Escape to Alacatraz: swimmers and workers face turning tide

Irish Times

26-05-2025

Treacherous currents abound in the San Francisco Bay area. Container ships and whales, sailing boats, sharks and sea swimmers all tackle the tricky tides.
The two sea-swimming clubs sit cheek by jowl in Victorian wooden clubhouses on the harbour of the city's aquatic cove. The Dolphin and the Southend share a small urban beach and allegedly a mutual enmity. They have seen a surge in use since the pandemic in spite of the chilly North Pacific waters. Well, they say chilly, but we would just call it grand.
As is tradition with wars, there are occasional ceasefires. Every Friday evening peace comes to the small beach with cocktails on the veranda, the two clubs suspending animosities to mingle with clinking glasses. But both shoals have a mutual target in fog-wrapped sight of the horseshoe cove.
Alcatraz.
READ MORE
I first heard of this aquatic Everest from Gerry, a 20-something software engineer from Dublin, standing outside a precipice-perched wine bar in his flip flops and shorts, his dog sleeping at his feet. 'I was training for Alcatraz,' he declared, 'earlier', athletically waving a goblet of Pinot Noir toward the foggy island off in the distance. 'A mile and a half; should take 45 minutes'.
It's been in
the national news recently but in this city it is omnipresent
. The Rock's distinctive shelled-out buildings and defunct water tower loom out of the gloom at dawn and dusk. The city's first lighthouse, once a penal institution that housed Al Capone, was occupied in the 1970s by a Native American tribe, and their graffiti, visible to passing ferries, still claims its indigenous heritage.
Ira is stretching athletically on the deck of the Dolphin Club. She has been a member here for 48 years, since she arrived in San Francisco in 1977 at the age of 21, from Iran, one year before the Islamic Revolution.
'I paddled in the Caspian Sea as a child, I wanted to learn to swim so I came to the city on the bay,' she explains, her feet stretched up above her head against the rickety wooden fence.
'Three months later on New Year's Day 1978, I swam from out there, Alcatraz, back to here. I jumped in and swam, the water was 47 degrees – and no wetsuit, in a leotard!'
Outside the busy ferry terminal for Alcatraz stand a number of ad-hoc food stalls, selling hot dogs, fruit cups and souvenir trinkets to the thousands of visitors to the Rock. I am in a co-working space just opposite so they are a familiar site to us all, South Americans frying onions, chopping fruit − the original gig economy.
A few weeks ago, there was a noisy kerfuffle outside as the vendors suddenly packed up and took off en masse helter skelter down the waterfront Embarcadero, seemingly spooked. Two figures in dark clothes and high-vis jackets came strolling along menacingly.
'Man that sucks, leave them alone,' said a young San Franciscan, Jim, who works with a local sports NGO, shaking his head as he watched.
It was a false alarm but a timely reminder of the precarious nature of life here for some. And it was one of the few comments I have heard here on the evolving national situation. Jim is one of the few younger people to speak openly; 'What can we do?' he shrugs. 'It feels hopeless, I mean, are people out there laughing at us?'
If anything it is the older citizens who can be heard commenting, swimming against the tide. Maybe they have seen it all.
In Washington Square an elderly man in a T-shirt and military veterans hat, stands at a packed shopping trolley, proselytising the picnickers. 'Tell your neighbours, shout it out, watch the stocks, there's a showdown coming with China, in Chinatown, San Francisco.'
In Cafe Trieste, where
Francis Ford Copolla
is said to have written The Godfather screenplay, among the vintage coffee drinkers, a man in a Grateful Dead T-shirt says he is 'just checking the stocks − up 500, S&P up too. He must have done a deal with Zelenskiy'.
He shakes his head and returns to his cappuccino.
A barman talks at night in the quiet.
'The shoe is going to drop soon man, the next few weeks, you can ignore the news all you want but when the shelves start emptying, that's when the shoe drops.'
I bump into Iranian Ira again down at the swimming club, looking out at Alcatraz.
She has swum from it 12 times in her 48 years in the city on the bay, a stretch of water with some of the most treacherous currents, not to mention the odd whale or shark.
What about the latest late night-announced grand plan from Washington, or rather Florida: to reopen the prison on The Rock.
'Oh Trump, him?' she replies.
'It'll never happen, too expensive, no water over there. But I'll tell you, it keeps people's minds busy, that it does'.
The sun is shining, the swimmers are out, the sailboats skim the waves past The Rock and container ships glide by, only half as full as they were a few weeks ago.