Stories of San Diego Bay

Launched as Euterpe on the Isle of Man in 1863, she still sails from San Diego, the oldest active sailing ship in the world.

Before the submarine piers, before the lighthouse, before the city had a real skyline, Ballast Point was California's southernmost commercial whaling station. Portuguese-American brothers built it in 1858. The gray whales they hunted still pass through every winter.

Ira Hayes completed recruit training at MCRD San Diego, then volunteered for parachute training at Camp Gillespie east of the city. He was one of six men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. He carried its weight for the rest of a short life.

When Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the Iwo Jima flag-raising ran in newspapers on February 25, 1945, Belle Block recognized her son immediately. It took the Marine Corps four years and a Congressional investigation to agree.

In early 1927, every aircraft manufacturer on the East Coast turned down Charles Lindbergh's request for a custom transatlantic monoplane. Ryan Airlines, operating out of a factory near what is now San Diego International Airport, said yes — and built the Spirit of St. Louis in sixty days.

By 1940, San Diego's Nihonmachi occupied a tight cluster of blocks near Fifth and Island with 1,554 residents, three churches, two Japanese language schools, and more than 35 Nikkei-owned businesses. In the spring of 1942, it emptied.

After Tombstone, Wyatt Earp came to San Diego and leased four saloons and gambling halls in the Stingaree — the waterfront district now called the Gaslamp Quarter. The building where his most famous establishment operated still stands.

From 1900 through 1938, thousands of middle-class families built a canvas city on Coronado Beach at two dollars a week — a planned community of electric-lit tents, a dance pavilion, a library, a carousel, and the best view in San Diego.

From 1932 to 1937, the SS Monte Carlo operated as a floating casino anchored three miles off the Southern California coast, just beyond state law. On New Year's Day 1937, a storm drove her onto Coronado Beach. No one ever claimed her because no one could admit owning her.

In late 1915, San Diego hired a self-proclaimed moisture accelerator named Charles Hatfield to fill Morena Reservoir for $10,000. He produced the deadliest flood in county history. The city refused to pay.

In 1855 the U.S. government built the first Point Loma lighthouse at 422 feet above sea level — the highest lighthouse in the United States. San Diego fog swallowed the light so often that ships at sea couldn't see it. It took 36 years to fix the mistake.

Everingham Brothers Bait Company has operated a live-bait barge in San Diego Bay for decades, supplying the sportfishing fleet around the clock. California sea lions discovered the arrangement at some point and have never left.

At 28th Street and Harbor Drive on the south shore of San Diego Bay, NASSCO is the largest new-construction shipyard on the West Coast, one of the last substantial yards on the Pacific coast still building new ships from the keel up. The yard has operated on this bay since 1944.

When the Hotel del Coronado opened in 1888, it was the largest all-wooden structure in the United States. Every American president since Benjamin Harrison has stayed there. In over 135 years it has never caught fire — which, for a building made entirely of wood, is the most remarkable fact about it.

From 1886 until August 1969, the only way to reach Coronado from downtown San Diego was by ferry. For eighty-three years the rhythm of this bay ran on a boat schedule — and the ferry that served the Navy base charged five cents a ride.

Every carrier, destroyer, container ship, and tanker moving on San Diego Bay does so with a licensed harbor pilot at the helm. The work has run continuously from this harbor since the 19th century, and the pilot boat that served this bay from 1914 to 1996 is now at the Maritime Museum.

On June 1, 1940, the Navy opened a Radio and Sound Laboratory at Point Loma with a staff of six people. Sixteen months before Pearl Harbor, their job was to figure out how ships might detect submarines and communicate across open ocean. What they built became the electronic nervous system of the Pacific Fleet.

In June 1942, Platoon 382 marched across the MCRD San Diego parade deck. Twenty-nine young men from the Navajo Nation had just completed Marine boot camp — and built something Japanese military cryptanalysts never decoded.

Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery holds more than 120,000 Americans on the Point Loma ridgeline — visible from nearly anywhere on the southern bay. The granite obelisk at one end marks the worst peacetime naval disaster in San Diego history.

Every warship generates a magnetic field its own crew cannot see. Before a submarine leaves Point Loma for the Pacific, a facility at Ballast Point runs thousands of amps through its hull to erase that field from the water below.

Naval Submarine Base San Diego was formally established in 1963, but the Navy has operated from this western shore for far longer. The submarine fleet based here is one of the most powerful — and least visible — concentrations of military force in the world.

On September 28, 1542, a navigator named Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed three ships into this bay and set foot on the coast of Alta California for the first time in European history. He named it something different, and almost no one remembers what.

From the recruit depot on the north shore of San Diego Bay to the black sand of Iwo Jima — and the impossible weight Ira Hayes carried home from the summit of Suribachi.

The Navy's most elite warriors trace their origin to a reef at Tarawa in 1943 — and for more than eighty years, they have trained on the shores of Coronado, where a brass bell marks the line between staying and leaving.

In 1922, a single destroyer tender tied up at the foot of 32nd Street. Today, the eastern shore of San Diego Bay hosts the largest concentration of U.S. surface warships on the West Coast.

Shelter Island and Harbor Island weren't there 100 years ago. They were made from bay bottom, raised above the waterline, and turned into the finest recreational waterfront on the West Coast.

The Coronado Bridge bends 80 degrees across the bay because the Navy required 200 feet of clearance for their fleet, and the architect solved the geometry in a single afternoon.

Daniel K. Inouye watched Pearl Harbor burn at seventeen, volunteered for the 442nd, lost his right arm in Italy, and waited fifty-five years for the Medal of Honor his country finally agreed he had always deserved — then had a destroyer named for him to patrol the same Pacific.

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated unit in U.S. Army history — made up of men whose families were behind barbed wire, and whose medals were corrected fifty-five years too late.

Japanese American fishermen built San Diego's tuna empire from bamboo poles and Pacific ambition — and were driven from this bay the same week their boats were drafted into the Navy.

How San Diego became the Tuna Capital of the World, who built the fleet that earned the title, and what happened to the people who made it.

She survived a mutiny, a gale, and decades of neglect in a San Diego harbor. The world's oldest active sailing ship has called this bay home for nearly a century.

USS Midway was commissioned eight days after Japan surrendered. She arrived too late for the war she was built for, so she stayed for the next forty-seven years.

On January 26, 1911, Glenn Curtiss flew the first seaplane in America from the sheltered water off North Island — and the Navy has been building on that flight ever since.