Sausalito Floating Home Communities:
The Complete Dock Guide

The southernmost dock in Waldo Point Harbor, South 40 has a geographic intimacy that larger docks can’t match. Its configuration is unique in Sausalito — and produces a community rhythm that feels more like a small neighborhood than a marina.

Buyers who want to know their neighbors by name, and who value proximity without sacrifice, tend to find what they’re looking for here. Forty-seven homes; rare turnover; the kind of dock where people settle in and stay.

On most docks, the walkway is a corridor. On Main Dock, it’s a commons. The extra width changes everything about how residents relate to each other — there’s room to stop, to set up a folding table, to let music spill out of a doorway without anyone being in anyone’s way.

Thirty-five homes span its length, ranging in style from compact original live-aboards to elaborately reimagined floating structures. Most buyers who land here stay for decades. Turnover is rare.

Liberty Dock sits opposite Issaquah across the harbor’s open water, and together the two docks form the arms of a floating amphitheater. Seventy-two homes line its length. The dock has a long tradition of staging things — community spectacles that spill onto the water and draw the whole harbor in.

It rewards the curious buyer: the person who wants to ask every neighbor about the thing on their roof, the thing in their window, the thing Paul will tell you to look for that pops out of a houseboat.

Issaquah takes its name from a Washington State ferry that ran aground here and became the foundation of a floating home community — and that origin story of reinvention still runs through the dock’s culture. The dock bends in an “L” shape, wrapping around the harbor’s edge.

Sixty-nine homes, many of them deeply personalized over decades, line its walkways. Paul and Roman have sold multiple homes here and know the slip inventory well. Walk it once and you’ll understand why buyers keep coming back.

A Dock is the smallest and most self-contained dock in Waldo Point Harbor. Where other docks have foot traffic and community events, A Dock has the quiet of a working waterfront — because it is one. The barge tied up alongside isn’t decorative; it does real work for the entire community.

This is the dock where TJ Nelsen — author, marine contractor, and one of the dock’s most singular characters — lives and works. Twenty-three homes; one barge. Read Houseboats, Drugs, Government and the 4th Estate before you visit.

East Pier runs the full length of the Kappas canal — straight, uninterrupted, 42 homes facing the water from one end to the other. Morning light comes in from the east and warms these homes first, before it reaches the rest of the marina. It’s a detail that dock-life veterans notice immediately.

The canal setting gives East Pier a particular energy: shared, exposed, and surprisingly social. People who want anonymity don’t tend to last here. People who want connection do.

West Pier has the best sunset of any dock in Kappas Marina. Its west-facing orientation means the light hits directly in the evenings — the kind of light that makes residents stop what they’re doing and migrate toward the water’s edge. Forty homes, many with architecturally expressive exteriors that have been reimagined over years.

The dock sits closest to the street of all three Kappas piers, which places it within steps of the café circuit and the bike path. Daily life here has a natural structure that the other docks don’t.

Gate 6½ is the only dock in Kappas Marina that runs perpendicular to the main waterway — giving it a completely different orientation, and completely different views, from East and West Pier. Thirty-five homes on an “L-shaped” fixed pier, open Bay on one side, Marin hills on the other.

It’s close enough to the bike path that you can hear it; remote enough to feel private. The dock has produced some of Sausalito’s most interesting residents. For buyers who want Kappas Marina with Mt. Tam views and genuine local character, this is the dock.