The Raccoon Strait is a

waterway A waterway is any navigable body of water. Broad distinctions are useful to avoid ambiguity, and disambiguation will be of varying importance depending on the nuance of the equivalent word in other languages. A first distinction is necessary b ...

of the San Francisco Bay between Angel Island and the

Tiburon Peninsula The Tiburon Peninsula (french: Péninsule de Tiburon), or The Xaragua Peninsula, simply "the Tiburon" (''le Tiburon''), is a region of Haiti encompassing most of Haiti's southern coast. It starts roughly at the southernmost point of the Haiti-D ...

, mainland Marin County, California, United States. During the ice ages, when sea levels were considerably lower and San Francisco Bay was a grassy valley, the combined Sacramento-San Joaquin river flowed through what is now Raccoon Strait before flowing through the canyon at the Golden Gate.

History

From Angel Island California State Park in San Francisco Bay. Ref. California State Parks Angel Island. In 1814, the British 26-gun sloop of war, , was damaged off the coast of Oregon, but stayed afloat to reach San Francisco Bay. From March 13 to 19th, the ship was repaired on the beach at Ayala Cove on the Northern portion of Angel Island, at the location of the present day ferry boat dock. This event gave the name to the deep-water channel between Tiburon and Angel Island. It is unclear whether the ship was engaged in the War of 1812 or, more likely, protecting British and Canadian fur traders.

Geography and Natural history

The Spanish, the first European power to control the area, established the village of Tiburon on the north side of the body of water and showed the straits on their charts as the Straits of Tiburon. Tiburon is the Spanish word for

shark Sharks are a group of elasmobranch fish characterized by a cartilaginous skeleton, five to seven gill slits on the sides of the head, and pectoral fins that are not fused to the head. Modern sharks are classified within the clade Selachi ...

, named for the subspecies of

leopard shark The leopard shark (''Triakis semifasciata'') is a species of houndshark, in the family Triakidae. It is found along the Pacific coast of North America, from the U.S. state of Oregon to Mazatlán in Mexico. Typically measuring 1.2–1.5 m (3.9� ...

native to San Francisco Bay. The mainland of the Tiburon Peninsula is dominated by Ring Mountain, which is endowed with considerable archaeological traces of the early Native Americans, who settled the local area. Ring Mountain is also replete with numerous species of native

wildflower A wildflower (or wild flower) is a flower that grows in the wild, meaning it was not intentionally seeded or planted. The term implies that the plant probably is neither a hybrid nor a selected cultivar that is in any way different from the ...

s. The mainland point of closest distance to the strait is Point Tiburon, off which the water depth is approximately 15 fathoms.Army. Corps of Engineers. 1904

References

* C. Michael Hogan. 2008
''Ring Mountain'', The Megalithic Portal, ed. A. Burnham
* U.S. Army. Corps of Engineers. 1904. ''Report of the Chief of Engineers U.S. Army'', Published by U.S. Govt. Print. Office, Washington, D.C.

Line notes

Bodies of water of Marin County, California Landforms of the San Francisco Bay Area San Francisco Bay Straits of California {{MarinCountyCA-geo-stub