James Wooldridge Visual Storytelling

Kristina Weber cuddles her dogs as she falls asleep. She has lived on a boat on Richardson Bay since October, 2018, off the Sausalito, California shoreline. As housing prices continue to skyrocket in the Bay Area, some people turn to a community referred to as "anchor outs" on Richardson Bay off of the Sausalito shoreline. They are part of a long tradition of sea dwellers who anchor their boats in the bay. Kristina had dreamed of living on a boat ever since she was a little girl, drawing boat designs and maps. So when she saw a sailboat for sale last year on Craigslist, she decided to go for it.

Kristina tries to get her dogs Poseidon, named after the god of the sea, and Baxter, named after the dog in the movie Anchorman, into the cabin of her boat so she can make a trip to shore. Her dogs were a big reason she decided to buy her boat. She couldn't find an apartment in the Bay Area that allowed pets. At first they had a difficult time adjusting to life on the water, but they came around. She takes them to shore at least once a day. "My dogs are everything, really," she said. "They're my kids. They’re my family. They’re my support group."

Kristina works as a gardener and landscaper at properties in Sausalito. Before she lived on the water, she was commuting an hour and a half to work. "It was impossible for me to do my job and commute and have any kind of life whatsoever," she said. Now, her commute involves rowing to shore and walking up the Sausalito hillside. Houses on the hillside overlooking the bay sell for millions of dollars. Some of Kristina's clients don't know she lives on the water. "I don't know what their impression is of anchor outs," she said. "There's a lot of people in the community that have a preconceived idea or concept of what people are like out there."

Kristina works on repairing the siding on a wall in her boat. She has been repairing the structure for months after a fire that ate away at the cabin just three days after she moved in. "I didn’t really have many options at the time," she said. "I had just moved out of my place, and it wasn’t like I could back step on any of that." She continued to live on her boat through the winter while repairing it, all the while making trips to shore for her dogs, work, groceries, laundry, and more. She quickly found that living on a boat is hard work. "You can’t just hop in a car and go to the convenient store," she said. "You have to hop in your boat. Nothing is convenient."

As her friend tows her row boat to shore, Kristina talks to John Burke about finishing a landscaping job she hired him to do. "Trying to be reliable for all my clients has been a challenge," she said. When the weather is bad, anchor outs who don't have motor boats can't make it to shore in the choppy water. "The weather changes on a dime. You’re constantly at the mercy of the elements."

After a long day, Kristina talks on the phone with her friend as she sits next to a bouquet of flowers she and another friend picked. She spend much of the day repairing her living room, which was damaged in the fire. "Everybody kept telling me I couldn’t do it," she said. "I didn’t like being told I couldn’t do something. I just didn't’ accept that reality that it wasn’t possible without trying. Some people have this very throwaway attitude in life in general. I’ve always liked taking old things and bringing them back to their original beauty."

Kristina's friends Pete Glaser, left, and Darrell Anderson visit her living room. She often has visitors over to socialize. Despite that most anchor outs don't feel welcomed by the wider Sausalito community, the people on the water know each other and look out for each other.

While doing a chore on the deck of her boat, Kristina takes a breath in the dusk light. When it's not foggy, she can see the San Francisco skyline shining in the distance. "The view on a clear night makes it all worth it being out there," she said.