SF Bay Notes is an independent visitor journal. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any tour operator or the National Park Service. We do not sell tickets and never process payments.

SF Bay Notes An independent journal from the piers, ferries and islands of San Francisco Bay

The person with the notebook

About

Looking toward Coit Tower and the Bay from the hills above North Beach — the neighborhood I ended up in.
Looking toward Coit Tower and the Bay from the hills above North Beach — the neighborhood I ended up in. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m Tom. Twelve years ago I moved to the city for a job and stayed for the water. The job ended. The habit of walking to a pier with a notebook did not. I kayak when the tides are polite, I read too much institutional history, and I have taken every public boat that will sell me a seat. Friends started asking me which departure to take and whether the night visit was “worth it,” and I got tired of typing the same paragraph into messages.

This site is that paragraph, stretched into something I can send instead. I am not a guide. I am not a ranger. I have no relationship with any operator or with the National Park Service. I do not take a cut of anything. If a sentence here sounds like an opinion, it is one. If a fact changes — a path closes, a boat moves — trust the people who run the place, not a journal that was updated on a Saturday.

I live in North Beach, which is a pretentious thing to type and also just where the rent landed. I write in the mornings before the hills fill up. If you catch an error, write to me. I would rather be corrected than sound sure. The third time I used the old name in a history book that printed Alcatraz on the spine, I put the book back and went outside. The Bay is better than the spine.