Pulling skeletons from Davy Jones' locker - San Francsico Examiner - October 25, 1997 - by Donna Horowitz

Pulling skeletons from Davy Jones' locker
Donna Horowitz, SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER

Wednesday, October 15, 1997

Sunken wrecks raised and destroyed as part of cleanup of Richardson Bay

(10-15) 04:00 PDT SAUSALITO -- SAUSALITO - Rotting wood encrusted with barnacles and a rusty propeller were all that remained of the Shana S, a 65-foot tugboat dating back to the 1930s.

The old boat was smashed to smithereens Tuesday as part of an effort to rid Richardson Bay of sunken wrecks littering the waterway and posing a navigational hazard to recreational boaters.

Many of the abandoned boats were once homes to

"anchorouts," hardy individuals who live on the bay without water, phones or other utilities.

"A lot of the vessels out there are skeletons. So what we're doing is pulling out the skeletons while being compassionate to the people living on the water," said Sausalito Vice Mayor George Stratigos, a member of the Richardson Bay Regional Agency, the group undertaking the cleanup.

The Richardson Bay agency, run by the cities of Belvedere, Tiburon, Mill Valley and Sausalito and the county of Marin, is spending $250,000 in Housing and Urban Development money to remove the wrecks, said Bill Price, harbor administrator with the agency.

He hopes to complete the cleanup, which began in August, by the end of the week. By then, he estimated the group will have removed and demolished 29 wrecks.

The work has been surprisingly peaceful for a waterfront often wracked by dissention. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when the Richardson Bay agency attempted to evict anchorouts, they fought back with lawsuits, said John Leonard, a Mill Valley councilman who represents his community on the regional board.

The Richardson Bay group was trying to follow policies of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which considers anchorouts and their vessels as illegal landfill and the equivalent of homeless squatters in a park.

But the Richardson Bay group is now taking a kinder, gentler approach by trying to prevent new anchorouts from moving to the area, helping boat dwellers secure their vessels and hoping eventually to see the community of about 40 people and 100 boats fade away through attrition.

Price said he hopes to find solid moorings, possibly old train wheels, so anchorouts can tie up their vessels without fear that they will float away in storms.

On Tuesday, the contractor hired for the demolition, Zaccor Co. Inc. of Alameda, pumped out the sunken Shana S tug at low tide and floated it to the debris removal yard made available by the Army Corps of Engineers. The contractor also removed the second story of a sunken houseboat and barged it to shore. Both wrecks were smashed to pieces, with engines and other metal parts salvaged, and toxics such as fuel and oil disposed of.

"As a mariner, I think it's a great idea. It's imperative to move and remove any underwater navigational hazard," said Doug Storms, a commercial diver and Southern Baptist chaplain who has lived as an anchorout in Sausalito for 10 years.<