How shallow is the SF bay?

The shoreline is highly irregular and is bordered by tidal marshes. Cliff erosion is slight, and there are few sandy or pebbly beaches. Most of the Bay is shallow, being less than 18 feet deep. Eighty-five percent of the Bay is less than 30 feet deep.



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Its deepest point is 360 feet at the Golden Gate. Every year, more than 67 million tons of cargo pass through the Golden Gate. The Bay also supports commercial bait shrimp, herring and Dungeness crab fisheries.

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The bay is actually only as deep as a swimming pool. Heck, between Hayward and San Mateo to San Jose it averages 12 to 36 inches. So much for that bridge! With that said though, the water surrounding Alcatraz is on the deeper end of the scale, but still, it's just an average depth of 43 feet.

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Underneath the Golden Gate Bridge lies the wreck of the City of Chester, a steamboat that sank on August 22, 1890 at 10 a.m. The boat was impaled on the steamer Oceanic, arriving from Asia, and sunk in six minutes.

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Although there is no known record of an attack on humans by a white shark inside the bay, great white sharks have been observed inside the Bay on several occasions.

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Constructed in 57 sections, and reposing on the bay floor as deep as 135 feet beneath the surface, the remarkable $180 million structure took six years of toil and seismic studies to design, and less than three years to contract.

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Since it opened on May 27, 1937, there have been an estimated 1,600 deaths in which the body was recovered, and many more unconfirmed.

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