Raccoon Strait

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Raccoon Strait is a waterway of the San Francisco Bay between Angel Island and mainland Marin County, California.^[1]

This story of the origin of the name of the body of water is apocryphal and legend. No authority for the story is known.

The Spanish, who were 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, and there is a species of shark that lives there that is unique and does not appear anywhere else in the world. They are supposed to be small, gray, with black spots, but I have never seen one, and I never have heard anyone say that they have, either, but the local Steinhart Aquarium has a couple of them.

At that time, in the early 1800s, charts of unexplored areas like the west coast of America were hard to come by and very sought after, especially by ship captains before engines, who were at the mercy of wind, waves and current to keep them off the land. So a British ship and a French ship were sailing up and down the coast, shooting at each other whenever they found each other, and the French ship took some cannon shots near the waterline, and disappeared into the fog at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, in search of a place to run aground and make repairs. The British captured the French ship and took the French charts. The Spanish who controlled the area had named the water between the island and the land the Straits of Tiburon, and the little town on the north shore Tiburon, and it still has that name today. So the French had translated that. Tiburon is the Spanish word for shark, so the French chart shows the town of Requin, the French word for shark, and the Straits of Requin.^{[citation needed]}