Bodega Bay
— the harbor the fog never quite leaves.
Not only on a wall.
“A small harbor town where Highway 1 bends east around Bodega Head. The fishing fleet works Dungeness crab from November into spring; the rest of the year it is salmon and the long swells that come straight off the open ocean. The headland sits on the Pacific Plate side of the San Andreas Fault, granite that started its journey hundreds of miles south. Most afternoons the marine layer comes in around three. Boats return to Spud Point before the wind gets up. The light is the cold blue light of a working coast.
Bodega Bay, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Bodega Bay is a small harbor community on the Sonoma Coast, in Sonoma County, California, about 60 miles north of San Francisco by way of Highway 1. The bay itself is a shallow water body roughly two miles across, sheltered from the open Pacific by Bodega Head, a granite peninsula that sits on the Pacific Plate side of the San Andreas Fault. The town's working harbor is at Spud Point Marina, with Doran Beach forming a long sand spit along the southern shore. UC Davis operates the Bodega Marine Laboratory on the headland, a coastal research station founded in 1966.
Marine fog defines Bodega Bay's daily rhythm from late spring through early fall. The cold California Current keeps offshore water in the low fifties Fahrenheit even in summer; warm inland air drawn over that cold surface condenses into the low cloud locals call the marine layer. Most summer days the fog burns off by late morning and rolls back in by mid-afternoon. The wind that comes over Bodega Head pushes hard enough that the cypress on the bluff lean inland. The Bodega Marine Laboratory has tracked this microclimate since the station opened in 1966, and the area falls within the cool-summer Mediterranean band of the Sonoma Coast.
Dungeness crab season anchors the bay's calendar. The commercial fishery opens around mid-November and runs into late spring, weather and pre-season testing for domoic acid permitting. The fleet works out of Spud Point Marina; the morning the boats head out in November is the working coast's first proper day of winter. King salmon follow from May through October. Gray whales pass on their southbound migration in December and northbound from March, visible from the Bodega Head trail. The summer fog peaks July and August. The clear, cold winter mornings after a storm are the time the Sonoma Coast looks most like itself.