On starting a new venture when your combined age is 151

Kate Josephs and Mike Herz

This is our second Bay Area scouting expedition for our new venture - more on that shortly. During our last trip, in December, we managed to both get COVID and infect four friends & family members.

This trip is going better. 

So far in five days we've met with two partner organizations, one towering icon, two dear friends, one benefactor, three boat brokers, and six family peeps. We've visited nine cities and five marinas. Coming up today: one historian, one filmmaker, and two more cities. I've attended two online classes during that time and completed a couple of assignments. Oh, and we almost bought a boat.

The venture is Once Upon A Bay. It will be a podcast featuring stories of San Francisco Bay and the people who love, protect, make a living from, or otherwise deeply care about this enormous and fragile body of water. Later the project may encompass a book, and some people (not me) are considering a documentary. We plan to live on a boat and wander around the Bay and Delta as we collect these tales. I should mention that my husband and I live on the coast of Maine. We're not journalists. I'm 65 and my husband is 86. Also, we have an elderly dog who doesn't play well with others and hates the water. So some may ask, why are we doing this?

I'll poke at this question in future posts. For today, I just needed to (1) start the project journal, which I should have done months ago, (2) get over my habit of not taking pictures, and (3) start getting better at taking pictures, because as you can see I'm terrible at it. 

My name is Kate Josephs and my husband is Michael Herz. In 1989, Mike founded Baykeeper. That's the first reason we're doing this.

More another day.