SAN FRANCISCO’S GLOW-IN-THE-DARK ISLANDS
Jim Gray was an experienced sailor. On the morning of January 28, 2007, the respected computer scientist set out on his sailboat Tenacious from a marina on San Francisco Bay to scatter his mother’s ashes along the Farallon Islands, around 30 miles from the city. The wind and water seemed auspicious as Gray sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and made his way out to sea. At 10:30 A.M., as he approached a channel marker 15 miles out, he phoned his wife to say things were going well. At 11:50 his cell phone synced one last time with his email server. Then Gray and his boat vanished. There was no mayday call, and his emergency radio beacon was silent.
Despite a search-and-rescue mission that covered 130,000 square miles of ocean, no trace of Gray was ever found. In 2012 he was officially declared dead. Some familiar with the Farallon Islands believe they claimed yet another victim.
Long before the first Europeans laid eyes on the Farallons, Native Americans called them the “Islands of the Dead.” They believed that the spirits of those who had died resided there, and they avoided the islands for that reason—and because of the sheer difficulty of making the voyage. A member of a 1603 Spanish expedition gave the islands their name, writing of seeing “seven farallones close together,” farallon being the Spanish word for cliff. Through the centuries the islands have been exploited by seal hunters and egg traders, who at one time were selling as many as 500,000 seabird eggs a month to mainland buyers. In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt created the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to the largest seabird nesting colony in America south of Alaska. Unfortunately, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had used the islands as a dumping ground for radioactive waste between 1946 and 1970, depositing almost 50,000 steel drums of hazardous material there. In addition, the U.S. Navy scuttled the hull of the USS Independence, which had been used in nuclear testing and was loaded with radioactive waste before she was sunk. The EPA believes that removing the waste would create an even greater hazard than currently exists, and the Farallon Islands remain closed
to the public.