The ghosts in our breakwater

Point San Pablo Harbor today

Our breakwater is built out of sunken ships. It's a distinctive shape, like two crab pincers reaching into the water. The lefthand pincer is owned by Chevron and they don't let anyone on it. The righthand pincer is part of the marina, and I have always had an eerie feeling driving or walking on it. Because truly, we're standing in a graveyard on the bones of buried ships.

Knowing the boats are under our feet is one thing, but seeing them before they were buried is another. We caught a glimpse when we took a quick tour of the old whaling station site at Terminal 4 the other day, courtesy of Bobby Winston. There was a small history exhibit in the old boiler room. We had only a minute to look, but there we saw an undated, blown up photo of all the ships sitting in place, in the exact formation of the jetties today.

Online I found a small, blurry version of that photo. It was okay, but you had to know what you were looking at to understand it. Then I went to Google Earth and time-traveled back to 1939, and... there they were. It gave me the shivers. Here's the side by side comparison of our harbor:

1939 Image © SF Estuary Institute

2023 Image © 2023 Airbus

And then I was able to learn their NAMES. This piece was written in 1950, when the ships were beginning to break apart:

This latter-day rotten row of heeled-over, crumbling wooden steamers, surplus naval craft, a broken barge and the hull of the ferryboat Golden Gate, swings on a wide arc on the mud. Inside the arc, and on an adequate channel, is a kind of "poor man's boat anchorage." It's called the Point San Pablo Yacht Harbor. This graveyard of coastal steamers and the striking pool they create, is presided over by a veteran skipper of the Richmond-San Rafael ferry run named Raymond H. Clark, who started the project in 1939. That was a year of relatively low costs. But Captain Clark, a small boat enthusiast who for years had mulled over such an enterprise, found a rock breakwater at his property would cost between $100,000 and $150,000 to build. He made a deal to pick up a half dozen condemned wooden steam schooners on the Alameda flats and towed them up the bay. After the war he latched onto two surplus LCIs and a sub chaser and dumped them. The hull of the Golden Gate was already there. The cost of the entire breakwater came to not more than $7,000, and Captain Clark was in business as a harbor master. 

The breakwater contains some of the coast's best-known single and double-end steam schooners. They include the Bertie Hanlon, Jane Nettleton, Salmon King, Carlos, Siskiyou and Anne Christensen, all built between 1890 and World War I. They were units of what the shipping industry here used to call the "Scandinavian Navy," because masters and crews were Johnsons, Petersens, Johansens — Swedes, Norwegians and Danes who kept their Viking accents and created legends from Alaska south. This was part of the fleet, incidentally, which built the cities on the coast, hauling timber from Puget Sound, Oregon and the Redwood coast for generations.    

- William Hogan, San Francisco Chronicle, 30 April 1950 

Captain Clark flooded the hulls so that the boats sat unmoving in the shallow water. He used the above decks as meeting space for his new Point San Pablo Yacht Club, later relocated to deeper waters in Point Richmond. 

John Wayne filmed an anti-communist potboiler here called Blood Alley in 1955, with he and Lauren Bacall in starring roles and Anita Ekberg as a Chinese villager (omg) supposedly clinging to one of the boats. We have yet to steel ourselves to watch it because, honestly, would you?

Steam schooner Siskiyou, now buried under our breakwater © National Park Service

In 1965 the now rotten ships were burned to the waterline and the jetties built up to their present-day level by adding concrete blocks and dredged soil from the harbor. And that is why, when we walk on the jetty, we're standing on generations of fishing, timber trade, storms, wind, fog, Scandinavian sailors, arguments, friendships, dinners, parties, yacht club meetings, and Hollywood history written directly beneath our feet in wood, fire, water, and dirt.

I love taking in the past through my feet. I once dragged Mike to Gainesville, Texas, and had him walk an imaginary labyrinth covering every square inch of an empty Baptist church parking lot. Why? Because in the 1890s, his great-grandfather served as rabbi in the synagogue that used to stand there. His grandmother trod that ground every Sabbath as a little girl, maybe sometimes during the week. We were going to do it, too.

Anyway, that's the story.