San Diego Bay

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San Diego bay and Coronado Bridge at night from Harbor Island

The San Diego Bay and the rest of the San Diego-Tijuana metropolitan area can be clearly seen in this photograph.

San Diego Bay is a natural harbor adjacent to San Diego, California. It is 12 mi/19 km long, 1 mi/1.6 km–3 mi/4.8 km wide. The bay is bordered by the cities of San Diego, National City, Chula Vista, Imperial Beach and Coronado.

The western border of the bay is protected from the Pacific Ocean by a long, narrow strip of land called the Silver Strand. The northern end of the Silver Strand expands to become North Island, the location of Naval Air Station North Island (the home port of several aircraft carriers including the USS Ronald Reagan) and Coronado. Coronado is the site of the famous Hotel del Coronado. The U.S. Navy has three other facilities on the bay: Naval Station San Diego, Naval Base Point Loma at Ballast Point, which is a Nuclear Submarine base, and Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. The Coast Guard Air Station San Diego is across the bay from NAS North Island and the Federal Communications Commission maintains a monitoring station on the Silver Strand.

San Diego International Airport is also adjacent to the bay, across Harbor Drive from the Coast Guard Station. General Dynamics' National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO), the only shipyard on the west coast capable of building and repairing large ocean-going vessels, is near the San Diego side of the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge.

San Diego Bay's commercial port has two container ship facilities (one for refrigerated containers) and a cruise ship terminal. The port handles more than 3 million metric tons of cargo annually. The cruise ship terminal hosts more than 250 ship calls a year totaling nearly 1 million passengers. Commercial sport fishing boats depart all year round from two docks in Point Loma. Small boat sailing is extremely popular, and the bay is lined by dozens of marinas and nine yacht clubs, including the San Diego Yacht Club which was the home of the America's Cup from 1988 to 1995. An inlet of the bay was renamed America's Cup Harbor to commemorate that occasion.

Several museum ships call San Diego Bay home. They include the USS Midway, the largest aircraft carrier museum, and the Star of India, the oldest iron hulled merchant ship still afloat. She made more than 20 circumnavigations of the Earth as the Aussie and Kiwi immigrant ship Euterpe. Volunteers raise and lower her sails on a daily basis, and she is sailed in the Bay at least once a year. She is the oldest ship in the world that still sails regularly. The Star of India and seven other boats and ships on San Diego Bay are the floating collection of the San Diego Maritime Museum; most are open to the public for a fee.

The bay is spanned by the San Diego-Coronado Bridge, built in 1969. The bridge curves and rises to a height of 200 feet above the water so that Navy ships can pass under it.

In the northern part of the bay there are two commercial "islands" (actually connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land) called Harbor Island and Shelter Island. They were built up from former sand bars. They hold hotels, restaurants, and public parkland. Across from Harbor Island is a bayside park called Spanish Landing, a historic site which commemorates the meeting in 1769 of two expeditions from Spanish Mexico that made possible the European settlement of California.^[1] A dozen other parks are found at various locations along the shoreline.

The shallow southern end of the bay is used for evaporation ponds to extract salt from the sea water. In the 19th century there was a southern harbor ship entrance by a canal south to the Tijuana River. It was filled in by a great flood in the 1880's.

The Port of San Diego manages the harbor and administers the public lands adjacent to the bay. The Port is a special government entity created by the state legislature in 1962, for which revenue consists of tariffs and rents paid by district tenants.