Just north of San Francisco in Marin County is Richardson Bay and the city of Sausalito. This location is where the book takes place, with stories and life experiences by a community of people called anchor-outs.

They live in the bay on boats not sanctioned by any government agency so the city and harbor master take to removing the boats. When someone isn’t living in one every day, the boat is impounded then destroyed. Although some called the people unhoused before they lost their boat, now they really are homeless.

This is a collection of stories but lacks solutions or other commentary than just stating what this community has experienced over the past ten years or so.

People have been living in boats for a long time, over a hundred years, since the time of the great earthquake in San Francisco in 1906. Some of the current community members have been living on their boats for decades. This is not a new community. Except the number of boats expanded by nearly doubled when the financial crisis hit.

Marin County is a wealthy community and some residents complained about their view. There were complaints about the anchor-outs polluting the waters, although no ecological testing proved this was an issue.

The author spent nearly ten years visiting these people, hearing their stories and at times living with them. When nearly all of the boats had been impounded and torn up a tent city erupted. Kloc slept in the tents for a few days as well, this being around the time of the pandemic.
Kloc and some of the anchor-outs attend city council meetings. It becomes very eye-opening when you realize a city, or other government agency is willing to spend thousands of dollars, in this case close to half a million dollars, on legal fees to evict and otherwise harass these unhoused individuals. None of this money is spent on providing any relief for these people.

Something missing from this book is more information on the house boats that are legally in the bay. They are mentioned very briefly but not deeply enough to provide context. How is it that there is a community of people living on boats in the bay accepted and others are not. It may just boil down to money, as usual, but this part of the story is lacking.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much of a conclusion to the book either. No solutions or options were provided, it really is just a collection of stories about some of the people’s lives who lived in the bay in unusual living conditions.

Book rating: 3.75 stars

Interesting Expose Of A Particular Community, Suffers From Problems Typical Of Its Form. As an almost anthropological examination of a particular culture that arose over decades in a very specific region of California - the roughly six square mile region known as Richardson's Bay, an offshoot of San Francisco Bay - this text is a pirate's treasure trove. Specifically, as it examines the "unhoused" people who have claimed homes among the derelict and otherwise vessels floating in the bay, the so-called "anchor-outs", it truly does a phenomenal job detailing the history of how the culture arose, a lot of the features of the specific culture, and even a lot of both the key historical figures of it and at least some of its living practitioners.

As a *journalistic* piece... it may fly in today's "lived experience" version of "journalism", where objectivity and distance from subject are defenestrated in favor of being "up close" and "real"... but it still would have been enhanced by being a more old school journalistic type text, at least to my mind.

Instead what we get here is almost an action, thriller, and memoir mashup wherein the author inserts his own views into the text, but the story itself becomes one of a community's fight for its right to survive and the dastardly developers and government officials seeking to eradicate it from history once and for all.

Which for a narrative, works well. For what is supposed to be a nonfiction work... maybe doesn't work as well.

The star deduction comes in from the dearth of bibliography, which is likely due to not much written work existing about this particular group or its history, but still, there is quite a bit here that *could* have been documented more thoroughly, if even detailing newspaper or other media reports about various events over the years.

Very much recommended.

Joe Kloc was able to weave a strong case for this, it was realistic and I really felt for the personal element to this book. It had that realistic element that I was looking for from this type of book. It was written well and felt like I was dealing with a personal account.

This book was a good read but had way too much "language" that would not be appropriate for my library. I get that it's nonfiction and that is how they communicated but just not a good fit.

What an interesting true story! Lost at Sea is based on a subject that I knew nothing about. The rules for these boats and the communities contained within them was interesting and kept me reading. If you're craving non-fiction, Lost at Sea is perfect.