At Long Last: Sailing Home Aboard the Heart of Gold

If you've been reading my blog for any amount of time, you may remember that I dropped my boat, the Heart of Gold, off at Svendsen's Boat Works back in June so that they could replace the mainmast damaged in a disagreement with a drawbridge.  While she was there, I went ahead and had them haul her out of the water for new bottom paint and some much needed maintenance.  Five an a half months later, having missed a gorgeous sailing season on San Francisco Bay, I finally got a chance to go sailing again. 

The day started off great on the bay.  The night ended with me and my father freezing cold in a thick fog with barely any working navigational electronics before running the boat aground in my own slip in the marina where I keep her.  If you're up for a somewhat painful story about a good trip turned bad, read on...


We got underway around noon from Alameda.  As we were leaving the berth at the boatyard, we passed another Islander Pacific 41' like mine only not as pretty:

On our way out of the Oakland Estuary, we were keeping pace with this snazzy little motoryacht:


As we were heading out, I noticed that the depth sounder wasn't working.  This will become relevant later.

Clear of the channel, we hoisted the sails and did a bit of tacking back and forth south of Yerba Buena Island just to make sure the rigging was all in good order.  The wind was going exactly the wrong direction for the transit North, so we cheated a bit and motored under the eastern side of the Bay Bridge:


I know there's plenty of room for my little boat to fit under this bridge, but I still find myself getting nervous when I pass under bridges now.  It doesn't help that the perspective always tricks you into thinking the mast is going to touch:


Once we were clear of the bridge and past the lee side of Treasure Island, I killed the engine so we could finally enjoy a bit of proper sailing.  It was only a couple of hours worth of beating into the wind, but I can't tell you how happy I was to finally have my boat back.

As we made our way north, the wind slacked off and the current picked up.  Eventually it was all we could do to hold our position against the current.  Before too long I had to admit defeat, point straight into the wind, furl the sails, and proceed under power.  Here's a quick shot of the Golden Gate fading into the mist behind us:


Passing Red Rock:


Dad spent most of the day bundled up in the cockpit and hanging out:


Meanwhile, I got another chance to exorcise my bridge clearance paranoia under the San Rafael-Richmond Bridge:


As we passed marker six, I snapped a pic showing the wake from the current rushing past the buoy:


It was slow going across San Pablo Bay on the way to the Petaluma River Entrance Channel.  We reached the first daymarker just after the sun had set:



The channel transit was pretty uneventful.  It wasn't until we passed under the Highway 37 causeway bridge at Black Point that things started getting interesting.  Suddenly the fog started to close in and visibility dropped to about 100 yards.  Unable to see the river ahead, I had to steer by gauging the distance to the bank on either side as we headed up the river.

Earlier in the year, a sailboat sank about halfway up the river in the middle of the channel by the tiny community of Lakeville.  As luck would have it, visibility opened up and the tide was so low that we had no time spotting the mostly submerged wreck and avoiding it.  To make it even easier, someone in a parking lot ashore had left their headlights on and they were pointed right at the mast of the sunken boat.  Thank you, whoever you were.

After clearing Lakeville, things got much worse.  The trickiest part of the upper Petaluma River transit is a turn called Cloudy Bend.  At high tide the river looks to be almost 200 feet wide at this point, but there's only about 80 feet of that width that's deep enough to transit.  The rest is only about knee deep at high tide.  At low tide, it's a huge peninsula of soft mud.  If there was any place we'd get stuck, that was it.

As we were coming up on the turn, I slowed to about 1.5 knots and started to favor the left bank of the river to give the shallow part as wide of a berth as possible.  As we were making the turn, the fog thickened.  There are two buoys that mark the edge of the shallow at Cloudy Bend.  We only saw one of them even though we had to have passed within about fifteen feet of the second one. 

Once I was confident that we were clear of the shallows, I picked up speed again.  Just as I was remarking about how we'd gotten through the worst of it, the boat ran aground.  I never even saw the bank where we touched bottom even though you could reach out and touch it from the deck.  As I backed off, the rudder got stuck in the mud astern.  In the darkness and fog, there was no frame of reference to tell when I finally started creeping forward again, so just when I noticed that I'd gotten headway again, I managed to slide right back into the mud ahead.  The tide was so low that the boat barely fit in the river sideways.  I ended up going back and forth this way three or four times before finally getting the boat turned enough to clear the banks on both sides.

That's when I looked down at the compass and realized that I'd somehow gotten us turned around and headed back downriver.  If it was happening to someone else, I'd've been laughing at them.

After a bit more grounding and turning and grounding and turning around, I got us pointed back in the right direction.  Proceeding blindly upriver, I'd slowed to a crawl to avoid doing any damage in case we grounded again.

We did.  I don't remember how many times I managed to touch bottom, but the saving grace is that the bottom of the river is soft mud almost everywhere.  Since Dad and I both know the river pretty well, I was confident that we could make the rest of the transit while avoiding the few places where there were rocks or structures along the banks.  Still, the last half mile or so worth of the passage took nearly two hours as we crept along.

As we headed upriver, we kept looking out for any of the lights that should've been visible ahead.  Even a hint of a glow would've been useful.  We could hear the traffic on Highway 101 to the west, but never saw any of the lights ashore until we were at the entrance to the Petaluma Marina.

That should've been the point where I was home free, but the City of Petaluma has neglected the Marina for a number of years and the silt has made it much shallower than it's advertised depth of ten feet.  As we were passing C Dock in the middle of the marina, right in the middle of the fairway, I ran aground again.  Cranking up the throttle, I was able to force my way through the mud to my berth.

Once we were close enough to reach the dock, dad put a bow line around a cleat and I tried to spring the stern in.  Even with the engine running full speed ahead there was no moving.  I was aground in my own home berth where the boat has been moored most days and nights for the past four years.

Having arrived alive, we counted our blessings, passed the rest of the mooring lines over to the dock, and headed home.  That was just after 2330.

At about 0130 I came back.  The tide had risen slightly so I could pull the stern in and tie the boat securely alongside the dock.

Taken for all in all, I'd call it a successful shakedown cruise.  Now I just need to troubleshoot the depth sounder and replace the radar so we can avoid these problems in the future.  I'm done with navigation by the Braille method.

Heart of Gold Repair Update

The last time I wrote about the ongoing drama surrounding the rigging repairs on board my boat following my disagreement with a drawbridge, I stated that "with any luck I'll have the boat back sometime this month."


That was early October.  I have no luck.  Clearly.


Over the following six weeks or so, I've had two separate occasions to go down to Alameda and look over the work in progress.  I found lots of work and very little progress.  Mostly the boat was just sitting idle like so:


Bear in mind that in 2009 it took me about a month to replace all of the standing rigging on both of my masts by myself using a pair of pliers and a bosun's chair.  Most of that time was spent waiting for the rigging shop to cut and swage new wires for me.


For some reason it's taken Svendsen's Boat Works over twice as long to re-rig only one of my two masts even though the rigging shop is on the premises, they've got a crew and a crane to help them, and they had three months to get ready for the job.  I'm not really thrilled about this.


Still, after five and a half months of waiting for the insurance claim, the mast manufacturer, the riggers, and a massive pile of mismanagement and delays, the whole thing is done.  I found out it was finished when I was writing a plaintive email asking how things were progressing.  The reply: "The riggers say it's ready anytime you want it. We just need to wash it." 


Almost a week later I finally had a chance to head down to Alameda and do some last-minute fine-tuning.  At first glance, I was thinking that the boatyard really needs to fire whoever they've got washing boats down there.  Upon further inspection, it was pretty clear they just didn't bother.  Instead, the deck was littered with clevis pins and other detritus from the rigging work.  Five months of dust had been cemented to the deck and hull from the recent rain.  The Heart of Gold looked almost as bad as she did after I spent fourteen months away at sea and off to war in 2008/2009.


After a quick turn around the deck picking things up, I decided to hoist the sails and make sure the new running rigging was in good order.  The main sail and mizzen went up easily enough, but when I tried to unfurl the jib, the brand new roller furler bound up.  Only halfway unfurled, the sail was stuck in place.  When I went forward to see what was the matter, I found the furling line wrapped up outside the housing and spent a few minutes wrestling it back into place so I could re-furl the sail.


Here's a shot of how it was set up:


To avoid binding up, the line is supposed to run through the opening on the right where the cage is designed to lead it onto the drum instead of allowing the line to get caught up under the rotating disk at the top.  It's a bit tough to spot in this picture, but cast into the cage above the opening is an arrow with the word "LINE" imprinted on it.  This makes it perfectly obvious to the most casual observer that this was put together wrong.

Other problems were less of an issue.  The new turnbuckles are stainless steel instead of bronze.  They're pretty, but they don't look quite right next to the few old ones that are still on board:


My main complaint with Svendsen's is that everything took such a long damned time.  I expected some major delays on account of waiting for the insurance company to pay out and for LeFiell to take a break from making missile bodies and jet engines so they could manufacture my new mast (which is gorgeous by the way).  But once the mast arrived at the yard I really expected the whole project to come together in a week or two. 

Instead it took over two and a half months.  When I'd ask about the delays, I was given every excuse you can think of including a backlog of small racing boats that apparently took precedence over taking care of me after all the waiting. 

What really irks me is that they didn't even bother to call and let me know it was done.  I don't know what kind of profit margin they've got going there, but it seems to me that there should be some sense of urgency when someone's waiting for you to finish tens of thousands of dollars worth of work.  Just saying.

On the plus side, the bowsprit is a bit shinier:


Now that the boatyard was finally done with the rigging, it was up to me to get the boat home.  The last time I did any work on board, I was concentrating on getting the engine up and running after it's brief submergence back in June.  I hate working in the engine room because it's a bit cramped:


Still, with some help from my friend Matt, I was able to fire it up and test it running both ahead and astern.  Everything worked reasonably well, but the raw water pump wasn't pumping any water.  Looking closer, I noticed that the belt was loose and the pump wasn't turning at all.  The fix was a simple matter of replacing one of the two fan belts in the filthy, rusty hole:


After that, the wet exhaust started puking out more seawater than I'd ever seen. 

With the cooling system up and running, it was a simple matter of scrubbing things down and making ready to get underway the next morning.  I'd been without my boat for far too long to keep waiting.

Stay tuned for bloggage on that little adventure.  It started off as a pleasant day of sailing and slowly turned into a tale of darkness and gloom with impending disaster around every turn.  In case you're worried, I did survive.

Heart of Gold Repair Update

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I took my boat down to Svendsen's Boat Works in Alameda for some mast and rigging repairs after a disagreement with a drawbridge operator about exactly how open the bridge actually was.

So a little while ago I went down to check on the boat and found her like so:

For a moment I couldn't think of what exactly was amiss. Then I realized that the mainmast had in fact been removed. A little walking around the yard and I found it lying on some sawhorses. This is the first time I'd gotten a close look at the broken end where the masthead used to be welded on:

About a foot below that you can see where the bridge girder hit and scarred the aluminum a bit:

Looking down along the length of the mast, it also looks (to my untrained eye) as though there's a bend in the mast right where the lower spreaders are attached:

Other than that, some of the screws that held the spreaders in place look to have been pulled loose:

I'm still waiting to hear from the insurance company and Svendsen's rigging shop as to whether they can save the mast and make it serviceable again or if it needs to be replaced altogether. We'll see.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned in another post, the boat tried to sink last week. It seems that my trip motoring all along the length of the bay was enough to wear down the flax packing in the shaft log (the seal where the propeller shaft passes through the hull of the boat) and it was leaking by significantly. This shouldn't have been a problem but, for reasons unknown, the bilge pump decided to take a vacation at about the same time. So after a couple of weeks of sitting at the dock without incident, the engine room filled with enough water that it completely submerged the engine. Blast!

After they'd pumped the water out, the good folks at the boatyard sent me a bunch of terrifying pictures of the oily funk that now covered everything in the engine room.

That afternoon I ran down to Alameda and tightened down the packing gland to prevent it happening again.

Last night I shanghaied my friend Matt and we went down to troubleshoot the bilge pump. The problem with troubleshooting the bilge pump on my boat is that it's situated at the deepest darkest part of the bilge, below the prop shaft. The only way to reach it is through this hole:

More precisely, the only way to reach it is to lay face down on the deck, slide into the hole head first, thread your body past the two stainless steel steering cables, lean against the raw fiberglass of the hull, and stretch as far as you can in order to just barely catch the top of the bilge pump housing with your fingernails, then hold onto it as if for dear life while you shimmy and shake and swear and suffer and slowly back your way out of the hole. All the while, the steering cables digging into your left armpit.

Matt didn't get a picture of me halfway in the hole, but he did get this shot of me in between a couple of forays down below:

Once I'd pulled the pump out (losing a hose clamp and a basket strainer into the bilge that I'd have to go back for in the process) I pulled it apart to see what was the matter. For all my poking around, it looked to be in good order. Holding it to the battery terminals, the pump functioned perfectly. Clearly the flaw was elsewhere.

Working my way back up the system, I found the problem. There, just under the deckplates in easy reach and ready view, were a pair of crimp connections that were badly corroded. Once I'd replaced the crimp fittings, everything ran perfectly. So in essence I'd spent two hours risking cuts and scrapes and the structural integrity of my spinal column in the deepest darkest dirtiest part of the boat when all I had to do what cut a couple pairs of wires and reattach them. Shit.

The coolest part though is the pair of bruises I got that match the steering cables I was laying on:

Awesome!

Stay tuned for more...

Haulout and Rigging Repairs for the Heart of Gold

For those of you who don't know, back in March I took the Heart of Gold to downtown Petaluma to go out drinking with some friends.  I like to bring the boat downtown because it puts me within walking distance of all of the shops, restaurants, and bars (or stumbling/crawling distance as the case may be).  Unfortunately, as I made my approach to the D Street drawbridge, the bridge tender didn't tell me that due to some sort of controls problem, the bridge hadn't opened all the way. 


Even though I've taken my boat through this same bridge many times (often at higher tides) This time I didn't have quite enough clearance to pass under the bridge.  Instead, I caught the forestay on the bridge.  Since I was trying to avoid holding up traffic on D Street, I was moving pretty quick when it hit and the impact was enough to tweak the roller furler, mangle the bowsprit, and snap the welds that held the mastead to the top of the mast.  The mast itself may have been bent beyond repair as well.


Luckily nobody was hurt.


Having a potentially broken mast and a bunch of wrecked rigging means no sailing.  No sailing means my sailboat is basically not a sailboat.  This will not do.


The plan was to take the boat down to the yard for repairs as quickly as possible.  The only problem is that not long after the whole fiasco, I was shipped off to Japan for Operation Tomodachi.  Then I came back to the crazy schedule I needed to run in order to be ready for Maker Faire.


Finally on Monday I set out from the Petaluma Marina with my father aboard, bound for Svendsen's Boat Works in Alameda.  I picked Svendsen's because back when I was a 14-year old sea scout, they gave us a good deal on the haulout when we were working on the old wooden 45-foot picket boat that became the Sea Scout Ship Compass Rose.  I liked the facility and the location and felt like it was a good idea to go back there.


The transit down to Alameda was pretty unremarkable.  Dad and I left the marina at about 1030.  Three hours later we were finally clear of the Petaluma River channel and in fairly open water.  When the waves started picking up, things got a bit interesting for a moment.


Back when the masthead broke off, it was held in place by one of the old wire halyards that had hooked itself across the top of the mast.  In the calm water of the Petaluma River, it's stayed in place for the past three months.  Once we were in a bit of a rolling sea, the broken masthead finally started to work its way down the wire halyard. 


The main problem with this is that it might eventually decide to come down altogether.  In the process, the roller furler for the jib would kink or bend and possibly tear up the jib itself.  Turning for a favorable wind, I managed to get one of the rope halyards wrapped around the upper spreaders and pull it tight enough to hold the damaged rigging in place.  If the rigging didn't look messed up before, it definitely looked bad now:


While I was monkeying around with all of that, Dad was at the wheel:


Early in the afternoon we passed Red Rock:


As we entered the open Bay, I was glad to see that the weather was fairly calm:


In case anyone's wondering how I could've hit a bridge, I'd like to point out that it's very difficult to guage how much clearance your mast will have while standing in the cockpit.  So when the bridge is opened up, you have to trust that the operator has indeed opened it as far as he needs to in order for you to pass under it.  To illustrate this point, here's a shot of my mast as I was about to pass under eastern span of the Bay Bridge.  In this case I had about a hundred feet of clearance:

It still looks like it's about to hit.

Having passed safely under the bridge, we made our way down the Oakland Estuary toward Alameda.  Along the way, we passed Coast Guard Island:


After a bit of looking, we finally found our way to the dock at Svendsen's Boat Works and moored.  Here's another shot of my jacked-up rigging:


As we left the yard, a lone raven stood watch in the yard:


The next day I got the first call from the yard with their initial range of possible damage estimates.  I'd rather not post numbers, but suffice it to say that their worst-case estimate was about half of my total earnings from last year.  Thank goodness I have insurance.

Stay tuned...

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I Hate it When My Head Gets Clogged

The word of the day: feculent.


The other day I woke up on my boat and, as often happens first thing in the morning, I felt the sudden urge to go to the head* to sit down and catch up on my reading.  I ended up taking a number four** and when I got up and stepped on the flush pedal I was mortified when there was no flushing.  No flushing at all. 


On the boat I have a vacuum flush system.  This means that there's a ball valve at the base of the bowl and a vacuum pump and tank downstream in the plumbing.  It's a pretty foolproof system.  When working properly, stepping on the flush pedal opens such a powerful vacuum source that there's an audible rending of the air around the bowl itself.  Your ears pop and, if your mouth happens to be open when you flush, you may actually have the breath sucked from your lungs.  It's all very satisfying.


So you can imagine my dismay when I stepped on the pedal and nothing happened.  Not only did I miss the satisfaction of having my daily intestinal sculpture evacuated into some far away place where it would no longer offend anyone, I was also filled with dread at the thought of the repairs that I would get to peform on the system itself.


What follows is a tale of filth and flatulence, the slightest word of which could harrow up your soul.  There's also pictures.  In order to spare those folks who might have just eaten a meal, the rest is after the jump. Click "read more" if you dare...

Stopping By at Moss Landing

Coming back from my sister's place in SoCal, my folks decided to stop and visit my old marina neighbor Levon.  He and his wife have moved their boat to Monterey and are now living aboard in the Moss Landing Marina.

Once we got there, the girls wandered off in one direction while I wandered the docks with my father and Levon looking at the wild selection of boats:


The view at Moss Landing isn't the greatest:


What is great though is the wildlife.  Right outside the marina is the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.  This is a massive area where fishing and other harvesting is prohibited.  As a result, there is an overwhelming proliferation of sea creatures.  While we were walking around I stopped to watch a sea otter cracking open crabs and eating while floating around on his back:


While I was watching the sea otter, I was being watched as well:


I could've spent hours there just snapping away at all of the random critters, but it was getting late:


I'll have to make a road trip down that way again soon.

 ,

Temporary Neighbors in the Marina

Normally the Petaluma Marina is a pretty quiet place:


So it's usually pretty interesting when I go down to my boat and find something new.  The other day, I arrived at my dock to find these lovely ladies:

On the left is the scow schooner Alma, a nineteenth-century workboat typical of those that would haul cargo up and down the Petaluma river over a hundred years ago.  She is now owned and operated by the National Parks Service and is homeported in San Francisco.

On the far side of the dock is a traditional Chinese junk.  Next to the Alma it looks like not much.  But once the first batch of elementary school kids had laid aboard Alma and she got underway, the second batch went aboard the junk and started hoisting sail:



Both vessels spent a couple of days at the marina, offering tours and educational trips for local schoolkids.  Then they went up the river to the turning basin for the weekend where they were open to the public to come and look around.

Neat!

Unseaworthy Vessel of the Week

The other day I was walking along the docks in Angel Island's Ayala Cove when I spotted what at first glance appeared to be a nice, clean, new sailing yacht. At first it looked like a trim and well-equipped boat, the kind of vessel that was ready to weather the passage to the South China Sea without much more than a quick trip to the supermarket for provisions.

Then upon closer inspection I noticed the name:


Clearly this is the boat of a complete moron. I'm sure the owner felt very clever in the brief moment of sober clarity when he came up with this name, but no. Someone who can't even take the naming of their boat seriously should reconsider being in, on, or around water before their nincompoopery gets them killed.

Lots of Catching Up to Do

It's been quite a while since I posted.

In that time I've been all over the place, doing all sorts of things, with all sorts of people, and ended up a year older.

I'll try to explain in detail in the next couple of days.

Sailing With Rich

Quite some time ago my friend Rich was bitten by the sailing bug. Some time later, I purchased the Heart of Gold. While he's asked several times to go sailing with me, he's been stationed in the Far East ever since I bought the boat and I'm not about to singlehand all the way to Japan just so we can dawdle around Tokyo Bay for an afternoon together.

Then a couple of weeks ago he called me and mentioned that he was going to be stateside for a bit. He planned to boondoggle a few days in the Bay Area and asked if I'd be up for going sailing. Given all of the little things that are wrong with the boat and all of the big things that are stacking up on my to-do list, I hesitated for a moment. Fortunately, reason found its way into my head and reminded me that I bought the boat for sailing and I never get to spend enough time with Rich anyway.

When I say there were little things wrong with the boat, I have to place emphasis on the word "little." The most significant concern was a dead light bulb in the anchor light. Fixing it meant going aloft all the way up to the tippy top of the main mast and unscrewing this little fitting:


It wasn't until I'd hoisted myself all fifty or so feet up that I realized that I went all the way up with the wrong size bulb. The bulb I had fit in the socket, but there was no way to put the cover back on over it. Good enough.

I was also having a few issues in the engine room. Here's a picture of me having issues in the engine room:


Other than that, the only things I needed to do before getting underway were replacing the little shackles along the foot of the main and mizzen sails and finding a new home for these little guys living inside the cover for my mainsail:


All too easy.

WEDNESDAY: Singlehanding to the South Bay

0630: Reveille

0720: Underway for pumpout station

0820: Departing Petaluma Marina under power

0850: Proceeding downriver under power/sail

1112: Passing channel markers 9 & 10:


1303: Moored at Loch Lomond Marina in San Rafael for fuel. I took on a total of 105 gallons of diesel fuel, so it gave me a few minutes to chat with the guy working at the fuel dock. Turns out he's a Vietnam veteran and he and his wife live aboard a sailboat there in the marina. Nice guy.

After settling the bill, I walked ashore to grab lunch. On the way I felt like somehow I was being watched:

The guy at the bait shop says this bird's name is "Nasty."

1400: Underway from Loch Lomond

1616: Passed the only commercial traffic I've seen all day:


As I passed Raccoon Straits, I got a good shot of the fog coming through the Gate:

1859: Entering Oyster Point Approach Channel

As I motored into the Oyster Point Marina, I found the guest dock completely full. With no other idea of where to go I went ahead and tied up at the fuel dock.

1914: Moored at Oyster Point Marina

When I had the boat tied up, I walked up to the harbormaster's office to find that there was nobody there. I called the number posted on the door and got a machine, so I figured I'd just stay at the fuel dock overnight and take off when they opened for business in the morning. At this point, the only thing I needed was a shorepower connection so I could charge my battery banks and call it a night.

For some reason it seemed that none of the shore power outlets that I tried were working. I was in the middle of trying to find a working outlet when I was interrupted by one of the more annoying phone calls I've received in years. It got me so spun up in fact that I completely failed to notice the rather simple detail that kept me from being able to plut in. Note to self: recognize the worth and value of caller ID.

At some point while I was messing up my shore power, I noticed that a harbor patrol officer had shown up at the harbormaster's office. When I walked over to check in, he pointed out that I needed to move to a different slip and it was time to cast off again. Somewhere in the conversation he expressed a bit of surprise/concern that I was moving such a large boat singlehanded.

"It's no big deal as long as you stay ahead of things," says I. I'm still convinced that's true.

So I shoved off and headed to the docks at the far end of the marina where the officer told me to find an empty slip. The only problem was that there was no empty slip. I didn't find this out until I'd turned into the 45-foot wide passage between the docks. This is where it's worth pointing out that my boat is 41 feet long. For a lesser mariner, turning a single-screw boat around in this kind of cramped space would be nigh unto impossible. For me it was just a matter of concentration and control.

Still, in the five minutes I spent backing and filling to turn the boat around, about a dozen residents of the marina started popping up everywhere to stand and stare and wait for me to collide with something. Several of them even brought out big rubber fenders just in case I crashed into their boats. I'm proud to say that I managed the turn without coming within 18 inches of any boats on either end. I rock.

Then it was time to motor to the other end of the marina where the harbor patrol officer emphatically assured me that there were in fact empty slips. As I turned down another row of slips I found him standing at the end of one of them. That's when he asked me how wide the boat was.

"She's thirteen and a half feet on the beam," says I.

"Oh," says he, "these slips are too small, but there's wider ones over that way."

So it was time to make another tight-squeeze-U-turn. Once again I ended up with an audience of paranoid boaters standing by to fend me off if things got too close.

As I headed back toward the main channel at dead slow speed, I was looking out for the officer to wave me into a slip. He didn't pop out anywhere until after I'd passed him. This meant that I'd have to back up, twist the boat to point toward the slip, and then keep control of the headway with the wind pushing me forward to prevent crashing into the dock. Meanwhile, another crowd had gathered on the dock, worried that someone with a big boat and only one person on board was about to wreck their floating homes. Fun.

Everything went well at first. I backed the stern into the wind, pointed the bow into the slip, and started creeping forward, checking the headway against the wind. In fact, it was all going perfectly. Then one of the marina residents "helped" me by grabbing one of my docklines and pulling my bow toward the dock on the starboard side.

With the unexpected spin, I didn't have time to keep the stern from swinging to port. Then the wind caught and swung me faster sideways as the stern was pushed. I ended up bumping the dock pretty hard amidships on the port side. It left a pretty noticeable skid mark, but at least there was no real damage.

2053: Moored. Again.

I can't really complain about the well-meaning folks who helped make up the boat once I was alongside. I had it handled all by myself, but I can understand why they'd be worried that something was about to go wrong.

Sometime later Rich called to let me know that his flight was delayed. His new ETA at SFO was 0045 on...

THURSDAY: Northbound with Rich

Rich got to the boat at about 2am. We sat and chatted for a while, but I can't for the life of me remember what we were talking about. I was well overdue for some rest at that point.

0400-ish: For no earthly reason, Rich is awake and alert.

0630-ish: The saner member of the crew wakes up to find a warm, calm, and overcast day with a bit of a breeze from the West.

0830-ish: Returned gate key to the harbor master.

0842: Main engine light-off

0851: Underway

0912: Main engine shutdown. Underway under sail.

It was a nice, calm day on the bay:

1410: Passing Under the Bay Bridge:

As we passed between the city and Treasure Island, we got a great view of the fog rolling in through the Gate:
The nice part about sailing the bay on a Thursday was that there were hardly any other boaters out there. Here's one of the very few (six at the most) sailboats we saw all day:
It was a great day to be out though, despite the whisper of fog:

It was a bit warm in the south bay, but the fog helped keep things cool as we crossed the slot. In fact, at some point we had to start adding layers of clothing to ward off the cold.

1543: Passed under the San Rafael-Richmond Bridge, to windward of Red Rock.


1759: Approaching Anchorage. We decided to end the day at anchor off of China Camp. Unfortunately the area is perilously shallow for a boat with the draft of Heart of Gold, so we had to make the tradeoff between potentially grounding in calm but water close to shore or in spending the night in choppy water farther off. We ended up with six feet of water under the keel when we set the hook, so I suppose we could've gotten closer in than we did.

For dinner, I grilled a couple of steaks. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting to buy a set of steak knives for the boat. Fortunately, I still have my KA-BAR combat knives that I picked up in Afghanistan. Rich didn't complain:

I used the bigger one for myself:

After dinner we sat around in the cockpit, telling stories, trading jokes, and finishing off a bottle of pinot noir.

It was a good day:
FRIDAY: Up the River

07??: Reveille, a nice, gray day:


The day started with me cranking out a couple of omelettes. When making omelettes, I like to impress myself by flipping them over with a deft flick of the pan rather than using the more pedestrian spatula method. Because I savor the opportunity to impress people with my trivial skills, I made a point to show off my omelette flipping for Rich

ME: Did you see that?

RICH [smugly]: Yeah. It looked like you were about to float test an omlette.

Some people just find no wonder in the world.

With breakfast finished and the dishes securely piled in the galley sink, it was time to get underway. Rich took the helm and I headed forward to drive the anchor windlass. On my way up I snapped this pic:


10-something: As we started heaving in, it became immediately clear that we were going to have trouble. The wind and the current were running in contrary directions. This meant that the wind was pushing the boat one way above the water and the current was pushing the other way under the water. As a result, the anchor chain was trailing from the bow under the length of the boat.

The first idea was to turn the boat around by hauling up the mizzen sail and pointing the boat into the wind. This proved impossible and all we ended up doing was going in circles around the hook as the wind and the current took turns as the main driving force moving the boat. After the seventh or eighth lap, we decided to just lower the sail, start the engine, and motor the stern around into the wind so we could haul in the hook against the current.

Once we had the anchor in sight, we turned toward the wind, hoisted the mizzen, unfurled the jib, and shut down the engine. The plan was to sail across the current and into the wind until the tide turned, then follow the wind and current up the river to Petaluma.

Rich spent much of this time at the helm while I kicked back and handled lines:


1418: Passing Markers 1&2, Entering Petaluma River Channel

1612: Passed an unorthodox boater in the river:


1805: Enter Petaluma Marina

1819: Give up on holding tank pumpout system, underway for berth.

1823: Moored.

1830: Main Engine Shutdown

In the end we managed to get there and back again with no major injuries or damage to the vessel or crew. I can't express how nice it was to be back out on the water for a little while.

Now back to my regularly scheduled life...