Swim Across America — San Francisco

Swim Across America — San Francisco is an open water swimming race held in the sea waters of San Francisco Bay in California. The event was established in 2006 under the banner of Swim Across America, an organization founded in 1987 that stages charity swims nationwide to raise funds for cancer research and patient programs. The route is a point-to-point journey of 1.5 miles tracing the shoreline of the bay. Swimmers enter the saltwater at Little Marina Green and chart a direct course, finishing inside Aquatic Park. Each edition gathers more than 500 participants along the bay shoreline, bringing together swimmers, dedicated volunteers, cheering spectators, and Olympians. Cancer survivors, families, and seasoned athletes swim side by side in the open bay, creating a powerful community atmosphere where participants see the tangible impact of their fundraising efforts on vital cancer research. The event welcomes swimmers of every experience tier, opening its start line to bay novices embarking on their first open water challenge as well as veterans who have swum these shores for decades.

Aquatic Park: the sheltered cove and swimming clubs

Aquatic Park serves as the finish line and the heart of San Francisco's daily open-water swimming life. The cove is an official designated haven for recreational and training open-water swimming. It provides an enclosed water arena where swimmers can enter the sea directly from the city shore, gliding across flat or rolling bay water. Within the Aquatic Park grounds stand the South End Rowing Club and the Dolphin Club, two enduring institutions. The architectural backdrop of the cove echoes that maritime heritage. The Maritime Museum building was originally built in 1939 as a public bathhouse. Nearby, the visitor center of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park occupies a 1909 waterfront brick warehouse, housing a massive first-order Fresnel lighthouse lens and the remains of a shipwrecked boat.

Aquatic Park Cove: water temperatures, buoys and currents

Dolphin Club members swim year-round in Aquatic Park Cove, where temperatures vary from about 50 F in January to about 65 F in September. In Aquatic Park Cove, a line of buoys parallel to the shore marks a quarter-mile course. The Dolphin Club advises swimmers in the cove to check the tide, current, water temperature and wind speed before a swim. Its advice for the current is to swim against it at the beginning, so that you can take advantage of it in the back half of the swim. The Dolphin Club's scheduled swim calendar includes the Golden Gate and Alcatraz swims, and its longest swim runs from Fort Point to Aquatic Park. Public day-use swimmers must stay within the Aquatic Park Cove Swim Boundary.

Hyde Street Pier: the wooden giants flanking the finish

Beside the cove stands the historic Hyde Street Pier, home to a preserved fleet. Long before the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge spanned the open water, this wooden pier served as San Francisco's primary automobile ferry terminal. On May 1, 1929, ferry operations here came under the management of the Southern Pacific-Golden Gate Ferries company, until the bridges made auto ferries obsolete. Today, the pier is preserved as a core component of the maritime national historical park, mooring a rare fleet of turn-of-the-century vessels. Most prominent among them is the Balclutha, a full-rigged sailing ship built in 1886. The Eureka was launched into San Francisco Bay on May 17, 1890. Measuring 277 feet long with a round-bottomed wooden hull 42 feet across, she is the largest existing wooden ship surviving in the world today.

The Eureka is also the world's only afloat survivor powered by a walking beam steam engine across the bay waters. In World War II, the ferry carried thousands of troops from Camp Stoneman down the Sacramento River into the port of San Francisco.

Working the Bay waters: scows, schooners and steam tugs

Tied up along Hyde Street Pier are the smaller workhorses that once kept the bay and coastal trade alive. Among them floats the scow schooner Alma, built in 1891 at a boatyard near Shipwright's Cottage at Hunters Point in San Francisco. The Alma was built specifically to navigate the shallow creeks of the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta. Until 1918, she hauled heavy bulks of hay and lumber across San Francisco Bay, and today she remains the only scow schooner known to survive afloat anywhere in the United States. Between 1895 and 1912, the C.A. Thayer carried loads of rough-sawn lumber from Grays Harbor, Washington, directly into the booming port of San Francisco, venturing as far as Hawaii and Fiji.

Later she turned to seasonal salmon fishing in Alaska and cod fishing in the stormy Bering Sea, and now she rests peacefully at the Hyde Street Pier. To move these sailing vessels against the heavy Pacific winds, mariners turned to sturdy ocean tugs like the Hercules. Built in New Jersey in 1907, the steam-powered tug steamed all the way to San Francisco via the Straits of Magellan. In 1916, Hercules hooked a line to the C.A. Thayer and towed her north to Port Townsend, Washington, overcoming the prevailing northwest coastal winds that battered working schooners trying to beat up the California coast. Swimming through the bay into Aquatic Park connects you directly to that maritime past, stroking past historic hulls that carved through these same waters more than a century ago.