Nora Sawyer/Sausalito Historical Society
In 1972, a 23-year old woman named Suzanne visited Sausalito. “A terrific water skier, fluent in French and some Spanish,” she was by all reports smart and cosmopolitan, not prone to flights of fancy. On a day spent with friends, taking in the sights and hiking Sausalito’s hills, she paused at the top of Curry Ave. Thaddeus Tigger reported the scene in the August 1st edition of the Sausalito Marinscope:
Suzanne turned around, to enjoy the view of the ever-changing bay. For one brief moment she claimed, she saw something like four black humps in a straight line going in a S/SE direction. What she could barely make out as eyes were in the place where a tail should have been – or else the beast (if it was one) was going backwards. Total length – estimated – could have been in excess of 300 feet. It moved at approximately 25 knots.
At Tigger’s request, Suzanne provided a sketch of the incident, showing the creature’s location. It shows the beast moving past the Bay Model, away from Strawberry Point and towards the open Bay.
The columnist, who happened to be present for Suzanne’s sighting, attested to her sobriety, reporting that the woman “was neither drunk or on drugs” and “in complete possession of her mental faculties.”
Two weeks later, having received a postcard from Suzanne with no mention of the sighting, Tigger started to doubt Suzanne’s tale. Then, one evening in early September, he tuned into a news story about lighthouses on KCBS, and was struck by an interview with a 19 year old Coast Guard recruit who had served at Point Bonita.
He talked about boat wrecks and lonely hours, about long duty time spent. And reported matter-of-factly that one night he had seen something out in the Pacific glistening, above the waterline, not a ship, not a known living creature, coming up and then again disappearing. He thought it to be a fabulous sea monster.
Though it seemed like Tigger might have “a monster of a story by the tail,” no further sightings of the Bay Monster were reported.
However, Suzanne’s was not the first sea monster sighting in Richardson Bay. On March 7, 1940, the Sausalito news reported that a resident of Greenwood Beach, “peering through her curtains in the morning hours after ‘one of those storms,’” observed what appeared to be a sea serpent out on the bay. Doing her best to stay calm, she called her next-door neighbor, a sea captain. “To her relief,” the News reported, the captain “firmly” told her no, it was not a sea serpent, “just a black hulk.”
Not every sighting was dismissed so easily. On November 20, 1926, the Sausalito News reported that on Tuesday morning, passengers aboard the 6:45 ferry from San Francisco “witnessed the spectacle of a huge sea serpent swimming alongside the ferry.” Sausalito residents aboard the ferry stated that “the huge reptile was very real and of a species never seen before.”
In 1908, Sausalito’s mayor reported an even closer encounter. The Sausalito News reports,
One of our prominent citizens received a letter from Monterey county that Mayor Thomas had an exciting adventure with a sea serpent on the Carmel river, forty miles from the ocean.
Alas, Mayor Thomas does not seem to have been as reliable a witness as young Suzanne:
It was warm and the Mayor, finding a good pool near a shady tree sat on the bank, cast his line in the pool. In a few minutes he was in the arms of Morpheus, dreaming of the prehistoric era when he was awakened by a strong lull! at his line. “Whoop ala Billie” yelled the Mayor to [his host, WJ Martin], “Help me land an ichthyosaurus.” The line parted before Martin arrived and the Mayor spent the day trying to convince Martin.
The News seems unconvinced, noting “Trustee Pistolesi says it was a rabbit.”
Similarly, the Sausalito News’ Brief Items of Local Interest column for August 21, 1914 reports that Pete Diehl “says he had a battle with a sea serpent while trolling for salmon Sunday.” However, “some of his friends claim he was dreaming.”
Reports of Richardson Bay’s resident cryptid remain dubious at best. As the Sausalito News for September 23, 1886 noted (with no context given): “All yarns to the contrary notwithstanding, the sea serpent is not a seen serpent.”
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