23 Dec The Golden Rule Connects the Dots in San Francisco Bay Voyage

The Golden Rule anti-nuclear sailboat, a national project of Veterans For Peace, spent most of August sailing around San Francisco Bay, visiting multiple cities, holding a wide variety of events, and taking lots of happy people out sailing on the Bay.
The 34-foot wooden ketch, which famously attempted to stop U.S. nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands in 1958, arrived to Pier 39 on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf on August 5, 2025, where it was greeted by members from VFP Chapters 69 (San Francisco) and 71 (Sonoma County), as well as local television and radio reporters, and a Japanese wire service.

The Golden Rule sailed to multiple cities around the Bay, including Alameda, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, San Mateo, and back again to San Francisco. At each stop, the iconic peace boat and its crew were welcomed warmly and enthusiastically.

Event highlights included the Oakland theater screening of a new film, Golden Rule: The Journey for Peace, produced by Nolan Anderson, a member of the crew that sailed the boat from Honolulu to San Francisco in 2022. The 34-minute film was very well received, and was featured at several other events around the bay.

Golden Rule Project Manager Michelle Marsonette did a terrific job coordinating the busy schedule and spoke at many events, as did project chair Gerry Condon. Former project manager Helen Jaccard spoke at the annual Hiroshima/Nagasaki commemoration outside Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, the nuclear weapons research facility co-founded by Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb.”

In Richmond, the Golden Rule was ushered into the harbor by the Rich City Rays kayaktivists, who are protesting the genocide in Gaza

Project Manager Michelle Marsonette shows off proclamation received from the Mayor of Richmond.

The crew was invited to attend a meeting of the Richmond City Council, where the Mayor Eduardo Martinez presented them with a proclamation honoring their mission to abolish nuclear weapons. The mayor and his wife then sailed on the Golden Rule with a flotilla of activists expressing their opposition to President Trump’s stated plan to turn Alcatraz island—now a national park and a sacred Indigenous site—into an immigrant detention center. They also sailed past the Chevron refinery, which has a long history of polluting Richmond’s environment, and supplies oil to Israel, fueling its genocide in Gaza. The focus on Alcatraz and Chevron that day is just one example of the intersectional nature of the Golden Rule’s visit to San Francisco Bay.

Activists working to save temporary protected status (TPS) for immigrants

Captain Steve Buck and crew took a lot of activist groups out sailing, including Code Pink, Sonoma County Veterans For Peace, the NorCal TPS Coalition (an immigrant rights organization), the Task Force on the Americas (a Latin America solidarity group), the Cal Sailing Club, the People’s Arms Embargo (organizing to stop U.S. weapons shipments to Israel), and the Comfort Women’s Justice Coalition, which advocates on behalf of the thousands of Chinese and Korean women whom Japan forced into sex slavery during World War II.

In San Francisco, Golden Rule crewmembers were greeted with a Chinese Lion Dance and the event was given prominent coverage in Chinese-language TV, radio and newspapers.

Another unique event and solidarity sail brought attention to the alarming increase in whale deaths in San Francisco Bay and called for freighter ships to slow down.

San Francisco Veterans For Peace hosted a well-attended farewell event on August 27 at the Veterans War Memorial Building in San Francisco’s Civic Center. Representatives of many of the aforementioned groups who had sailed on the Golden Rule in the previous weeks showed up and were invited to speak about the important work they are all doing. Longtime anti-nuclear crusader Jackie Cabasso, who had just returned from events in Japan marking the 80th anniversary of U.S. nuclear bombing of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was the keynote speaker. This culminating event underscored that the struggle for the abolition of nuclear weapons is intrinsically connected to the struggles for peace and justice, at home and abroad.

The Golden Rule safely returned to its homeport in northern California’s Humboldt Bay, where it will remain for the winter. A voyage to southern California and Baja Mexico is under consideration for next spring or summer.