Solla Sails (whew!)
The boat sails; she sails well in fact, and now that we’ve serviced the heat exchanger she motors well too! But wait, there’s more…. nothing broke or failed to function! I’m happy of course, but I think “relieved” is the chief emotion 🙂
The “tune-the-rig” sail with our rigger and friend Barrett didn’t end up happening (no wind, and I’m giving him little welding lessons so we did that instead). The following day, New Years Eve, Deb came and we got off the dock around 1130am. The tracking device in our Wirie that I got working that morning performed beautifully, and you can see the route we took for the day. There wasn’t a ton of wind, but enough that we could get both sails up and kill the engine. And when we were in Raccoon Straits and the slot we actually got ‘er up over 7 knots! You’ll see we’re cold in the pics, but that’s San Francisco sailing for ya.
I had gotten us a permit to anchor in Aquatic Park for the night. When we anchored Deb and Harry rowed to shore to pick up Chris. We have the wrong size of oars for our dinghy – it is a royal pain in the arse to row that thing especially with a strong current, but they made it work. (Including a 2nd round trip by Deb & Chris for more libations). It was a GORGEOUS night with a very full moon and pretty sunset. They boys grilled big meat; Deb and I made grilled veggies and a salad. Our meal was superb.
Unfortunately only Harry managed to stay awake for the fireworks…he said they were amazing, even took pictures, but alas, Harry has a flip phone, so the pics, meh.
We were greeted in the morning by all kinds of New Years Day activity – a small drum circle, hundreds of row boats, kayaks, and other small craft heading out of the park, swimmers and other sailors in their dinghies passing by and saying hello. Maybe an hour later all those row boats escorted tons of swimmers back into the park… they had swum from Alcatraz and were on their first leg of a triathlon! (nutcases all of them! the water is ~50 degrees!) We had a leisurely breakfast, weighed anchor and motored toward home.
The bay was a glassy lake; not a breath of wind. But the clouds and fog burned off as we got closer to the east bay, and it actually turned into a really nice day. I am already missing Deb and Chris like crazy with our looming departure, so spending all this time with them was a real treat.
In my first post I talked about making our way to Half Moon Bay the following weekend, which is today as I’m writing this post, so obviously that didn’t happen. Life, ya know. We’ve talked about next weekend, but here’s the deal: 1. HMB in a slip is the same price as Emeryville. 2. I have high speed wired DSL here in Emeryvillle so I can confidently work remotely and, Netflix. 3. Har needs to spend 2-4 weeks at his mom’s place doing stuff he’s promised to do before we leave-leave. I’m not feeling real keen on kickin it by myself in foggy/cold/wet HMB for a month with crap internet away from my friends, just for the sake of being there. So, I’m advocating for beginning of February-ish. I’ll keep you posted 😉
