As a legal liveaboard in the San Francisco Bay area, I often feel like someone has handed me a rare gold coin. I wake up every morning to the gentle rocking of my boat with the salt air filling my lungs as I view the distant Golden Gate Bridge, often shrouded in fog. Living here is far cheaper than renting an apartment in the city, but what I really love are the sea and PoTolo, my 36-foot Sundowner tug.

A gorgeous day on San Francisco Bay.

San Francisco Bay is home to an unusual community of liveaboards. This lifestyle, while not for everyone, combines elements of minimalism, adventure and closeness to nature.

Heidi Mark is in her 60s and a 10-year liveaboard at Emeryville’s Safe Harbor marina in the East Bay. She met her husband, John, while windsurfing. At the time, she was living on her 38-foot trawler, Coquette, but together, they traded up to Andiamo, a 50-foot Ventura pilothouse cruiser.

“I’m called ‘the pie lady’ and the ‘queen of C dock,’” says Heidi, who is an avid baker. She likes the community’s potlucks and dockside Thanksgiving crab feeds, and paddling out to Ashby Shoal to light bonfires and picnic at low tide beneath a full moon. Heidi and her friends also gather on board Andiamo to play music. “This Christmas, four or five of my neighbor’s children gathered here making Christmas cookies,” she says. “Then we did a big cookie exchange on the dock.“

The author and Zippy. Anyone thinking about living on a boat also has to embrace a minimalist lifestyle, she says.

The Bay Area includes many boaters who would like to live on their vessels, but the criteria is selective. Regulations set up some 40 years ago prevent overpopulation and ensure a balanced use of resources. Only 10 percent of berths in most marinas can be populated by liveaboards in San Francisco Bay. Waiting lists are long to become one of the chosen few.

Mik Maguire, a broker with Richard Boland Yachts, suggests that aspirational liveaboards “meet personally with the harbormasters as you sign onto their waiting list. Sometimes you can jump the line if you fit the right criteria, if your boat is the right size and you seem responsible.” Maguire also suggests that boaters network at yacht clubs and go through a marina’s vetting process by renting a slip as a transient, which is allowed for three nights a week.

Clockwise, from top left: The author says liveaboards seem to cherish anything brass, although it corrodes in the marine environment if not polished; Space is minimal on a liveaboard vessel. On Andiamo, a 50-foot Ventura pilothouse cruiser, Heidi Mark prefers hooks for coats; The author has learned to utilize the local public library; A cap autographed by the deceased president of the New York harbor tugboat company, McAllister Towing, hangs from the wheel of the author’s boat, PoTolo. 

The demographics at Bay Area marinas cut a wide swath. Berkeley’s municipal marina has 100 slips available for liveaboards and is currently taking applications. In Sausalito, just north of San Francisco in Marin County, the eight independent marinas are mostly family-owned and include Clipper Yacht Harbor, where many slips are rented month to month. Oakland’s five marinas are run by Almar Marinas and leased from the Port of Oakland. And just a few miles from San Francisco International Airport, word has spread in aircraft cockpits that the Brisbane Marina in South San Francisco is a good place to “crash between flights,” as one berther told me.

Anyone thinking about living on a boat also has to embrace a minimalist lifestyle. Some say the forced simplicity of being in a smaller space can lead to a less-cluttered life.

Heidi Mark, a 10-year liveaboard at an Emeryville marina in the East Bay. “I’m called ‘the pie lady’ and the ‘queen of C dock,’” says Heidi, who is an avid baker.

However, like taxes and the tide, it’s a certainty that you’re going to pay dearly for maintenance, says Sausalito harbormaster Curtis Havel. “Maintenance of a boat isn’t like that of a house,” Havel says. “If you don’t keep it up, it will sink.”

When I spoke with liveaboard Matt Moore, he was deep in the hold of his 41-foot Kha Shing trawler from the 1980s. It was cradled on the hard on jack stands a year after he and his partner bought it. “We hoped to supplement our income by taking her out fishing,” he says, standing near a rusty iron I-beam with a rolling pulley that had been blocked through the center of the galley, to hoist the boat’s failed Perkins starboard engine. “Living on a boat is not as glossy as you’d find on reality TV.”

An iron beam with a heavy pulley was used to pull Matt Moore’s dead engine from his trawler. It stretches from the stern into the galley and salon, whose deck was pulled apart for the endeavor. Moore and his partner are staying on the boat while it’s on the hard.

It helps to have a seasoned mechanic on call. For me, that marine mechanic is Salvador Contreras. One evening, I watched in horror as water gushed into my bilge. A hose clamp leading to my hot water heater had slipped. With only a half hour’s notice, Contreras arrived to my rescue, tools in hand.

Down from my slip, my neighbors are Sonia Pang and Lukas Martinelli. I most recently found them hauling three aluminum window frames down the dock, to clean up the aluminum in order to reseat them. Their 48-foot cruiser, Sunrise, was built in the 1970s and was once used for swordfishing.

Liveaboard Lukas Martinelli hauling aluminum window frames for a reseat. He and his partner, Sonia, live on their 48-foot cruiser, Sunrise, down the slip from the author.

Lukas says it’s all worth it as Sonia dumps a load of laundry into the washing machine on Sunrise’s aft deck and joins her partner for breakfast. The couple snack on pineapple chunks as they gaze out into the marina’s broad fairway. “We have our resident seals and other birds,” Sonia says, adding that she likes to watch pelicans dive bomb in search of fish in the eddy not far behind Sunrise’s swim platform, where strawberries are growing in a clay pot.

At Jack London Square in Oakland, pricey boats available for charter line the dock, replacing all of the old-school Bohemian boats that used to dominate the liveaboard lifestyle. The character of the communities is different now, but still vibrant.

The author during her tugboat days with her favorite deckhand, Mack. “He took his lower false teeth out on change crew day and put them back in at the end of the rotation,” she recalls.

I return back to PoTolo in the early evening in time to catch the start of the Berkeley Yacht Club beer can races. I climb up to the pilothouse roof, plop into a beanbag and gaze at the billowing, multicolored spinnakers as crews douse them after racing. Heading back to the galley, I coat some halibut fillets that a neighboring fisherman gave me, and I reflect on a visit I made earlier to Boland, the yacht broker.

His first experience living on the water was in the roaring 1960s. “You live on a boat, right?” he asks me with classic salesman intensity. “You wake up in the morning and you hear the wildlife, the clattering of lines on sailboats and all the sounds that go with boating, right? You have a sense of excitement every day you wake up. It’s different. There’s an energy to living on a boat, living on the water, that you cannot find living in an apartment or house on land.”

On a Sunday morning, with friends and her dog, Zippy, the author heads for the Corinthian Yacht Club for brunch.

I agree. While my land-bound friends are mowing their lawns, I will be varnishing the galley sole. My choices are simple: glossy, semi-gloss or matte? 

This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue.