We found your sighting interesting because we also had a sighting in May, 2006 and were able to take over 3 minutes of video of a juvenile sea serpent attacking and being attacked by a group of seagulls. We have only mentioned this sighting and video to a few people so the fact you mentioned that your husband saw one of the animals eat a pelican and be attacked by several pelicans is interesting to us.

Also, On February 8, 2009 we had another sighting of one of the animals swimming eastward near the southeastern tip of Angel Island. We were able to take over seven minutes of video of the animal as it swam at the surface.

Bill and Bob C.

So, I was shocked to see it in our own back yard. Of course when I told my husband, he didn’t believe me until he saw it himself while driving about a week later. The area is rife with birds — pelicans, seagulls, cranes and lots of little birds. It’s a popular area with wind surfers, too. We last saw it in August 2007. My husband saw it eat a pelican sitting in the water and those birds are huge. As I was driving and trying to watch the road, I didn’t see it happen, but immediately after we both witnessed a bunch of pelicans wildly dive-bombing the serpent in the water as if on the attack. I remember it clearly as I almost crashed the car watching all the commotion. It was the most amazing thing I ever saw– these pelicans fighting so hard for something. We haven’t seen the serpent since. Perhaps the pelicans injured it…

I was surprised to later learn of the twin brothers who’ve been watching and recording this serpent in the San Francisco Bay area near the Golden Gate Bridge for some time. I’m sorry to say that I doubted them when I saw them on television (as I hadn’t seen it myself) but now I’m convinced its the same creature or species. I guess you have to see it to believe it.

While we haven’t had the fortune to see it since that time, we continue to keep an eye out every time we drive home.

By now everyone who is connected by radio, tv, internet or newspaper is aware that James Gray of Microsoft has just disappeared from the face of the earth while expertly sailing his 40ft sailboat on a day cruise under nearly perfect condition, through very well known waters, to the Farallon Islands. Speculation as to his whereabouts is wide-open and even the most serious and likely suggestions underscore just how slight slight is the ability of our human pereceptions to be able to actually see what’s going-on around us. The idea that there can’t be something previously unknown on the order of a large animal living out in waters all around us because if it were there we’d have seen it and photographed it…well, that greatly overestimates our powers of observation, not to mention our ability to photograph stuff.

Another news item currently getting some chatter in the Bay Area is the recent report that as many as several dozen Orcas have migrated from the Pacific Northwest and are currently cruising the coastal areas just outside the Bay. One speculation is that they’ve keyed-in on the up-swing in salmon populations along the northern and central Californian coasts, since it’s believe that these are salmon eating populations of orca (in contrast to the transient populations which are found in association with predation on large marine mammals), though I haven’t read if there’d been any positive ID by cross checking this population’s distinctive dorsal profile and coloration with known populations, nor have I heard if DNA had been collected and whether it had been compared to known population characteristics.

I don’t know if anyone else has made the connection but there have been verified modern reports of Orca and other whales actually sinking boats of the size reported to be sailed by Mr Gray of Microsoft (an encounter with a wooden boat and a humpback in Alaskan waters years ago, and an trans-pacific class modern sailboat off the coast of South America rammed and sunk by an Orca), though admittedly it’s more likely that Mr Gray has had a catastrophic encounter with another ship or partially submerged log. Interestingly, the SF Chronicle’s article this morning also noted that the last time Orcas were seen INSIDE the bay(reportedly) was in the 50s.

The Bay and the not-too-distant ocean environment are an interesting piece of geography in both human and geologic/oceanographic senses, and the kinds of stimuli and kinds of scale to which our human senses are evolutionarily geared are simply in-adequate to appreciate what it is we have outside our known space.

I don’t necessarily have to believe that colonies of briney cryptids inhabit the bay in order to be open and even supporting of ideas that require a big unknown animal or population of animals to pay us a visit from out of the largely unknown watery realm every once in a while and still believe that we could miss it entirely or discover that our pathetic little camera caught only a fuzzy indecipherable blip even though my own eyes and my mind, working in colusion told me it was a sea-serpent, and it is hard to argue with a racing-skull filled with rowers…especially if they were as articulate and enthusiastic as the south-side rowers I’ve known.

Not an appropriate comparison to someone piloting a boat. Look at it this way: if a sea serpent were on the road itself as you drove to work, you’d notice it.

On one hand, I’ve never seen the video. (Might this be a good time to suggest that the Clark brothers put it up on the web?) On the other hand, you’ve never stood on the shoreline of the St. Francis and Golden Gate Yacht Clubs (not just one small boat harbor, but two) and seen all the boats go by. The closest of these sightings, in which the creature actually struck the rocks near shore, was about one hundred to three hundred feet from several hundred anchored yachts, two fancy yacht club buildings (where someone is always hanging out) and was observed from a parking lot. To leave the yacht club harbors and travel west you would have to pass right through the alleged sea serpent hangout. Can you imagine Bigfoot hanging out around a toll gate of a parking lot and nobody seeing him?

Let’s put it this way. I’ve been interested in this stuff all my life. I would be thrilled if I could take a five minute drive (the time it would take me to drive to the location from where I’m typing this) to the scenes of the sighting and stake the place out. I would buy the gear. I would spend the time. (I need another hobby.) But I won’t. Because I honestly think, based on my own experience, that there’s nothing there. I’ve already done all the watching I think that place deserves. (Hours and hours of watching the water in the exact spot where I should apparently been looking for a sea serpent, except I was looking for striped bass or a halibut.)

I wish the Clark brothers the best of luck, but for now, I won’t be joining them.

I don’t buy the arguments that there are fishermen and all sorts of people on the water and no one has ever seen the likes of that before–people miss things all the time–it is a fallacy that people as a whole are observant and aware of their surroundings. I drive to and from work every day and the amount of times that I actually look up in the sky or pay attention to the water in the river as I go over the bridge are minimal…there could be all kinds of things popping up out of said river and I would never see it because I’m concentrating on the road…my point, people are not as observant as we like to think. If they were, the Clarks would not have been the few to have witnessed and filmed what they did (I am guessing someone else might have witnessed it, but either tossed it off, or did not want to publicize it). Besides, according to the Clarks, they have witnessed this “something” before, and a number of times.

Taken as a whole, I am not sure what is pictured in the video…it is an odd moving, strange business altogether, and I am not saying it couldn’t be “normal” type things, but from what is in the video, you can’t say definitively that it is birds or a net, or another mundane explanation either.

The area deserves more watching and studying with better gear.