Jean Michel sat at the helm of his 47-foot sailboat, Aweigh, and gestured toward the calm blue waters of Richardson Bay off the Sausalito shore as he rhapsodized about life as the master of his domain.

For more than two decades, the nomadic native Frenchman has lived alone on an 83-year-old wreck he bought from a fisherman for pocket change and restored, only to later learn it had been designed by famed sailboat architect Olin Stephens.

Michel is part of a group of hearty sea salts known as “anchor-outs” whose futures are in question as Sausalito embarks on its latest peregrination in a half-century effort to rein in boating scofflaws, starting with an ill-fated attempt in the 1970s to get rid of hippie houseboats.

Michel and about 100 of his briny brethren live free from the tethers of society — and, in many cases, free of charge — on as many as 177 boats anchored illegally in the waters that lap against the picturesque Marin County city.

“When you are at sea, you can be whatever you want to be,” said Michel, 57, his long gray-blond hair blowing gently in the breeze coming in from the Golden Gate. “You are connected to the energy of the universe, unconstrained by society.”

That freestyle life has become a growing civic concern in Sausalito, where anchor-outs have been blamed for an uptick in drug use and crime, the clogging of the harbor with derelict vessels, damage to eel grass from dragging keels and the dumping of sewage.

The debate over the boats escalated last month when the City Council passed rules limiting the time a vessel can remain in city waters to 72 hours before it can be impounded. The rules, effective May 18, allow beached vessels to be removed, along with those carrying people deemed by law enforcement to be a danger to themselves or others.

Whether a big clampdown could follow is a matter of perspective. After all, Sausalito has for decades barred sailors from setting their anchors for more than 10 hours without a permit from the police chief. But that ordinance has rarely been enforced.

Councilwoman Jill Hoffman said the new law is not an attempt to clear the anchor-outs but to get rid of abandoned boats, which make up about 40 percent of the vessels anchored in city waters. As many as 70 decrepit crafts are removed from Richardson Bay every year.

“It’s an environmental disaster,” Hoffman said. “I don’t think anybody in Sausalito has animosity toward the anchor-outs, but we would like to have better management of our waterfront.”

Sausalito needs a clear set of local rules, Hoffman said, in part because the city is thinking about severing ties with the Richardson’s Bay Regional Agency, which regulates county waters using fees collected from Sausalito, Mill Valley, Tiburon and Belvedere.

What could be seen as a simple fight over nautical rights is a deeper dilemma here because the crusty sailors, eccentric artists and roustabouts who live on the boats bring a certain diversity and distinction to swanky Sausalito. The wharf-rat element may not be appreciated in the hillside mansions and waterfront restaurants, but many residents would like to preserve it.

Yet the problems have been getting worse, said Lt. William Fraass of the Sausalito Police Department.

“While there have been people living on the waterfront of Sausalito since the Gold Rush, we’ve noticed within the last six years more and more vessels and more boats coming into Sausalito waters,” Fraass said.

Back to Gallery As more ‘anchor-outs’ live on SF Bay, tension mounts... 11 1 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 2 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 3 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 4 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 5 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 6 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 7 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 8 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 9 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 10 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 11 of 11 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle





















He said the department had fielded complaints “from a wide cross section of the community” about “crime, theft, drunkenness, trash, garbage, navigational hazards, boats being used as trash, boats being abandoned, and boats dragging anchor during storms and getting beached.”

According to Fraass, the number of boats anchored illegally in Richardson Bay has nearly tripled, from an average of about 90 in the early 2000s to as many as 240 last year. While the figures include vessels floating off Mill Valley, Tiburon and Belvedere, he said the majority of illegal parkers are in Sausalito.

The aberrant bunch includes artists, musicians, ex-convicts, professors, fishermen, disabled people and drifters who live on yachts, aging sloops and junky schooners, some of which are seaworthy.

They use generators, solar and wind power to charge their batteries and board dinghies and skiffs to get to shore, where they stock up on supplies and eat at the local coffee shop. Many pay to have their bathroom holding tanks pumped, and some of those who can’t afford the fee use a free mobile sewer service funded by the Richardson’s Bay Regional Agency.

One of the more unique anchor-outs is Liberty Darling, a bubbly 11-year-old who steers a dinghy to shore to get to school at Willow Creek Academy and, when she’s bored, climbs the rope ladder to the top of the mast and waves to passersby.

“I love it here,” said Liberty, who lives on a sailboat with Greg Baker, the 78-year-old former tug and fireboat operator who is raising her. “It’s really quiet and pretty.”

Some of the anchor-outs would prefer to live in a real home, if they could afford it. What’s annoying, they say, is that nobody seems to get as charged up about the “sneak-aboards” who live full-time in fancy cruisers moored in Sausalito marinas, where owners are not supposed to sleep more than three nights a week.

City and community leaders have discussed building a mooring field for the anchor-outs where they could be better managed. There has also been talk of providing housing and services, but most proposals to force their removal have been met with anger.

“The people who live here have nowhere else to go,” said Darcy Chatoian, 53, who moved onto a 27-foot boat four years ago after a car accident left her disabled. “I can understand cleaning up the meth heads, but there are good people here. You can’t throw them out.”

Another of the anchor-outs, a 68-year-old resident of a 40-foot cutter who asked to be identified by the nom de plume Christian Jones, said authorities are going after the boaters now that they’ve tamed the houseboat community, a one-time bastion of revolutionary thought now dominated by homeowners’ associations and “people who get pedicures.”

In fact, the current brouhaha has its roots in waterfront high jinks that started after World War II when floating barges and ferries were recommissioned by beatniks, bohemians and, finally, hippies, who created a counterculture free-for-all.

The houseboat party scene got wild enough in the 1970s that the Sausalito City Council and the Marin County Board of Supervisors sought to crack down, prompting a battle memorialized as the “Houseboat Wars.” The trouble raged for the better part of a decade and featured fighting, sabotage, the bulldozing of houseboats and police raids.

The houseboaters eventually formed the low-income Gates and Galilee communities, accepting the condition that the former party sites comply with city regulations. Years later, the renewed focus on anchor-outs has been driven to a large extent by environmental worries.

“The primary concern is the eel grass,” said Barbara Salzman, the board president for the Marin Audubon Society, referring to the underwater plant on which herring lay their eggs, providing food for water birds. “They drop their anchors and the tides make the boats go in circles and you can see the damage to the eel grass.”

Moored vessels have been shown in aerial photos to create “crop circles” in the eel grass as they swing around. However, a study by the San Francisco Bay Subtidal Habitat Goals Project showed eel grass coverage in Richardson Bay increased from 13 acres in 1987 to 670 acres in 2009.

Critics have also accused the boat people of dumping sewage in the bay. But county testing has shown no significant contamination in the anchor-out areas.

“The real problem is that this city has no garbage service, water, bathrooms or showers (for boaters), so the anchor-outs look scruffy and unwashed,” said Chad Carvey, 53, who pays $150 a month for the mooring ball that secures the sailboat he lives on with his wife, Carolyn. “If the city could take the noose from around our necks and meet us halfway by providing some services it would be huge.”

Michel, who adopted the live-aboard life in Sausalito after 12 years climbing the corporate ladder at Club Med, said he might sail to Mexico or French Polynesia one of these days if he gets around to making some needed fixes to his boat. Still, he said, he hopes to be able to return, always, to his life drifting along the Sausalito waterfront.

“It’s a way of life, not a lifestyle,” Michel said, lighting a pipe of tobacco in his cluttered yacht cabin as he brewed yerba mate tea. “When I die, I want to be burned the Viking way, on my boat.”

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite