salts who occupy these rusting tugboats and de-masted sloops, Richardson Bay is sacred, a last bastion of living free on the water in a Bay Area of Apple Stores and $3,000-a-month studio apartments.Īmid the antique timepieces cluttering the walls of the cabin hang two black-and-white photos: One is a portrait of Baker’s great-great grandfather, a Nova Scotia sea captain with a long gray beard, like his own.
The battle has pitted the forces of gentrification against Sausalito’s fading identity as a freewheeling maritime town that has always been a refuge for rebels and dropouts.Īround 90 vessels in various states of disrepair bob amid the seagulls and paddle-boarders. Baker and his fellow anchor-outs, as they’re known, have long lived illegally and rent-free in the sightline of some of America’s priciest real estate, and now authorities in Sausalito and other neighboring communities want them gone. Lately though, life has been anything but peaceful on the bay. “I like the peace, the quiet - if I stub my toe I can holler,” said Baker, who at 82 has been living here, in one vessel or another, for half a century.
Greg Baker likes to say that the only way he’s leaving his home, a broken-down 40-foot sailboat anchored in this sparkling estuary north of the Golden Gate Bridge, is in handcuffs or a black plastic bag.
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