Last weekend I got to go out on San Francisco Bay from Berkeley Yacht Harbor with my father-in-law.  It was some pretty amazing sailing really.  The forecast was for mostly sunny with winds from the west at 5-15kts.  Well, they got the mostly sunny part down but the winds were just a little more lively than 15kts.  Lets call it 15-20 with gusts to 25...  I also never knew that San Francisco bay actually has waves...

 

To date I've only sailed rental boats that have the mainsail permanantly-ish attached to the mast and jibs in roller furlings.  So the day started as a learning day by choosing the 95% jib then finding the jib clew and attaching the sheets with bowlines.  Then I needed to find the jib tack and attach it to the hook on the bow, and attach the jib halyard to the head feeding the luff into the channel on the forestay.  Yes this was all new and I was diggin it.  Our next step was uncovering the main and attaching the halyard and guiding the luff into the mast.  I did a little house keeping while Kurt attached the outboard then we were off.

 

I think the FIL was trying to give me a work out.  As we left his slip in Berkeley we started tacking to get out of the yacht harbor channel.  It's only about 200 feet wide so we were tacking rapidly back and forth.  I was breathing pretty hard during this part whew...  Once we got out past the jetty we quickly realized the forecast was a bit conservative...  Kurt sent me forward to put in the first reef.  My only reefing experience to this point was once on a Capri 22 in becalmed conditions on San Diego Bay and once on a Catalina 320 in reasonably benign conditions.  This evolution then was pretty interesting for me.  Thankfully Kurt's main comes with the reefing lines already run through the clews and it has a cunningham to make the new tack forward.  So for me it was: lower the main about four feet, haul in the reef line, attach the cunningham and tighten, then re-raise the main.  The reefing went pretty easily despite the bouncing around the boat was doing.  We were regularly getting spray in our faces. Luckily we'd put on foulies before going out. I was also wearing a life jacket, something I never do in San Diego bay...

 

So across the bay we headed.  We crossed "The Slot", an area in the bay directly inland from Golden Gate that gets the worst of the weather coming into the bay.  Half way across it was time to reef again...

 

Once we got closer to Richmond and Sausalito the wind died a bit and we shook out the second reef.  We beat our way to Raccoon Straight between Tiburon and Angel Island.  What an interesting place to sail!  Raccoon Straight is inline with The Gate and gets some odd/interesting/challenging weather and tidal conditions.  We tacked our way through along with a dozen other boats and as we neared the western entrance to the straight there was literally a standing wave, like you see in rivers!  That's some kind of tidal flow!  The winds through here were pretty flukey.

I was on the tiller for most of the passage until we took a good puff right on the beam and heeled over until water was coming in over the cockpit coamings...  I said something to affect of "KURT!!!  Your turn to drive the boat!!!"

 

If we'd had more time we might have tried to beat our way to The Gate, and maybe even pop under the bridge real quick but it was quite obvious that wasn't going to be an easy task.  Besides, it being Mothers Day neither of us wanted to take advantage of our good fortune of even sailing on this day.

We continued up-wind until we were far enough around Angel Island to turn down wind and head back to Berkeley.  Once headed downwind the sailing became extremely comfortable.  We saw some sea lions and even some dolphins in the bay as we made our way east.  Kurt remarked that this was only the second time in four decades of bay sailing that he'd seen dolphins so that was quite a treat!

 

In addition to broad reaching home we had waves coming up our stern that we could surf down regularly.  Pretty sure we exceeded hull speed a few times.

What a fun sail! I really felt lucky to get to go out with Kurt and I really appreciated his patient teaching ways.

 

Ciao,

Seaman Ray