See you at the Farallons! Photo: Matt O’Brien.
One night over beers, an old friend named John told me about the time that he almost got sucked out to sea towards the Farallon Islands — the fabled feeding grounds for great white sharks — in San Francisco, California.
The year was 2015, and San Francisco was overtaken by two things common to the Bay Area: fog and swell. Karl, which is what locals call the far and wide reaching fog, draped low to the ground and enveloped everything in its path.
When John looked outside from his window on the second floor of the apartment building, he couldn’t see the street down below. He figured that when he got to the beach he wouldn’t be able to see past the shorebreak. This endless fog would keep most people away from the surf.
But as tried and true NorCal Surfers do, he packed up the car. John relished the opportunity to snag a few waves, sans the crowd. He drove down to Fort Point — a novelty left that breaks right under the Golden Gate Bridge.
The fog caked low to the ground, and he could barely see the lineup. The waves that crashed into the rocks of the point spit up drawn-out tendrils of foamy white spray, sailing into the ripping winds. He sipped on his coffee, and turned the radio to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather radio. The droning, robotic monotone voice said, “At San Francisco Bar buoy, winds are Northwest at 15 knots, sea temperature 52 degrees, wave height five feet, wave period 15 seconds, rip current warning in effect.”
John threw on his black hooded wetsuit, and entered the gray. The prevailing onshore northwest winds made the waves choppy, but the overhead swell reeled some lefts down the point.
After an hour, the winds and tide started to shift, and the sun burst through the clouds. This would’ve normally been a gorgeous site, but what John saw was anything but. He was expecting to see the vermilion international, orange-colored bridge in front of him. Only it wasn’t. He turned around to see that he was a football field’s distance out past it, drifting in a strong current out to sea.
Fort Point is located at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, which can move nearly 400-billion gallons of saltwater through the Golden Gate. John was just a drop in the sea. Like the great San Franciscan novelist Jack London once foretold in his tale The Sea-Wolf, my friend John was adrift in the ocean near the City by the Bay — only this time there would be no rescue from captain Wolf Larsen and his schooner.
Two terrors occupied John’s mind. The first was the obvious and immediate problem. He was stuck in a current that was wide, and far too strong for him to paddle against. The second, and more horrifying thought, was that if he didn’t find a way to paddle in somewhere, he’d likely drift out towards the Devil’s Teeth, or Farallon Islands. That’s where the tax men, the men in grey suits, the great white sharks the size of trucks, feed on seals.
And not just seals. For years, researchers used surfboards as lures at the islands to study the sharks’ hunting behavior. They’d been primed to launch themselves at surfboard silhouettes, and now John was the primer. The last thing he wanted to do was have a chance encounter with Stumpy, The Queen Annihilator of Surfboards — a 19-foot white shark popularized in Susan Casey’s book The Devil’s Teeth.
The thought of being a big ticket item on the food chain was too fear-inducing to give any credence. John resisted the urge to panic, and came up with a plan.
He looked around to see where the nearest inlet was. There were large rocks covering the shoreline in front of him, and the waves were too steep at the shore. He’d likely just get smashed. Further south, he spotted a small beach. He reckoned a path based on how fast he was drifting out, and mentally set a diagonal line towards shore.
John is an experienced surfer, and knew to paddle sideways out of the current. But it was very wide, and he didn’t want to get pulled further down the coast and miss the beach. He bit down on his proverbial mouthguard, and started the grinding paddle to shore. By the time he escaped the current, his arms were noodles.
He finally touched the sand at a small, remote shorefront called Marshall’s Beach, and took the cold and lonely mile-long walk across the bluffs, down Lincoln Boulevard, and back to the Fort Point parking lot.
“Looking back through the breaking clouds to see the sun’s piercing rays light up the wrong side of the Golden Gate Bridge was a once in a lifetime view,” John said. “I hope I never see it again.”
