travel stories and news from floating homes alumni
On the morning of Friday, July 31, 1846, Samuel Brannan sailed boldly into the mist-shrouded headlands of San Francisco Bay. His ship, the Brooklyn, carried 238 fellow Mormons, known as Saints. Their goal was to build a Mormon kingdom in the Mexican territory of California without the conflicts they had...
We recently posted a firsthand dispatch from West Maui by former Gate 6 ½ resident Robb Petty. Robb, a retired emergency room doctor, and his wife Jane returned there just days after the devastating fire, when they learned their home near Lahaina had been spared. Since then, they’ve had limited...
The website iHeart states: “There is one town in California situated within the hills along the coast, framing the lines where the sun meets the earth and the earth meets the sea. A breathtaking change of pace that is simply impossible to forget if you’ve ever visited, leaving you with...
The BBC has reviewed a new book which features eight examples of remarkable houseboats from Scandinavia to the US. Surprisingly, none of the eight are located in Sausalito. The cover of a new book, Making Waves: Floating Homes and Life on the Water by Portland Mitchell, captures the freedom associated...
Robb and Jane Petty were neighbors on Gate 6 ½ until last year, when they bought their dream home in West Maui. Last week they were back on the dock, preparing their floating home for sale, when the wildfires struck the island. Learning that their Maui home had been spared,...
Oscar Melet of Gate 6 ½ competed in the recent world championship regatta for 420 class two-person trapeze and spinnaker racing dinghies. The regatta was held in July at the Real Club de Regatas de Alicante on the Mediterranean coast of Spain and included 277 crews from 22 countries. He...
Donna Lunsford of Gate 6 ½ forwarded this amusing illustration. It seems everyone wants to get in on the houseboat action, even Admiral Picard.
The recent news that the infamous Forbes Island has been resurrected in the Delta reminded me that its visionary builder, Forbes Kiddoo, got his start fabricating concrete barges for Sausalito floating homes. Most of those barges measured no more than 20 by 40 feet, but one day Forbes got the...
Vocalist, writer and actress Gale Garnett was born in New Zealand, but became a local fixture in Sausalito’s hippie heyday. In 1964, Gale scored a Top Five pop hit with her original composition “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine,” which won her a Grammy for Best Folk Recording. Five years later...
Fresno Bee columnist Marek Warszawski recently spent some time on a floating home visiting his sister, and recorded his impressions of our part of the world. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “it takes a week in Marin County, specifically on a houseboat with an unobstructed view of Mount Tamalpais (Tam in casual...