Flashback: Wednesday, February 8, 1989, 7:59pm.

My 11 year old self is getting mentally prepared. All the lights in the family room are at full brightness: check. Parents are just upstairs: check. I glance to the window, it’s pretty dark out there. Not ideal, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Do I really want to go through with this? Yes. My friends at school will be talking about this tomorrow. I’m committed. I flick on the TV and out comes the haunting intro theme to Unsolved Mysteries.

This particular episode was dedicated to Alcatraz. I must have been fascinated, because I still remember the gist of the episode 33 years later. Alcatraz. The Rock. Perched on an inhospitable slab of granite in San Fransisco Bay, surrounded by freezing cold shark infested waters with powerful currents sucking out to sea. The episode featured the case of the only 3 men known to have broken out. They escaped into a homemade raft, which was later found washed up in pieces. The men were never found, investigators believed them drowned.

Fast forward 33 years: Wednesday, September 14, 2022, morning.

My own kids are now 11 years old. They’re on the foredeck as we motor towards the Golden Gate Bridge. We made it to San Francisco! Nyah suggested some theme music would be appropriate, so she queued up Chariots of Fire on our small speaker as we made our way majestically towards the Gate.

And there was Alcatraz, the real thing! We would anchor right across from it, at the Aquatic Park in front of Ghirardelli Square. As we were entering the anchorage Sarah spotted a swimmer, and asked West to help watch out for more.

“Swimmers?” he confirmed.

“Yes, the guidebook warned us about this.”

“I thought that was a joke!”

Me too West. Everybody knows you can’t swim near Alcatraz.

It was not a joke, there were swimmers in the anchorage. Lots of swimmers, all day long. Just swimming around, hundreds of meters from shore, right there in San Francisco Bay, apparently unperturbed by the freezing cold shark infested waters with powerful currents sucking out to sea.

We anchored the boat and the solitary grandeur of Alcatraz was right there, just across the water from us. My inner 11 year old shivered every time I glanced over at it.

That night we awoke at 4am to voices outside our boat. More swimmers! They wore lights, in case the sharks couldn’t see them in the darkness. These swimmers were drifting on their backs, cheerfully having a gab, as if maybe they’d just bumped into each other unexpectedly, in the freezing shark infested bay at 4am in pitch blackness.

Alcatraz can see you people you know, show some respect!

The next day we saw a poster for the annual “Alcatraz Sharkfest Swim”, an event where hundreds of participants swim from Alcatraz to shore. The last spark of my childhood awe fizzled out. Unsolved Mysteries had made a mockery of my youth. Those 3 prisoners definitely escaped. They probably swam to shore, swam back when they forgot a wallet, then swam to freedom once again.

While I wasn’t stewing over the disappointing lack of sharks in the bay, we had a great time exploring the city. Chinatown, the Castro, Union Square, Lombard Street. We even wandered accidentally into the Tenderloin district, and then wandered quickly back out again.

Up until now when people asked us how far we planned to go, we’d say that we just wanted to survive to San Francisco. Now that we’d made it, we looked south with renewed interest. The map doesn’t end here. Central California awaits!