A few miles north of San Francisco, off the coast of Sausalito, is Richardson Bay, a saltwater estuary where roughly one hundred people live out of sight from the world. Known as anchor-outs, they make their homes a quarter mile from the shore, on abandoned and unseaworthy vessels, doing their best, with little or no money, to survive.
The bay has served as a stopover for sailors headed down the coast, or out into the Pacific, for at least two centuries. It takes its name from William Richardson, a London-born sea captain who received a 19,500-acre land grant along the water in the 1840s, and then died penniless less than two decades later, after he fell into debt and was forced to mortgage his properties. During Richardson’s early tenure in the bay, it was part of the Mexican territory of Alta California. The shore was lined with laurel trees and sweat lodges built by the Coast Miwok, who had settled in a valley along the northwest waterfront. Richardson and the Coast Miwok operated the estuary as a safe harbor for whalers and tradesmen who’d drop anchor for a week to weather a storm or replenish their fresh water. The first live-aboards came with the Gold Rush, when those who had made fortunes moved onto rectangular crafts with gently curved roofs and French doors, then lost everything playing monte in the city, a period Richardson’s son later referred to as the “reign of whiskey.” They were followed by San Franciscans who had lost their homes in the earthquake and fires of 1906, and then by opportunistic bootleggers and rumrunners. Shortly after Pearl Harbor was bombed, the city built dry docks and floated them into the center of the bay to repair damaged submarine chasers. The docks were abandoned after the war, a time still remembered by some anchor-outs, and new residents moved aboard, until the city paid someone fifty dollars to burn them all down.
Today, people come to the anchorage from all over the country, on Greyhound buses and in rust-eaten cars that are scrapped on arrival. They purchase boats from other anchor-outs for as little as a dollar, or claim damaged vessels discarded by sailors from Oakland and San Francisco, and go to work patching their hulls and sealing their roofs. Time passes: health declines, money runs out. They wake up each day in a creaky plywood boat, with no food and a persistent cough, and, happy or not, for many there is no going back to the old way of things.
