Sail Cutthroat

Cutthroat Adventures 2009

21 July 2009

City Time in San Francisco

San Francisco is a beautiful and vibrant city with so much to offer. Too bad its smack in the middle of one of the most liberal parts of our country…way on the extreme side of the loony left. If you didn’t know where you were; however, you might think you are in a foreign country as one rarely hears English spoken. Bringing you back to USA reality – are the vast numbers of Obama/Biden 2008 bumper stickers. I guess they need to remind themselves frequently of the fact. I think we’ll all be reminded as the small business entrepreneurs disappear, our redistribution of wealth plan continues, and the middle class can no longer get the health care they are paying for because we’re providing it to the people in our country who are here illegally. Yep, change you can believe in.

Okay, that was my political diatribe for the day. Back to San Francisco…we’ve enjoyed the past week here. Charlie and Kathryne pretty much had free reign of the city with their unlimited bus/trolley passes. They returned safely to the boat each night…so all is good in the world. I hope Kathryne knows and appreciates how having her big brother with her gave her access to this crazy city that she otherwise wouldn’t have had. She would have been at my good mercy and seeing how I consider shopping and being a tourist forms of torture…she would have been tethered to the boat.

As I think I previously wrote, we are right next to the Sea Lion docks at Pier 39. For those of you who have visited San Francisco you have probably been to this area and gazed upon the cute little Sea Lions listening to their “baraking” and watching them frolic amongst themselves…when they’re not just laying there in some form of sleep. It is amazing to observe the entire scene from our new perspective…their neighbors. Yes, they “barak”, howl, yap and make a variety of ungodly noises at all hours of the day and night. Occasionally, they fight… over the females. Then it gets really loud. I also think they have a “time out” area – the boat docks. Actually, it might be the winners circle because there will be a mass migration of one large sea lion accompanied by several (usually 4 – 5) smaller ones, the females no doubt. The little harem is thus formed and everyone sleeps again…on our dock. The group leader is local legend and his name is Chewbacca. The other night, Rob got a text message from one of the marina people, a German girl he met at the marina laundry/lounge room. She said that Chewbacca was at the top of one of the docks blocking passage. Apparently he had been in a fight and had a pretty good size chunk taken out of his little paw, and wanted someone to help him. Since there is a sea lion marine help desk onsite, he was at the right place. Yet, another advantage of our new proposed health care system. Chewbacca pays nothing, gets the care he needs and “we the people” foot the bill. At least until he gets to a certain age, then he may have a problem. Did I forget to mention how much they smell? Not pleasant…

We also celebrated my birthday while we were in SF. We were lucky enough to catch up with some of our San Diego Friends from the marina where we both parked our boats. Scott and Jennifer moved up to San Francisco a couple of years ago, and it was great to get to see them and enjoy dinner. They were very helpful in directing us towards some of the needed marine services when we first arrived.

18 – 19 July 2009 – the weekend…

Since we were so close to so many beautiful things, like the California Wine Country we rented a car for the weekend and drove up to Napa and Sonoma Valley’s to renew our love of the California Wine Country. Charlie had not been up there for many years and Kathryne had never been there. Now wine tasting is difficult at best with two minors so while not much of that was accomplished we did enjoy the beauty of the landscape and the vast number of vineyards in the area in such close proximity to a major city such as San Francisco.

On Sunday we took the opportunity to visit with some First Command friends in Sacramento. We spent a delightful day at Bob and Elaine Swete’s home with Dave and Maria Thoreson. It was just like old times – amazing how the years do little to change the relationships that were strong. You just pick up as if that time had not elapsed at all. We had a wonderful visit and got to share some of Roger’s cool video’s of our passages.

We had a crew change prior to departing Pier 39. Alas, it was time for Charlie and Kathryne to head back to sunny Florida. Kathryne has to be at her high school Freshmen Orientation on the 1^st of August. Charlie wanted some time to reconnect with his friends before heading back to start his junior year at Stetson University. So they left us knowing that their brother Rob was safely aboard to continue our final leg of this adventure back to San Diego.

Our sail was returned, we got that up the next morning before the winds started howling as they usually do in San Francisco Bay, and Thursday found us on our way to the San Francisco Yacht Club in Belvedere Cove in the town of Tiburon. We cruised around Alcatraz and up the north shore of Angel Island prior to heading to the SFYC. We were going to go to Ayala Cove on Angel Island to hang on one (two actually) of their moorings, but it looked way too hard to make that work without a lot of effort. They require that you pick up two moorings, one fore and one aft. You have to point in a specific direction…northeast to southwest. Now the winds blow out of the west, and the current is running at 4+ knots from the west. So it’s pushing you sideways on both counts. Too hard unless we uncover and launch the dinghy. I could just see us being the afternoon entertainment in the cove…at least until the next boat arrived to replace us. So yes, we’re lazy and after all it is only a nature preserve – a place where they have beautiful trails to explore…and there’s a ferry to get you there from Tiburon if we were so inclined. So we headed back out of Ayala Cove and off to SFYC where there was a nice quiet dock right at the entrance to the bar of a beautiful yacht club. It’s a sailors’ yacht club too and they were preparing for a regatta this weekend, so there was lots of activity going on, not to mention the junior sailing program with their Ospreys and Club 470′s,and abundance of 505′s and even two J24′s for the more advanced kids…although many of them appeared to be about 10 years old. With all the wind and currents in the Bay and an active sailing program, they raise some incredible sailors here. They have to be tough, with the cold water and air, high winds, etc. Sound like fun?

Saturday, 25 July 2009

We wanted to time our SF Bay departure to catch the very end of the ebbing current and hit the Golden Gate Bridge just as the flood began. Good plan, but it didn’t quite come to fruition. Roger identified a couple of little last minute engine maintenance issues to remedy prior to departing and then all the racers were heading out of the very congested little marina basin. So, we waited until all the activity subsided and that put us about an hour behind schedule. In actuality, it worked out well because there was also a negative tide putting us in very shallow water exiting the cove. I would rather fight the current rather than scrape bottom…it’s so embarrassing when that happens especially with all the little racers out there. So we fought the currents exiting the Bay and just got a much longer last look at the Golden Gate Bridge as we left. While it wasn’t as sunny as it was upon our entrance, we still had a great view of the Bridge and both the City and north shore sides of the entrance. One of the racers (another group near Point Bonita) reported a boat on the rocks in their vicinity. The Coast Guard pulled five passengers off of her before trying to get the boat off the rocks. We never did hear the end of that saga but it reminds me of how treacherous an area it can be with the currents, and shallow bars just off shore. The further south we go, the less we will encounter these bars. As a matter of fact, Morro Bay is about the last one we will enter. Of course right after that we round Point Conception which is known as the Cape Horn of the West Coast. Fortunately, the weather outlook for the remainder of this week looks very good and we anticipate a quiet and uneventful passage.

We arrived at Half Moon Bay around 4:30 PM, fueled up and took a slip nearby. This marina is full of commercial fishing boats. It was quiet, friendly and cheap (gas and moorage)…all in all a great place. Unfortunately we planned an early morning departure so we didn’t see much of what is described in the cruising guides as a lovely, quaint little town. We’ll have to take their word for it.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Departed Half Moon Bay around 7:45 AM along with the some of the fishing fleet. It’s slightly over 60 miles to Monterey and we want to arrive in daylight, and preferably while the marina staff is still working. The predicted winds imply that we will be motoring most of the way, at least for the morning hours until the prevailing NW winds come in…which should still be fairly light today making the probability of a real sail, not very high. Less than 10 knots of wind right on our butt just doesn’t work for the mighty Cutthroat. We arrived in Monterey around 4:30 PM taking a slip for the next couple of days. Roger was out and about on Monday morning and just happened to run into another old First Command compadre, Bob Flowers. He and Ruth joined us for cocktails aboard Cutthroat that evening. It’s truly a small world!

Monterey is a beautiful little town. It has a rich seagoing history and a world-class aquarium that we were fortunate enough to visit during our stay. I’ll add some pictures from there to the Gallery. Although seeing how long it’s taken me to get this blog posted, don’t hold your breath!

That takes us to the present. We are in fact in San Diego as of 1100 AM this morning. But given the fact that change is the only constant aboard Cutthroat, I’ll leave the rest of the story for another posting that I promise to crank out in the next few days.

Until then, hope everyone is well and enjoying a beautiful summer wherever life takes you.

Elise, Roger and Rob

s/v Cutthroat