From our guest speaker at our General Meeting on December 8th at New St. Mary's Cathedral
By Carl Nolte, Contributor Oct 18, 2025 - San Francisco Chronicle
It was one of those days we get around here this time of the year: clear and bright, a few clouds. I was in Sausalito, having a beer, sitting on the dock of the bay, as the song goes. It was quiet; no one to talk to. So I just watched the bay for a while. I saw a ferry, a tug, a container ship headed out to sea, a couple of sailboats. It’s pelican season, and there they were, flying in V formation. The water was blue and brown, and in the distance the city on its hills.
“You never forget the first time you saw San Francisco Bay,” author Harold Gilliam wrote. Or the thousandth time, either. I took a sip of beer and thought for a minute about how the bay came to be the way it is now.
You can’t look out from Sausalito and not think of the first Europeans to sail on it. The first ship on the bay was the Spanish ship San Carlos, commanded by Juan Manuel de Ayala. Ayala anchored his ship off Sausalito for a day in the summer of 1775, then moved to a cove on Angel Island. His pilot, Don Jose de Canizares, made the first chart of the bay. The ship’s chaplain, Father Vicente de Santa Maria, had extensive contact with the native people and was impressed by them. They were “extremely skillful bold Indians,” he wrote. He was reluctant to leave. “Had I been able, I would have remained with them, even all by myself.”
Sitting on the dock of the bay, thinking about days long gone
Greg
Quick and Dirty
It was one of those days we get around here this time of the year: clear and bright, a few clouds. I was in Sausalito, having a beer, sitting on the dock of the bay, as the song goes. It was quiet; no one to talk to. So I just watched the bay for a while. I saw a ferry, a tug, a container ship headed out to sea, a couple of sailboats. It’s pelican season, and there they were, flying in V formation. The water was blue and brown, and in the distance the city on its hills.
“You never forget the first time you saw San Francisco Bay,” author Harold Gilliam wrote. Or the thousandth time, either. I took a sip of beer and thought for a minute about how the bay came to be the way it is now.
You can’t look out from Sausalito and not think of the first Europeans to sail on it. The first ship on the bay was the Spanish ship San Carlos, commanded by Juan Manuel de Ayala. Ayala anchored his ship off Sausalito for a day in the summer of 1775, then moved to a cove on Angel Island. His pilot, Don Jose de Canizares, made the first chart of the bay. The ship’s chaplain, Father Vicente de Santa Maria, had extensive contact with the native people and was impressed by them. They were “extremely skillful bold Indians,” he wrote. He was reluctant to leave. “Had I been able, I would have remained with them, even all by myself.”
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The contact with Europeans did two things: It led to what is now the famous San Francisco Bay Area, and it led to the destruction of the old way of life.
Five years after the San Carlos sailed, a child was born into a village of the Huimen tribe of the Coast Miwok people near what is now called Mill Valley or perhaps Tiburon. He was called Huicmuse, but when he was a young man he crossed the bay in a boat made of woven tules to San Francisco to be baptized at Mission Dolores. His new name was Marino, and he worked with — and sometimes against — the Spanish colonizers. He was a sailor, an explorer, a rebel. Betty Goerke, who wrote “Chief Marin,” a biography of Marino and his times, calls him “a historical figure of some importance. A witness to a time of cataclysmic change, and he was a survivor, buffeted by events largely out of his control.” He was such a legend that 10 years after his death, Marin County was named for him.
Marino battled against the odds. I can think of five others who were involved with the bay who sailed against the odds.
One was Mary Ann Patten, who was the wife of Joshua Patten, a sea captain in the great years of sail. She was aboard her husband’s ship, Neptune’s Car, when the ship sailed from New York for San Francisco on July 1, 1856. After some weeks, when the ship was near Cape Horn, Capt. Patten collapsed from exhaustion and the ravages of tuberculosis.
Mary Patten, who was 19 years old and pregnant, took over. She didn’t trust either of the two mates to navigate and sail the ship. So Mary put down a mutiny led by the chief mate, learned enough medicine to keep her husband alive, locked the troubled chief mate in irons and set a course for San Francisco. She said later she didn’t change her clothes for 50 days.
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Another group that sailed against the odds also involves women. They were three Berkeley housewives — Catherine (“Kay”) Kerr, Sylvia McLaughlin and Esther Gulick. The three were friends and lived in fine houses in the Berkeley hills with splendid views of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate.
A famous sight, but in 1961 it also included regular views of dump trucks and what activists later called “battalions of bulldozers” pouring fill into the shallow Berkeley shoreline. They also learned of Berkeley’s plan to nearly double the city’s size by filling 2,000 acres of shore for new housing and other developments. The new Berkeley shoreline would reach to the San Francisco County line.
They read in newspapers about plans to fill the bay for airport runways, shopping centers, factories, shipping terminals. Already huge chunks of San Francisco Bay had been filled in, all in the name of progress. If it kept up, they learned, the bay would resemble a river.
The three decided to do something. They sent out a few hundred flyers asking for pledges to form a new organization called Save the Bay. The dues were $1, and they got 600 replies immediately.
The women asked Chronicle columnist Harold Gilliam for advice. He told them to form networks, get political help and work on legislation. All three women were well connected. Kerr’s husband was the president of the University of California, and the other two also had powerful associates. But Gilliam was skeptical. “My own feeling was any attempt to stop filling the bay would be hopeless. As an issue the environment did not exist,” he wrote. He saw “You cannot stop progress” as the mantra of the times. Besides, he wrote, the women were “too naïve and inexperienced.”
They worked, built support and enlisted the help of state Sen. J. Eugene McAteer, who sponsored the McAteer-Petris Act, which created the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, pioneering environmental legislation. It was enacted in 1965.
Someone else who sailed against the odds, but in a very much different way, was Michael Healy, who was born a slave in a remarkable family. Three of his brothers were Catholic priests — one a bishop, another the president of Georgetown University. Michael went to sea.
Eventually, in 1887, he became the skipper of the Revenue Cutter Bear, in charge of patrolling 20,000 miles of coastline of the Territory of Alaska. He was the law in the north Pacific, a hard drinking tough guy they called “Hellroaring Mike.” His home base outside of Alaska was San Francisco, where he had many friends.
A man who sailed with the wind was Kenichi Horie, who sailed from Japan at age 23 in 1962 in a 19-foot-long plywood sailboat named Mermaid. He sailed alone: no electronics, no papers, no money, and when he turned up in San Francisco he was arrested as an illegal alien. But when Mayor George Christopher heard his story, he was given the key to the city. Horie was the first person to sail solo across the Pacific, and in 2021 he did it again — only in reverse. This time he was 83, the oldest person to sail solo across the Pacific.
I took my own short voyage only last week, a Fleet Week trip aboard the Jeremiah O’Brien, a World War II veteran that is now the oldest operating steamship in the Pacific.
We headed out the Golden Gate for a bit, to Point Bonita, the edge of the ocean. The ship turned there, offering a view of San Francisco for a minute or two by the Golden Gate Bridge, a chance to notice the look, the color that makes the bridge special. The vertical fluting on the towers that catches the light, the Art Deco touches, designed to fit into the setting of the Golden Gate strait. These are the work of Irving Morrow, the original consulting architect. “With these touches,” John Van der Zee wrote in the classic “The Gate,” “Morrow had transformed the bridge into an environmental sculpture, the largest ever built.” Like the others, Morrow made a difference.
Oct 18, 2025