Suzie Dods remembers the good old days at San Francisco’s historic Dolphin Swimming and Boating Club, when people didn’t have their faces in their phones and all the members gave as much as they took. But those days are no more, she told Gazetteer SF.
Dods has been a Dolphin Club member since 1991, when there were fewer than 1,000 members. Today, the nearly 150-year-old Dolphin Club boasts more than 2,000 members, and many of the newer members use the club for networking and business, rather than as a community space centered around a shared love of frigid water. Oldtimers like Dods are less than thrilled at the vibe shift.
Tech workers hold business meetings on their swims, some people take phone calls inside the clubhouse while others go for quick dips before crowding into the saunas (something Dolphin Club president Diane Walton attributes to a TikTok trend). Beyond how some newer folks use the club, Dods has felt frustrated with some of the new members’ lack of willingness to help out at the volunteer-run club.
“I understand that a vibrant community needs to have new life and I was once part of that new life, but I also think that people need to understand that you just can't take,” Dods told Gazetteer SF. “You’ve gotta give too.”
Max Segall, a tech worker, is one of these newer members to the club. He told Gazetteer he uses it as his go-to meeting spot with customers and investors. Segall, who joined the club in March, typically conducts his Dolphin Club meetings over a swim, where he and his guest “talk the whole time” and “catch up on anything we would have caught up on over coffee, but while looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and swimming in the Pacific Ocean.”
Segall certainly notices the different types of members, but said he’s personally mindful about having “respect for the energy of the club versus imposing some new thing that might get rejected.” There are the members in their twenties and thirties, mostly in tech, who use the club as a hangout spot, and “people who have been here for like 50-plus years,” he said.
President Walton more broadly describes the two types of members as those “who swim a lot” and the “band of people” who “come and jump in the water for a little bit and then come in the sauna for a little while.”
“Having people come who are not as committed to the club has been interesting,” she told Gazetteer. “They don’t always know how to take care of the building. It’s an old wood building and it takes particular care.”
The Dolphin Club opened its first boathouse and pier on Leavenworth, near North Point, in 1877, with just 25 members. In 1927, the club relocated along with the neighboring South End Rowing Club, to a stretch of Jefferson Street between Polk and Larkin streets.
Members swim year-round in nearby Aquatic Park Cove, where temperatures vary from about 50 F to 65 F. The traditional course, marked by a line of buoys, is about a quarter-mile long; the club also hosts longer group swims, including to and from Alcatraz, and from Fort Point to Aquatic Park.
Membership at the Dolphin Club grew from 1,470 people in Spring 2015 to 2,105 in June 2024, leading to sometimes overcrowded showers and saunas at the club, Walton told Gazetteer.
It’s been “kind of wild,” Walton said, adding that the club in March decided to add only ten new members a month. The growth has been “great,” but it hasn’t come without its issues.
In addition to not always treating the elderly facilities with care, Walton said that many of the newer members use the club in a “different, lighter” way, whether stopping by after work or dipping quickly and then running to the sauna.
The sauna is an important part of the culture, as a central meeting place within the clubhouse, where members of all kinds mix and mingle. Segall said the conversations there can range from reminiscing on past swims across the notoriously challenging English Channel to the latest in crypto and artificial intelligence.
Dods told Gazetteer she hasn’t been subjected to any conversations about tech, but said it “sounds awful.” What grinds her gears most, though, is that the club struggles to find volunteers to support swimmers on long-distance swims, despite all the new blood.
“I feel that people think that because it’s so inexpensive that you just go in and do your thing,” she said. “And people are always trying to get something for nothing.” (A yearly membership costs $583, a far cry from the minimum $1600 per month cost of a networking club like The Battery, though the amenities are quite different.)
“I feel that people are feeling entitled” and don’t recognize they’re “part of a community and you need to do your part,” Dods said. “It’s a two-way street.”
