Oct 19th, 2000
| We had two good, hard-working weeks in San Francisco Bay. Our friends, Jim & Fran Moyer, loaned us their car for the entire two weeks and that enabled us to get a tremendous number of errands done as well as some sightseeing. We had not expected to stay for two weeks, nor had we expected the Monitor windvane upgrade to be so expensive ($1037), but the windvane refurbishment required both the time and the money and it all turned out well in the end. | ||
 Sunset from Active Light at the Berkeley Marina. Just a bit to our left we could see the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. |
We stayed at the peaceful Berkeley Marina on the south side of San Francisco Bay. We were lucky to have found it, since the other marinas were pretty full. There was a supermarket and a laundry nearby and we soon learned our way around to the various marine supply stores. We even found a Costco. We did not yet know that Berkeley would be the last good-tasting water we would find on down the coast! The very first day we were out in Jim's Volvo wagon, the Monitor vane got loose in the back, an arm swung over and shattered the right rear window, so we got to fix that! We delivered the vane to Scanmar Marine and went to work on the many repairs and upgrades to Active Light. | |
| We were impressed by the SF Bay sailors, that they sailed so frequently "no matter the weather", always sailed their boats right into the marina, sometimes even into their slips. There were a lot of J24's in this area. We were also surprised that the bay in front of the Berkeley Marina was so shallow, average depth being around 8 feet. This is the area where the famous Berkeley Olympic circle (sail race course) is located. The wind usually blows pretty strongly in the afternoons in the bay and in this shallow water, things get pretty choppy. There are about 1000 boats in this marina and 95% of them are sailboats. We could always see boats sailing and racing, many of them pretty high tech. One of the boatyards Neil wandered into had Peregrine and Raging Bull (two famous racing sailboats) up on cradles. The decks were covered with full time boat guys polishing and rigging. Most of them seemed to be Australian or New Zealand types and were fairly pleasant. | ||
 Nancy in front of the Robert Mondavi winery. |
We took a day off to tour the Napa Valley wine country and it was great! We stopped at two wineries, Robert Mondavi and Clos Pegase. We took the official tour of the Mondavi winery. Neil embarrassed himself by asking the tourguide about the addition of sulfites in the wine, . . . she was offended and sidestepped the question. The sunshine and light are wonderful in this valley. It seems to be forever sunny and really looks as good as it does in the photo. You can just barely see the shape of a Dale Chihuly sculpture hanging in the archway over Nancy's right shoulder. Robert Mondavi is around 80 years old, still drives a Cadillac like a bat out of hell, allegedly never fully finishes a meal and drinks a bottle of wine each day, according to the tourguide. | |
| We learned something about the wine-making process. The wine grapes tasted surprisingly sweet as they were harvested. The barrels are bought from a French maker and used for only a certain number of years before they are sold to Costco for planters. The process where they fire-char the insides of the the barrels is interesting to see. | ||
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Amazingly, the tour ended at the Mondavi retail store, where you could purchase the wines you just tasted for about 25% above retail cost. We have to say the wines were wonderful, a great deal better than the stuff we usually drink. We sampled three wines, but we can't remember what they were. We wondered how the tourguide could come up with all the verbal descriptions of the things we should be tasting in the wines, . . . smoky, scent of ancient apricots, nutty ambience, etc. It was good wine though. We bought a bottle of chardonnay at the Clos Pegase winery. Both wineries had beautiful grounds and buildings festooned with lots of mostly modern sculptures. Some of these were whimsical, usually having something to do with winemaking, some were really interesting. We saw two Dale Chihuly sculptures on exhibit. This one was hanging outside in the main archway of the Mondavi winery. Neil kept wondering, given the dry and dusty soil, how they ever kept it clean. | |
 Another Chihuly glass sculpture in the Clos Pegase winery. Nancy's daughter, Shawna, had told us of the many sculptures in this winery. |
 The Napa Valley soil seems dry and sandy. These vines are about four years old. |
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 Nancy and a bear sculpture in granite at the Mondavi winery. A pretty nice mild abstraction, eh? |
 Neil models his thumb for a bronze sculpture at the Clos Pegase winery. |
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 Neil puts the reconditioned Monitor vane back together on the docks at Berkeley Marina the morning of our departure from SFB. We filled the tanks with good Berkeley water, motored to the pumpout station. |
Back to work on the boat, we spent an entire horribly messy day cleaning the diesel tanks. We installed an inspection port, pumped out all of the diesel, scrubbed the tanks, and filtered the diesel as we put it back in the tanks. What a mess! We finished that job about 10:00 PM. We got the reconditioned Monitor wind vane back on Friday afternoon, September 29th and Jim joined us as crew for the trip to Monterey. We left the Berkeley Marina around 11:00 Saturday morning and thus began the first of the two most embarrassing moments of our trip thus far. Our start was late and the tide was well into the flooding cycle and the wind had started to blow pretty strongly. Our "strategy" was to motor directly into about 20 knots of headwind until we were in the lee of Alcatraz Island, then cut over to the San Francisco waterfront, to get out of the flood current and sneak along the waterfront in the lee of all the tall buildings until we were almost to the Golden Gate Bridge. Understand that between the two, Jim and Neil have almost 100 years of sailing experience! Somehow, in a classic "Who's on first?" dialogue between Jim and Neil, we found ourselves wedged very tightly (like ten feet!) between the shore (a cement pier) and the oncoming very fast downwind finish of a large high tech sailboat race. | |
 Boat one has finished, boats four and five across have a red and yellow spinnaker. Nancy managed to snap this photo of the finish. |
These boats all had sponsor advertising on their sails, and lots of crew aboard, most of whom were looking at us, wondering what the heck we were doing there as we tried to squeeze by unnoticed! About the time the lead boat screamed across the finish line, we heard lots of applause, we looked up to our port side, and there on the pier high above us was a grandstand,TV cameras, and a crowd of onlookers cheering on the finishing boats. The first three boats to finish went by all right, we managed to just squeeze past them. But boat five decided to crowd boat four toward us to windward to steal their air, forcing boat four to squeeze Active Light, motoring hard to windward, up against a cement pier! It was a "heart in throat" and embarrassing moment. | |
 Active Light leaves San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. |
Getting past that problem, we pushed on out the Golden Gate Bridge, this time with no fog, to run into pretty light and fluky winds. We sailed a little bit, but mostly motored through a rolly afternoon and night to arrive at Monterey Harbor with the dawn and fog. Regrettably, our friend Jim had to leave us in Monterey and fly back to San Jose. We stayed two nights in Monterey, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row trilogy town. We enjoyed touring the Monterey Aquarium and walking down the scenic, historic waterfront. We left Monterey about midweek to encounter another hard, rolly, foggy night passage to Morro Bay, CA. We are getting tired of these long, cold, wet, windless, rolling night passages by now. It seems not a good way to circumnavigate this watery planet. Little did we know things were about to change. |
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| We found Morro Bay to be delightful. The Harbor Patrol police were actually quite nice to us. They allowed us to anchor out with several other cruisers, for no charge, near a sandbar directly across from the town center. They let us use their phones to log on to the Internet to get our email. We could walk to an Albertson's about one mile away, we used the computers in the public library to join the Seven Seas Cruising Association. | ||
 Active Light aground at about 2300. The tide dropped another foot and a half after this. We were afloat again by 0700 next morning. |
We attended the weekend Harbor Festival and had ringside seats aboard our Active Light for all of the music. It was a delightful harbor, so we stayed for five nights and rested. On the third night there, however, we had our second "Most Embarrassing Moment" of the trip. We were visiting some friends on another boat from Canada, only to return and find Active Light had drifted over a sandbar and was stuck fast and heeling in an ebbing tide. We were too late to free her, so we hunkered down and spent a MISERABLE night heeled at a measured 45 degrees! It was a most benign grounding, a very still night, with no damage except to Neil's pride. But it was still a lousy experience. Leaving Morro Bay on Columbus Day, we topped off our fuel tanks. The kindest fellow at the fuel docks not only let us take our time filling our tanks in ten gallon increments so we could mark a measuring stick with notches to enable us to know our fuel level, but he also gave us a basket of cherry tomatoes. If you ever visit the Shell fuel dock at Morro Bay, do something nice for the fellow with the gray beard. |
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 Leaving Santa Cruz Island after another rolly, but acceptably quiet night anchored off a shore where we could not land. |
We motored past Points Arguello and Conception during the early hours of the morning. Point Conception is called the "Cape Horn of the U.S. Pacific Coast", it supposed to be a sort of milestone in the voyage down the coast. What it meant for us is it was our last night passage to San Diego and the weather changed for the better. We arrived at isolated and lonely San Miguel Island at dawn and tucked into Cuyler's Harbor for a day's rest. It was pretty rolly and we were not allowed to go ashore, as it is a Nature Conservancy, but there was nice scenery anyway. It was nice to be away from civilization for a while. We were to learn that most all of the Southern California shore is either private land or part of a nature preserve. | |
 Arch Rock at the eastern end of Anacapa Island. |
In general, our feelings about Southern California are that there are just too many people. It is sometimes a bit harder to find friendly people here. We think the high population density brings pressure to bear on the environment, requiring enactment of so many restrictive environmental protection laws. It is a beautiful land with a benign climate, but when Californians move to Washington state, they must think they are in heaven, . . . they can buy a house twice as nice as the one they sold in California, they can anchor almost anywhere, go ashore almost anywhere, the drinking water doesn't leave a bad aftertaste in your mouth, . . . and people will even speak to you on the street! | |
 "Betty" aloft for the first time, October 11th, 2000. |
The most amazing thing happened leaving San Miguel Island. The wind came up astern at about 10 knots, the skies were blue, the seas calm, and we had almost three consecutive days of SAILING! We broke out our new asymmetrical spinnaker and were able to maintain 5 to 6 knots with only 5 knots apparent wind over the deck. We named this beautiful (and expensive) lightweight sail "Betty" after Nancy's mother because she "always gets us going" when we are just sitting around! (Hope you're not offended, Betty, we intend it as a compliment.) We like this sail a lot. We can carry it in up to 15 knots of wind and with the ATN snuffer sock, it is easy to get up and down once it is on deck. The hardest part is wrestling it up from down below decks in the forward cabin. It is a huge sail. We sailed to the south end of Santa Cruz Island, anchored for the night, then had a glorious all-day reach to Redondo Beach. We stayed there one night, anchored out inside the harbor and sailed again the next day for Catalina Island. | |
 The quasi-tropical, crowded, lovely Catalina harbor of Avalon. |
At Catalina, we had the honor of taking a mooring outside the harbor, in the open roadstead north of Avalon, rolling all the time, for $16 per night. We stayed two nights and loved it. What a tourist mecca! There were big expensive yachts, each with an owner reading the New York Times on the afterdeck with a cell phone glued to their ear, cruise ships (Nancy calls them "Love Boats"), palm trees, and lots of great people-watching to do. There were lots of German and Mexican tourists. We walked the entire tourist row along the waterfront, went into every boutique shop, bought tee shirts, ate fish 'n chips, had a pistachio waffle ice cream cone, and laughed a lot. On the beach in front of our mooring was a nightclub which had a good salsa band Saturday night. We decided it was the best of all the many shoreside bands we have heard this Summer. | |
 Avalon tiles lining the boardwalk. |
Nancy especially liked all the tilework that lined parts of the shoreside walk. These depicted various aspects of island life and history. She also liked the street paving which was done in interesting artistic patterns with bricks and stone. She keeps planning things she wants Neil to make for our driveway when we return home and build a house in five years and ten months from now. Neil says he really looks forward to it! The water was really clear, we could see the bottom detail at 30 feet depth. Neil went swimming for the first time this trip in 71 degree F water, . . . scrubbed the grass off the bow waterline which formed because we came down the coast overburdened, and discovered the protective zinc on the propeller had eroded away already. That is a mystery! | |
| We tried repeatedly to reach our son, Ron, to tell him about the diving and beautiful clear water, but he didn't answer his phone all weekend. We wonder what a young man of 30 could be doing if he is not home early Sunday morning? | ||
 Avalon street paving, . . . all the streets were not this nice. |
We stayed two lovely nights at Catalina Island and had another great sail with the big asymmetrical spinnaker, to Oceanside, where we took a slip and caught up with about three weeks of laundry. We used an electric pump we have on board to pump all the Morro Bay water from our tanks and replaced it with the somewhat better Oceanside water. We had a late night fish 'n chips dinner at a small diner and spent our last night out on our way to San Diego. Next morning we took on two blocks of ice at the fuel dock and began the 40 mile motor into a light southerly headwind, through many, many kelp beds and lobster buoys to San Diego Bay. |
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 Our home for two whole weeks, tucked in behind Harbor Island, downtown San Diego, next to the airport,. . . what did you say??? |
We arrived at about 1600 and after not too much hassle, we found ourselves safely anchored, with permit, in about 12 feet of water behind the east side of Harbor Island, just south of San Diego International Airport. According to our measure, an airplane lands or takes off from this airport every 80 seconds. Many of them make a great deal of noise. The landings are not bad, it is the take-offs that are so loud! However, the anchorage is free, reserved by the Harbor Patrol especially for the Baja Ha Ha participants. We are in the company of like-minded, south-bound voyagers, who, like us, are entering upon this high-risk activity, willing to risk injury, death, loss of personal property and our hearing faculties in the pursuit of adventure. The anchorage is calm and we are learning our way around the local bus transit system. | |
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Next time we write to you, it will be from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The Baja Ha Ha Race/Rally begins October 31st. It is a 750-mile sailboat race down the Baja western coast, with two stops along the way, . . . at Turtle Bay and Bahia Santa Maria. The race is supposed to be pretty relaxed, but just between you and us, we intend to win it! Any two sailboats going the same direction constitutes a race to Active Light, and here we will have 185 sailboats in the race. See you there and wish us luck! |
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Nancy and Neil S/V Active Light San Diego Bay, CA |
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