Randomly today, on my walk around Aquatic Park, I decided to stop at the Maritime Museum on Beach Street, right across from the Dolphin Club and in the Argonaut Hotel. Wow, it was an excellent exhibit and I ended up staying over an hour, up to closing time. A few key things you shouldn’t miss if you go there:
– the map of shipwrecks off of the golden gate
– the video of the bar pilots

Bar Pilots!!
So because there are so many shipwrecks, they’ve instituted this club of old sailors called “bar pilots”- people who really know how to navigate the Bay. They get ferried out to ships and lead the boats in and out of the bay. There’s video footage of a small little boat sidling up to a tanker in high seas, adn the pilot jumping up the side of the tanker and navigating the boat into the Bay. It’s really amazing, to see this huge tanker just bouncing around like a bobbin in a bathtub, and this tiny spec of a woman climb up the side of it and then lead it through… “potato patch,” this shoal around the outside of the Bay. Really fascinating.