The first time I saw Donna Bragg was in the documentary Houseboat Wars—a film about our community’s hippie beginnings and residents’ struggle to continue living on the water. She’s being interviewed sitting in a cushioned lawn chair, the bay behind her, wearing dark sunglasses, her long black hair parted in...
Every Monday night, you can find Joe Tate and the Blue Monday Band jamming at the Sausalito Cruising Club. If you haven’t seen him there, maybe you’ve caught his escapades in the videos The Houseboat Wars or Last Free Ride. Joe’s one of the founders of the Sausalito floating homes...
Even though Jay Lalezari’s floating home at 19 Yellow Ferry Harbor isn’t on the main walkway, it’s difficult to miss. It’s a three-story with a huge squid on the side. There are butterflies, a mermaid and progressive political signs too. Tourists often stop to take pictures, and Jay sometimes invites...
The latest craze among the jet(ty) set is silent disco, with revelers dancing to music only they can hear, via wireless headphones. It all started as a birthday celebration in May for Pamela Adams of Issaquah. About 50 people from various docks showed up in the new Waldo Point Harbor...
I’m wandering along Issaquah looking for the Box Poem when I see three people laughing, mugging for photos beside sculpted faces mounted on the pier railing. They’re in front of Box Poem. It’s Jim Woessner’s boat and he created the sculptures that are attracting attention. Opening the door, I step...
When a TV camera crew shows up, it attracts attention. What’s going on, we wondered, when we saw the press and Wilford Welch on the gangway to his 1 East Pier home last month. It turns out, he was being interviewed by a German TV station about solutions to global...
With two adults, two 13-year-old boys and two cats in 800 square feet, the Hudson family is close. Their kitchen table, where we sit talking, edges against an exterior wall between windows—the front door a half step away in one direction and the refrigerator a half step in the other....
In May, we walked up the dock to Teddie and Brad Hathaway’s floating home at 30 East Pier to see Teddie’s glass art. She’d opened her studio for the Marin Open Studios Tour. As we talked, by a wall of blue and green textured glass sky and bayscapes, Brad dropped...
Neighbors from the floating homes community joined other friends of Tom Dugan for a traditional Irish wake on Memorial Day. Tom and his wife Blaise had lived on A Dock and Gate 6 ½ for many years until he passed away two days before St. Patrick’s Day after a long...
“I should have been born at the beginning of the forties,” Katherine Boschetto says, smiling, when I ask about the black and white photos of dancers on her living room wall at 9 Issaquah. “Everything in my house is vintage, from the 30s, 40s and 50s.” In her bedroom, she...