San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bracing bay swims are a tradition
It’s no secret that the past few years have been tough on San Francisco institutions — everything from the downtown shopping district to Anchor Steam Beer.
But one venerable outfit has not only survived the changes that have rocked the city, it has prospered. The South End Rowing Club, a group of swimmers, small boat rowers and handball players, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Together with the somewhat newer Dolphin Club next door, the South End has experienced a boom in swimming and boating on the bay.
The South End’s membership has more than tripled in the last few years, as Bay Area residents rediscovered the pleasures of the chilly waters of San Francisco Bay. The South End took in 500 new members in 2023, according to club President Fran Hegeler.
Not bad for an organization that began when a handful of rowing enthusiasts — six Irishmen, according to club lore — organized the South End Boat Club in Jimmy Farrell’s Saloon near Third and Berry streets on May 5, 1873.
Every San Franciscan knew where that location was — down by the hay wharf near the Long Bridge that crossed Mission Bay, and the south end of the waterfront. Now it’s near Oracle Park and Chase Center, different sporting locations.
Rowing on the bay was booming in those longago days, and there were a number of rowing clubs around the bay and even in Sacramento. The Dolphin Swimming and
Boating Club was founded four years later, in 1877. The South End and the Dolphin are the only two that have survived.
Both have gone through name changes, reorganizations, new locations, bitter disputes, bad times and good. Both moved a number of times and ended up on cityowned land at the Aquatic Park cove on the northern waterfront.
It’s been a long and difficult journey. The key to survival for 150 years: “Persistence,” said Hegeler, the South End’s president. “It’s a miracle, a small miracle, that the club exists. It is a labor of love.”
Persistence and love are two words that fit those who admire swimming and rowing on the San Francisco Bay. It’s an acquired taste, like singlemalt Scotch.
The true believers — the swimmers and rowers — begin their day with a brisk swim or row in the morning. For the rowers, the morning is usually calm. The wind comes up in the afternoon, tough on human-powered rowboats.
It takes persistence to get up before dawn for a morning swim. You have come down to the shore and change. Then: “You stand at the edge of the water,” Hegeler told me. “It’s cold and it’s dark,
“It’s a miracle, a small miracle, that the club exists. It is a labor of love.”
Fran Hegeler,
South End Rowing Club’s president
and you think: ‘Why am I doing this? ’ You ask this every time.”
The water temperature the other morning was 53.6 degrees. She swam from the South End to Fort Mason, just over a mile.
There are rewards, despite the cold. “It’s exhilarating,” she said. “It’s unlike anything else.”
You feel alive.
“You are in the moment,” she said.
The moment Hegeler particularly enjoys is a swim that includes a winter sunrise. “The sky turns pink, the water turns soft pink,” Hegeler said. She sees the rising sun light up the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s daybreak on the water. “It’s sublime for me.”
Open water swimming is very different from swimming in a pool. “It’s thrilling,” Hegeler said. “The currents are very strong. It’s living water, and there are a lot of critters in there, fish, other things. The water is not clear so you can’t see. One day I felt something huge swim under me. I’m pretty sure it was a seal.”
Another South End swimmer, Roberta Guise, said the water feels different every day.
“Some days the water feels like silk or is satiny,” she said. “It’s always
changing. You never know what you are going to get.”
Though many openwater swimmers have set records, Guise is not one of them. “I’m one of the slowskis,” she said. But Guise is no slouch: She’s done the Alcatraz swim — from the island to Aquatic Park — six times and has swum the Golden Gate a couple of times.
She discovered the South End after swimming in an Olympic-size pool on Treasure Island. Not interesting enough. So she tried swimming in the bay.
She found something else at the South End: She met a swimmer named John Rohosky on the bay’s edge and had a watery romance. They married in 2000.
You don’t have to be a member to use the clubs: The Dolphin Club is open to the public Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the South End on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. There is a $10 fee.