Auto & Boats
Cruising into the Future With Captain Maggie McDonogh
Captain Maggie McDonogh (Photo by Looking Glass Photo & Camera)If you’re a Tiburon native, you probably know who Captain Maggie McDonogh is. Or maybe you knew her late father, Milton, who was operating boats to and from Angel Island before it was a state park and then started the Angel Island–Tiburon Ferry Company, as it is known today. And if you’ve never partaken in the joys of this uniquely Marin service, what are you waiting for?
“I’ve never had the same trip across,” says the well-known captain. “Things are always different, especially the wildlife. On one recent trip, we saw little thresher sharks jumping out of the water.”
It’s an understatement to say that McDonogh loves her job. And it’s not just because of the sights she sees when she’s on the water; she loves connecting with her passengers, calling what she does “the ability to make people happy for a living.” Whether that’s ushering them to and from Angel Island, guiding them on sunset cruises around the bay or even hosting weddings onboard, she’s played an intrinsic part in the joyful experiences of locals and tourists alike.
“I think about all these people I get to meet, and the stories they tell me — those are like little nuggets of memory that keep you warm,” she says.
Many of her own memories are tied to the company, too, from spending plenty of time on the boats as a child with her father. And yet it wasn’t a given that she’d end up in the same role he occupied; she thought she might become an attorney or a veterinarian. But by the time she was in her early 20s, she’d already attained her captain’s license. And even though the maritime industry has always been a particularly male-dominated one, McDonogh was anything but intimidated to be one of only a few women on the water. These days, however, things are changing, and you can see that in McDonogh’s own team, which includes her daughter, Becky McDonogh, who works as a deckhand and is working toward getting her own captain’s license when she isn’t fishing commercially.
“Usually, you just hear about father-and-son businesses getting passed down through generations,” Becky says. But this microbusiness is different — it is woman-owned and woman-operated and will be inherited by a woman, too.
And if the future is female, it’s also electric. Just this year, the Town of Tiburon was awarded a $24 million grant from the California Air Resources Board to electrify the ferry company’s fleet. Bay Area–based ZeroMar will work first on two existing vessels, and a company out of New Zealand called EV Maritime is also designing a plug-in hybrid electric vessel for the operation. The prime minister of New Zealand himself came to San Francisco for the contract signing ceremony, a big moment for a big step forward.
Many things have certainly changed since McDonogh’s great-grandfather first arrived in Tiburon following the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. But that’s the nature of progress, and McDonogh is more than ready to steer us all into the future.
