San Francisco Bay is a rogue sea. Strong as a sumo champion, it can wrestle a ship to its doom. Generous as a millionaire, it serves up salmon shrimp, abalone and sole. Unpredictable by nature, the Bay can suddenly become an enemy, lashing beach cottages to driftwood. Yet it can be a welcome ally, carrying California harvests to the Far East and bringing the Orient home.
Published: April, 2000
San Francisco Bay is a rogue sea. Strong as a sumo champion, it can wrestle a ship to its doom. Generous as a millionaire, it serves up salmon shrimp, abalone and sole. Unpredictable by nature, the Bay can suddenly become an enemy, lashing beach cottages to driftwood. Yet it can be a welcome ally, carrying California harvests to the Far East and bringing the Orient home.
From its tidepools to its seabirds, from fishing to surfing, the Bay is a dominant force in northern California and no one is its master. Twice a day, eight-foot tides flow through "Golden Gate," as explorer John Fremont christened the opening just seaward of the Golden Gate Bridge.
These semidiurnal tides are never the same. They range from two to nine feet and ships unfamiliar with the Bay often met at the "potao patch", the stretch of rough water outside the gate, to be escorted over the Bay by experienced tugboat crews. Yachtsmen venture out at their peril. The tidebooks are frequently off by as much as two hours.
The cause of all this turmoil is the Bay’s complex underworld of peaks and canyons, gorges and banks, islands and estuaries, channel and fill. San Francisco Bay’s kidney shape accounts for unique tidal action that is seldom the same one day to the next. Tons of water push through the mile wide opening to spread over a 400-sq mile area, only to meet another great force of water as it recedes towards the potato patch.
The Bay is so roguishly unpredictable, in fact, that in 1956 the Army Corps of Engineers built the San Francisco Bay Model on Richardson Bay in Sausalito to explore further the interaction between bay water and fresh water from the Sacramento river system. Visitors will enjoy the Bay Model, located at the north end of Sausalito.
From the shores of Richardson Bay or the bike paths of Sausalito, Mill Valley and Tiburon, visitors can watch the flight and feeding patterns of numerous shorebirds, many of them protected by law. In the mudflats and marshes are great blue herons, great and snowy white egrets, pelicans, seagulls, and more. You can also see them from the deck of the ferry. If you walk the bike paths or stroll the marinas you’ll find these birds seem tame enough to touch. The long white tail feathers of the egrets were once prized decoration for women’s hats, but using them today is a federal offense. The nesting grounds of the egrets and heron are open to the public at Audubon Canyon Ranch, just north of Stinson Beach on Route 1, a scenic hour’s drive from San Francisco.
A few miles from the Audubon Ranch is the town of Bolinas, where Duxbury Reef, the largest on the coast, yields the riches of the ocean floor during a minus tide. Sea urchins, starfish, sponges, kelp, rock weed, sea spiders and many other creatures delight those who are lucky enough to walk these rocky reefs when the tide is out. Wear old tennis shoes and watch for the incoming tide.
The Bay yields an abundance of fish for local fishermen and the "California cuisine" that everyone is talking about. Abalone, mussels, sole, shrimp, flounder, salmon, crab, shark and squid are just a few of the more common fish available daily at Fisherman’s Wharf. Oysters are farmed locally at Tomales Bay. If you want to see some of the more colorful fish, take time to visit Steinhart Aquarium at Golden Gate Park. The aquarium has 14,000 fish and most of them are visible in the "roundabout," designed to let the visitor feel the sea.
San Francisco was once a greater maritime port than it is today; still, cargo and passenger ships steam through the Golden Gate daily. A drive along the Embarcadero (part of the scenic 49-mile drive) from China Basin to Fisherman’s Wharf will give you a glimpse of the international flavor of local shipping. At the Ferry Building’s World Trade Center is I.M. Pei’s design for the future renovation of this waterfront area.
Nine separate counties ring the Bay, governing its use and development through the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which has authority over dredging and filling within the tidal basin. BCDC’s 27 members can halt development that is not in the best interests of the Bay, which to most of us has a personality of its own with a right to be protected.
The Bay contributes, of course, to northern California’s summer fog, which is produced by a rare combination of waters, winds and topography. The fog lies off the coast waiting to be pulled ashore by rising air currents when the land becomes hot. The coastal mountains hold back the fog for nearly a 600-mile front, but when it finds an opening at the Golden Gate, it penetrates like a giant gusher. You’ll see its solid mass under the Golden Gate Bridge at Fort Point or from Fisherman’s Wharf when the conditions are just right. The foghorns begin their mournful announcement. The sweltering cities cry out, "Fog’s in!" It’s music to our ears.
The San Francisco Bay is one of the world’s great estuaries. Extending south to San Jose, north to Napa County and east into Suisun Bay, it originally covered an area slightly less than the state of Rhode Island. For thousands of years before the Spanish arrived, the Bay was fringed with salt marshes crisscrossed by meandering streams called sloughs. Coast redwood trees, some approaching twenty feet in diameter, once fronted the surrounding hills.
Mountains of the Outer and Inner Coast ranges encircle the Bay. These hills are broken in two places, to the west at the Golden Gate and to the east through the Carquinez Strait. This inner barrier effectively contains the summer flow of fog, except at Carquinez, where consistent winds carry fingers of fog toward the hot interior valleys.
Before the Ice Ages, the Bay was an elongated coastal valley through which an ancient Sacramento River flowed to the sea. Several small glaciers melted, the ocean level rose and broke through the Golden Gate to drown the valley. The resulting bay was a twin-armed, shallow body of water. The tops of the mountains became Alcatraz, Angel and Yerba Buena islands. The Sierra rivers filled with debris and flowed into the bay, dropping sediment to provide soil for the marshlands.
Today, the Bay is a magnificent example of an estuary, a place where salt and fresh water meet. Such environments are among the most productive in the world. Both plants and animals of an estuary must adapt to daily and seasonal fluctuations in salinity as well as rising and falling tidelines.
Principal plants of the salt marsh are cordgrass and a curious succulent called pickleweed. Pickleweed thrives closer to the dry shoreline above the cordgrass. You will find these plants along the shore, along with a host of flowers, fish, birds and insects that thrive in the estuary environment.
Men of the sea were the first Europeans to discover San Francisco Bay and call it home, but who was the first? Was it the Englishman Sir Francis Drake? The Spanish captain Sebastian Cermeno? Or was it his countryman Gaspar de Portola?
"The discovery of San Francisco Bay was one of the most confused episodes in New World history," writes Bay Area author Harold Gilliam in his book San Francisco Bay.
For years it was assumed that Sir Francis Drake, aboard the Golden Hinde, was the first to find the Bay during his explorations here in 1579. Further study puts Drake some 30 miles north at Drake’s Bay, now part of the Pt. Reyes National Seashore, a huge expanse of public park. For sure, Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola was the first to spy the estuary by land. He arrived from the south in 1769 looking for Monterey. Disappointed that he couldn’t get on to Pt. Reyes to explore Drake’s territory, he missed the importance of the Bay and returned to San Diego.
It was left for young Spanish seaman Don Juan Manual de Ayala to discover the Bay that had eluded navigators for two hundred years because of the fog bank that often hides the entrance. Ayala and his crew stood on the deck of the San Carlos one early August afternoon in 1775 and, says Gilliam, "there before them was the hidden strait which navigators had passed by for two centuries. The high cliffs at the heads were deep in shadow. The waves dashed against jagged rock islands and the bluffs funneled ominously to a gap barely a mile wide at the narrows."
A lucky tide and careful seamanship brought Ayala safely inside the gate, where he anchored for the night. In the morning he spotted a cove with willow trees, indicating fresh water. Ayala named his find after that grove - a saucelito. For the next month or so, Ayala explored the Bay, charted its shore, named its islands and the cove that later was the site of the first building in San Francisco. Yerba Buena Cove, Angel Island and Alcatraz are Ayala’s heritage to San Francisco.
The San Carlos was also the first of the more than a hundred and fifty ships to meet disaster in the Bay. According to Gilliam, Ayala "weighed anchor early in the morning and sailed outward on the tide. But again the San Carlos was caught in the swirling currents between the great cliffs, and this time she did not escape so easily. She was driven onto a rock near Point Cavallo on the north shore and her rudder was damaged." Nevertheless, Ayala made the necessary repairs and the San Carlos sailed out in September "into history."
It wasn’t until another 75 years went by that U.S. Army officer John Charles Fremont christened the gate by the name we know it today. "I gave the name Chrysopylae, or Golden Gate," he wrote, "for the same reason that the harbor of Byzantium was called Chrysoceras or Golden Horn." The time was just before the Gold Rush. It was Fremont who surreptitiously organized the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846, which led to California’s separation from Mexico and to statehood.
Three years later, gold was discovered in the Sierras and the Golden Gate lived up to her name. Soon after, the little town of Yerba Buena took the name of its Bay and became San Francisco.
Reprinted from Adventures On & Off Interstate 80, by Eleanor Huggins and John Olmstead (Palo Alto: Tioga Publishing Co., 1985).
