Real spirit of Silicon Valley is floating off San Francisco's Pier 39

Forbes Thor Kiddoo’s man-made, self-powered island reflects the high-tech hub’s quirky obsessiveness

THE PROBLEM with Silicon Valley as a tourist destination is there really is very little there to tour. You’ll need to travel some 30 miles from the more scenic San Francisco before you get to the heart of it, and even then the most one can do is gawp at Larry Ellison’s Oracle buildings (they’re built to look like the old database symbol in ancient flowcharts), and perhaps hover beside the Google, Intel, Apple and Yahoo! logos outside their campuses – until their liveried security dudes bicycle you away.

If you want to see the real spirit of Silicon Valley, I’d recommend going to the very heart of San Francisco’s glitziest tourist trap: Pier 39 in the Fisherman’s Wharf.

Dodge the street theatre and the trips to Alcatraz, the sea lions, Hard Rock Cafe and the sour dough clam chowder vendors, and find the pier in one corner of the marina marked Forbes Island Restaurant.

There’s no restaurant on the pier, but there will be a man in a captain’s hat and a small ugly passenger ferry. Climb in, sit down, and wait as he steers you to the exact opposite corner of the marina some 850ft away.

There you will find the world’s only self-powered, man-made floating island; 1,600sq ft in size, 700 tons, and the culmination of the dream of one man – Forbes Thor Kiddoo. It has palm trees. It has a beach. It has a lighthouse. And beneath the lighthouse it has an entrance to an “underground” suite, once the playboy retreat of Kiddoo and now a restaurant.

Kiddoo is in his 70s but betrays none of his age and hides none of his enthusiasm for his project.

He does seem a little more rakish than the average Silicon Valley geek millionaire; a little more of a lover of the finer things in life (his island has a wine cellar chilled by its proximity to the sea, and a velvet-draped boudoir in the ladies room). But the culture of the bay, and how it treats and is treated by its rich and famous, begins to shine through.

Kiddoo began building his island in his shipyard, just north of the city in Sausalito, in 1975. He was a master carpenter who had made his fortune building floating homes for a growing community that had emigrated out into the bay.

Those floating homes are almost a metaphor for the history of the entire technology sector here. They arose from a vacuum at the end of the second World War; an entire city and shipyard were built in a matter of months on agricultural lands around San Francisco, and then almost as swiftly decommissioned. What was left was an incredible and unused infrastructure.

In Silicon Valley it was the research and technology systems built around the naval and military headquarters clustered around the bay. Across the bay, in Sausalito, it was boats, and shipyards, and chandleries, and a peninsula full of naval surplus. Just as any run-down, but promising, neighbourhood does, it attracted strange bohemian types. Kiddoo built them their strange bohemian homes – on the bay. A beautiful, and livable, floating scale model of the Taj Mahal; art deco houses with ferro-cement foundations and habitable underwater basements.

By 1975, Kiddoo was ready to build a home suitable for himself, and set about constructing the giant floating Forbes Island. Over 280 tons of concrete, 90 tons of sand, and 40 tons of topsoil displace 700 tons of bay water surrounded by three staterooms.

But this excess was just as much built on military foundations as Sausalito. Kiddoo came to be a carpenter after his stint working in the coast guard. The island is steered by a vast ex-second World War outboard, previously used in naval tugs. The portholes were salvaged from troop and supply ships.

Kiddoo took – and takes – an obsessive, thrifty craftsman’s eye to everything he made. The wood that held up the concrete mould became the decks of the state rooms. The panelling that covers that concrete was so painstakingly sculpted that no screws were needed to fit it together.

And for a person who everyone seems to view as a charming eccentric, Kiddoo has a paranoid eye on the practicalities. If anything goes wrong in the design of a floating home, it sinks. While he admires the 1970s louche atmosphere of his creation, he also spends the first few minutes every time he steps aboard her checking the moorings to see she is well-secured against the currents that surge through the Golden Gate.

That might be one of the reasons that Kiddoo is not just the island’s king – he’s the captain who ferries you from the pier to Forbes Island’s dock.

It might be fanciful, but Kiddoo, steering his ferry, wearing his skipper’s cap, reminds me of the other millionaire obsessives of his era and his locality. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Intel’s Gordon Moore. Building on military excessiveness, transforming it into a mercantile but aesthetic dream.

If you want to know how this valley works you’d learn a lot from watching Kiddoo ferry his guests to his dream island, taken from naval surplus and transformed into a paradoxical amalgam of practical, commercial art.

And I hear that Ellison just bought his Taj Mahal.