Words by Johanna Harlow
It’s a blissful day at Westpoint Harbor in Redwood City. A fleet of boats rest in 416 berths, while curlews and cormorants fly overhead. A sleek crew of rowers glides by, their strokes in sync. A gentle bat ray grazes on mussels attached to the docks.
A model marina, Westpoint Harbor boasts four harbormasters, a fueling station, an expansive guest dock and even a helipad for members who travel by air as well as by sea. It’s been crowned the 2019 North America Large Marina of the Year by Marina Dock Age magazine and was the first in the U.S. to win the Marina Industries Association’s coveted Golden Anchor.
But the man behind the marina is far from done. “That’s where the pool and the pool house will be,” Mark Sanders says as he points out an empty patch of land near the waterfront. Over there, they’ll add fire pits. There, a hotel. His eyes—blue and sparkling like the sea—can picture it as clear as day. His vision might sound far-reaching, but the former naval officer, engineer and tech CEO has already moved heaven and earth to construct this marina as well as the newly opened Hurrica, a breathtaking restaurant perched right beside the docks.
Here’s the epic adventure of how a stubborn dreamer willed the harbor into existence.
Getting Underway
Mark acquired a taste for the nautical life while serving in the U.S. Navy. “It just gets in your blood,” he says of sailing. As an intelligence officer aboard a destroyer, Mark worked in the combat information center. “I spent hours and hours on these beautifully-made machines,” Mark recalls. “And the bottom corner says, ‘Ampex Corporation, Redwood City.’” Born in San Diego, Mark formed an idyllic vision of this far-off city. “I had this image of redwood trees right down to the water,” he chuckles. So when his naval service ended, off to Ampex he went. He worked his way up through the organization until retiring—for the first time.
In 1993, Mark bought 50 acres for the first new marina the San Francisco Bay had seen in decades. It was far from the serene stretch of water you see today. For years, the Leslie Salt Company had been using the site as a bittern pond, to store a byproduct of salt-making.
By the time Mark came into possession of the land, he had to contend with 40 feet of salt sludge and mud. Geotechnical engineers told him that transforming the area into a 26-acre water basin would take 35 years—at least. But Mark wouldn’t put his big dreams on hold. Turning to a Dutch process called wicking, he got it drained in less than a year. Over the next four years, long-reach excavators rolled in to dredge the basin.
Around this time, Mark partnered with Robert John Hoffman of the Aqua Terra Foundation to remove dozens of sunken vessels in the Westpoint Slough (including a 120-foot tugboat) in order to clear the channel.
Saving the entrance of the basin for last, the diggers completed their task during a king tide the day before Christmas. “My best friend and I had our boats in the harbor the next morning,” Mark says. “Our Christmas lights were on the boats’ sails.” The harbor officially opened in 2008.
Stormy Weather
It was not smooth sailing from there.
Not only did Mark have to tackle the terrain, he underwent the decade-long process of obtaining permits for the harbor from a dozen regulatory agencies, often with opposing agendas. The most difficult led to a drawn-out battle with the state’s Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), which claimed nearly 100 allegations of permit violations against the harbor and imposed hefty fines.
Dozens of boating and environmental groups rallied to the harbor’s defense. Even Stanford University’s rowing team got involved. “They pitched in and gave me all the legal advice I needed,” Mark says of Stanford. “They were very supportive.”
The Friends of Westpoint Harbor formed and lobbied legislators, presenting a 5,000-signature petition and hundreds of letters, leading to an audit of BCDC’s enforcement program. Ultimately, a settlement was reached and the commission dropped all allegations and fines against Westpoint Harbor, ending the decade-long dispute in 2018.
While all of this was happening, Mark came out of retirement to head Pinnacle Systems as its CEO. Because “I realized it wasn’t going to be two years, like I thought,” notes Mark wryly of the marina project. After taking the 21-person startup tech company to 1,700 employees, he retired once again to give the harbor his full-time attention.
Hospitable Harbor
Mark’s dreams for the harbor went far beyond creating a floating parking lot. Seeking to grow a community, he put his entrepreneurial skills to work by painting a vision that would bring people on board. “It’s not just a harbor. It’s going to be a society of people who love the water,” Mark insists. “Everything’s going to be first-class!”
That meant intentionality to the details. “Being an engineer, I wanted my own design of docks,” Mark says, explaining that he wasn’t satisfied with the typical square-cornered style. “The scariest thing for a boater is coming into their own slip. That corner’s sticking out—solid concrete—your boat hits it …” Not good. So Mark reached out to 30 companies about making custom ones with rounded edges and special fendering. Bellingham Marine said yes. The custom design was such a hit, “people started calling them and saying, ‘We want Westpoint Harbor docks!’”
This hospitable harbor appealed to a variety of tenants and soon the marina filled with yachts and sailboats, kayaks and rowing racing shells. “We’ve got carpenters and lawyers and executives and maintenance gardeners,” Mark says. “It’s the whole gamut.”
Tina White, Westpoint’s senior harbormaster, is leading the effort. “She’s basically running the show here,” Mark says. “She said, ‘I’m going to make this the friendliest harbor in the world!’” That means an ample, 1,000-foot-long guest dock, an area that can be limited at many harbors, and several complimentary “party barges” (floating platforms with barbecues). “It needs to be better than your home,” Mark insists of the marina.
On a sunny day, you might spot one of the more inventive types testing out wacky aquatic toys on the water. Recently, Mark witnessed a member casually cruising by on a wicker couch, its bulk lifted several feet out of the water by a hydrofoil.
Westpoint also reserved 10% of the slips for “liveaboards.” “It adds a lot of life on the docks,” Mark says. “There’s security every 10th boat or so!” With someone always around, suspicious activity gets reported almost immediately.
Also keeping the marina lively are rowing and youth sailing events, boat shows, movie nights and holiday boat decorating contests. Annually, it hosts the swimming portion of the Stanford University’s “Treeathalon” and co-hosts the Westpoint Regatta. There’s also Radio Controlled (RC) Laser Racing with tiny toy boats making hairpin turns around beer-can markers. Many of these events are hosted by the on-site yacht club, The Club at Westpoint—which Mark also helped co-found.
Dinner on the Docks
Mark realized another part of his master plan this year: building a waterfront restaurant with a spacious second floor to house the yacht club. “I’ve been kissing so many frogs for years, trying to find the perfect person to build a restaurant here because I knew it’s got to be over the top,” Mark says.
Finally, he found the right folks for the job. Chef Parke Ulrich and restaurateur MeeSun Boice had already taken San Francisco’s dining scene by storm with Mersea, EPIC Steak and Waterbar. “They were keen on it!” says Mark, who had previously raced with Parke aboard his yacht, the Hurrica V.
Parke and MeeSun named the restaurant Hurrica after Mark’s boat, a 1920s wooden sailing yacht that cameoed in The Great Gatsby movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
THE HISTORY OF THE HURRICA V This 1924 wooden sailing yacht has seen some things. After being requisitioned by the Australian Navy as a patrol vessel during World War II, it was outfitted with machine guns, armed with depth charges and equipped with a powerful Perkins diesel engine. It was later restored and refitted for civilian use. Its many owners used it for leisure sailing, entertaining and the liveaboard life. It’s run aground, hit a reef, and weathered a cyclone. It even appeared in The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio. This year, Hurrica V turned 100.
The restaurant is full of nautical details, with seahorse door handles, copper wire fish that seem to swim about the ceiling and huge sliding doors to let in the Bay breeze. Redwood tables pay tribute to the city’s namesake and intricate woodwork on the ceiling resembles the butterfly hatches on Mark’s boat. “It’s just a big Hurrica!” Mark grins.
But the real showstopper? A 1,200-gallon aquarium with more than 100 pulsing moon jellyfish that separates the dining room from the bar. It’s the largest privately-owned jellyfish tank in North America.
“I make the restaurant give me their shells. It’s called cultch,” Mark says as he hikes the stairs from the dining room to The Club at Westpoint’s lounge. “Oysters want to adhere to old shells. So we’re spreading the shells on the rocks around here to promote more oysters.” He explains that back in the days of industrial salt production, the species had died out. But now, “it’s so clean in the harbor, the native oysters have come back.” It’s a lifegiving cycle, since these mollusks can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day, a sort of natural purification system.
Stepping out onto the yacht club’s balcony, Mark looks contentedly out at the forest of masts bobbing in the harbor. “There’s nothing like it.”