“I told them it’s not going to be easy, it’ll be weird, but it’s right up our alley,” Faul told SFGATE. 

He enlisted his friends, including a landowner in the Delta, and formed a holding company. Together, they were going to buy a manmade island that was once a residence in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. 

Forbes Island — a 700-ton vessel that’s 100 feet long and 50 feet wide — is relaunching as an event space and campground in the Sacramento River Delta more than 40 years after it first floated onto the water. For many in San Francisco, Forbes Island thrived as a quirky restaurant for nearly 20 years that served French-style seafood along the Pier 39 shoreline. Access to the island required a short ride on a shuttle boat, often captained by the island’s creator and namesake, Forbes Thor Kiddoo. 

The eccentric millionaire made his fortune building houseboats in Marin County, including the striking Taj Mahal Houseboat, and launched his island in 1980. He stationed the barge off the coast of Marin County and lived on the island for several years before starting the restaurant in 1999.

The restaurant was as adored as it was snubbed (its reviews on Yelp spanned the spectrum), while serving as a wedding venue and tourist attraction for those who appreciated its novelty. Tony Bennett was a fan and once performed in the vessel’s wine cellar. By 2017, maintaining a “kitschy” floating restaurant in the San Francisco Bay became too costly (the barge’s steel shafts, called spuds, which hold the deck together, continually broke) and Kiddoo decided to close the business for good. 

That’s when word of its sale rippled to Faul, who formed the holding corporation Seastar Marine in 2018 with Eric Goodman to purchase the vessel from Kiddoo. Neither party revealed to SFGATE the price for the sale.

“It was his vessel to end all vessels. Forbes wanted a floating island and that’s what he made for himself,” Faul said. “He transferred ownership to us and aged out his adventurous pirate life.”

The group spent the past five years purchasing, transporting and reimagining Forbes Island into an event space.  

Forbes Island can now host up to 100 people while offering RV or tent camping either on land or onboard. Similar to its days as a restaurant, Forbes Island is only accessible by boat; this time, it’s the Bradford Island Ferry. The floating platform is permanently moored next to private land on Bradford Island not far from Antioch.

The biggest changes the group has made to the vessel were tearing out the kitchen and then tethering a separate boat to the stern that’s equipped with solar panels for power. The group — which consists of Faul, Goodman, his friend Tom Bishop, and Heidi Petty, the owner of the adjacent land on Bradford Island — imagines Forbes Island’s next lifecycle as a sustainable and ecologically sound experience. 

Inside Forbes Island in its new home in the Sacramento Delta. (Courtesy Of Seastar Marine)
Inside Forbes Island in its new home in the Sacramento Delta. (Courtesy Of Seastar Marine)

The treasured floating island is available on Hipcamp to rent for $995 a night and has already begun booking private and public parties. The first public event, an art circus on the water called the Secrets of the Sea Circus Festival, is Sept. 29.

“We want to get closer to the original utility that Forbes created,” Faul said. “It was Forbes’ home and place to entertain people from all walks of life. We have done our best to preserve the space as it was.”

Prevailing against the headwinds

Waves have repeatedly rocked Forbes Island since the vessel first lodged in the bay, but the idiosyncratic island is still sailing due to the clear-eyed, if not stubborn, endurance of its founder. 

The island disembarked from Sausalito in 1980 to moor amongst the idle fleet of anchor-outs on Richardson Bay. Like a pirate in a loosely buttoned floral-print shirt, Kiddoo carved a career embellishing (and defending) his underwater home. For enhancements, he planted palm trees that had 40 feet of earth in the barge for their roots. Then he layered 120 tons of rock for a natural sloping shoreline and topped off the tropical aesthetic with 90 tons of sand. The island became a local fixture that stood out among the numerous other floating bohemian homes.

Raised in a Brooklyn brownstone by parents who were caretakers for the local engineer’s club, Kiddoo was preconditioned for a life in building. After serving in the Coast Guard, he moved to the Bay Area and translated his maritime calling into designing and constructing houseboats. Part of his success was a patented cement mix that could withstand saltwater, as well an ability to cater to the whims of Marin County’s artsy wealthy. When a client requested a floating home that could fit a heliport, Kiddoo designed it so that the owner could turn on his hot tub from his helicopter.

By the mid-1970s, Kiddoo began envisioning his own home that paid tribute to his fascination with 19th century British warships like the HMS Victory. He dismisses comparisons to Captain Nemo, but the likeness between Forbes Island and Disney’s version of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” is uncanny. 

Starting from that Sausalito dock, Kiddoo constructed a barge in two 2,500-square-foot split levels; the water line outside was lateral with the bar he installed inside. For light, he equipped the sides with 24 portals. The whole floating island weighed 700 tons, but Kiddoo understood the principles of physics (“Even though I was lousy at mathematics in high school,” he said). As long as Forbes Island weighed less than the displaced water, he reasoned he’d remain afloat. (In fact, steel ships weigh more than cement ones, so an island composed mostly of highly reinforced concrete is the lighter option.) 

Kiddoo remembers the doubtful spectators who lined the Sausalito shore in 1980 expecting the barge would sink due to its layers of cement. Nevertheless, the island drifted into the bay, a testament to Kiddoo’s engineering acumen that’s bound by a ceaseless imagination. 

Kiddoo credits a front-page feature in the Wall Street Journal sometime in the early 1980s as the spark for the island’s near continual attention from media from that point on. Reporters from Australia, Japan and Italy came aboard to meet the man who brought a tropical paradise to San Francisco Bay. 

The island also attracted negative attention, notably from the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which questioned its environmental impact and accused him of creating a floating landfill. Throughout the 1990s, Kiddoo sparred with the commission, but he ultimately prevailed due to a loophole that defined the island as a “self-propelled vessel” and spared him from eviction. 

In the 1990s, the Sausalito city council ultimately “pushed me out,” Kiddoo said, but he still has a letter from the council asking him to move back since the island became a “world-wide tourist attraction” that brought the Marin city tourism dollars. 

Kiddoo declined. Defiant and empowered, he began telling reporters of a new vision for the island — one that included a 40-foot lighthouse with a white picket fence.

Floating feasts

There are 51 steps to the top of the lighthouse that now defines Forbes Island’s outline, rising well above the palm tree canopy. After the ivory tower appeared, Kiddoo even obtained a small Fresnel lens.

Following two decades on the Marin side of the bay, Forbes Island found its new home just off Pier 39 adjacent the sea wall. He placed a white sign with blue lettering that announced the restaurant “Forbes Island” on the side and began welcoming visitors onboard for dinner. 

The lease was $5,000 a month, which was easily covered by the three fine dining rooms, which could sit up to 100 people, refashioned inside of the vessel. The restaurant was adorned as though it was a 19th century sailing ship equipped with a fake fireplace, wine cellar and even a boudoir that featured a velvet bed.

Forbes Island would sell out every Fourth of July while the rest of the year brought in about 450 diners a week. Kiddoo was proud of a 38% customer return rate, and the anomaly landed on Zagat’s list of most bizarre restaurants. 

“It was a beautiful place,” Kiddoo told SFGATE. “The dining room had underwater portals and I met nice people like Anthony Quinn, who was drinking margaritas. My general manager said, ‘Don’t give Anthony Quinn any more or he might get drunk.’ And I said that ‘a guy who starred in 152 movies should drink as many margaritas as he wants!’ He was a sweet guy and spent a half hour talking to one of our busboys. A real down-to-earth guy.”

Scenes from Forbes Island as a restaurant at Pier 39 in September, 2013. (San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Kiddoo continued running the shuttle boat that brought customers onto his island into his 70s, but by 2017, he was ready to retire. He sold the liquor license for $135,000 and put the island on the market. He found a new home through the Department of Veterans Affairs, first in Barstow and now in Napa, and is currently compiling photographs and memories into a memoir.

Rescued by community

The island was moved in 2018 to its new dock at the Holland Riverside Marina in the Delta, but rough water was on the horizon. 

For the next five years, Forbes Island underwent setbacks that stymied the new owners’ vision to reopen it to the public as an off-grid events space. 

The Holland Riverside Marina changed hands, and the new management did not share the same vision for Forbes Island as Seastar Marine. But moving the vessel would take tens of thousands of dollars and the ideal tide levels. Seastar Marine held fundraisers and eventually was able to relocate the barge to Bradford Island via a tugboat. 

The next hurdle was finding an insurer to back the island in a region where insurance is often hard to secure. Once Seastar Marine had its policy in hand, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. 

“We were rescued by the community,” Faul said, and the friend group united to keep steering the island into a commercially viable future. The listing on HipCamp is the culmination of their persistence.

The group keeps in touch with Kiddoo and honors him at every turn, writing on the listing how he “built himself an underwater home, complete with portholes for watching the fish swim past, an underwater diving hatch and a grand bedroom suite fit for a captain of his own private world.”

Last November, Kiddoo returned to his island for the first time in years. 

“I noticed they ripped out the kitchen, which cost me over $100,000 to put in. Otherwise, the only thing they didn’t do was take care of the palm trees. When it was mine, I kept watering it so it was like a jungle to walk through,” he said.

“I’d rather Forbes Island have a home as bed-and-breakfast than end up in a shipyard in Richmond. The palm trees will come back — if they water them.”