Lyn's Log, 12th October 2008
San Francisco

Alameda, California
N37º47', W122º16'
19,190 miles.

After entering San Francisco Bay we sailed round to Sausalito Yacht Club, by this time in low cloud and drizzle, but, there on a buoy, were our friends from Port Sidney, Tony and Nancy, and we picked up a buoy next to them. We spent the evening in the yacht club bar sharing stories about the dreadful seas and weather experienced on the way down the coast. We also met a young couple from Holland, Hans and Rose, who had sailed in their racing style yacht The Wind Cries, from Holland, round South Africa to New Zealand, up to Japan and from there, straight across to Vancouver Island. They agreed that perhaps it was not the most comfortable of boats, but was fast. They had two gimballed berths and movable seawater ballast. They had some good home brewed beer on board as well.

Saturday we printed out maps and bus timetables and explored Sausalito waterfront. Sausalito is a very popular up market resort. We had been ‘California Dreaming’ and wondering whether to ‘wear flower’s in our hair’, but had not yet felt the heat of the sun, or seen any remnants of the happy hippy people of the 60’s. We met up with Angus and Rolande. They had moored their yacht Periclees at Alameda Island and taken their bikes on the ferry from there to San Francisco, cycled across the Golden Gate Bridge with some friends of theirs to Sausalito where we met, and were than going to take the ferry back from Sausalito. It sounded far too energetic for me. We took the ferry across to SF and caught the bus back.

John and Barbara, on Naida, arrived at Sausalito a couple of days after us and later moved on to a marina to do some boat work. Wednesday we went over to Angel Island where it made a nice change from the sea to walk all round the island. It took just two and a half hours. Thursday we sailed over to SF’s north shore to the Saint Francis Yacht Club. Here we met up again with Jan and Sean on Solana. They too had been holed up in Newport the same time as us. In the evening we found the nearest Safeway store and replenished our food store. Friday morning we saw the doctor and everything was progressing smoothly. The drug regime would continue as before and a new appointment made in Los Angeles. Then we explored some of the historical ships in the aquatic park before returning back to the yacht. We worked the buses quite well. Periclees arrived with Angus and Rolande and we spent the rest of the day exploring SF’s large China Town with them.

We had a great time Saturday afternoon at the SF Blues Festival. It is held annually in the grounds of Fort Mason, near the Aquatic Park. There were half a dozen groups taking their turn on the stage, all excellent, entertaining a park full of people sitting or laying on the grass in the sun, or dancing. It was certainly difficult not to move to much of the music. It was here that I probably found the aged hippies from the 60’s. Men with long grey ponytails and beards, some wearing bandanas, were losing themselves in the music. One group that Andrew had heard of before did not have drums or keyboard. They were Hot Tuna, consisting of bass guitar, ukulele, and acoustic guitar/vocalist, and were very professional. I’m often amazed at what a good guitarist can get out of his instrument.

Sunday we sailed around the island of Alcatraz, now of course deserted except for many tourists. With the wind blowing quite strongly from the golden gate bridge, we sailed just with the genoa. As we gybed round one end of the island we found ourselves in the middle of a large number of racing yachts, and a ferryboat. We and the ferry did our best not to obstruct too many racers but with the gusty winds around the island their yachts were lying right over and broaching, with their crews scrambling across the decks or getting their feet in the water. The excitement passed and we continued more slowly to a peaceful yacht club between the island of Alameda and Oakland.

The time just flew by. We spent just a couple of nights at the Alameda Yacht Club and then a long time in Marina Village Yacht Harbour. This was an enormous marina edged by a strip of park and apartments. It was cheap, with excellent amenities, and a shopping mall across the street. Here we met up with several other ‘snow birds’, and on our penultimate night, sixteen of us met up for a great evening in the local pizzeria.

We rented a car for three days and drove northeast out of Oakland, over the fertile valley and to Yosemite National Park. We took a walk to see a group of huge, ancient sequoia trees when we first arrived. We drove right through the park, above 9000 feet and gaining fabulous views of granite mountains and sheer cliffs. We drove out past the Mono Lake with its weird pinnacles of white rock, to the ghost town of Brodie high in the Sierra Nevada. A century ago this had been a thriving gold mining town of 15,000 people, but was abandoned in the 1930's when the mining finished. The surviving buildings have been left exactly as they were but weatherproofed. By peering through windows, many of the artefacts of home life, school life, shops and hotels, could be seen. It is amazing how people survived out there, miles away from any other civilisation. There is still only a dirt track to the village, and the temperature ranges from forty degrees in summer to minus thirty in winter.

We drove back through the park in the afternoon enjoying different views, and then up to Glacier Point, directly above the Yosemite village. This was the place to be to see the sunset, which was well worth the long drive there and back along twisting roads. The sights we had seen were so awesome we considered we had got the best out of out of our short visit, even without actually having entered the Yosemite village. The last day we drove over to the Napa Valley and made such good time that we were able to visit three wineries, tasting their wine and seeing how it was made and stored. We visited a family run winery called Goosecross; Sterling, where we were taken up to the large, Greek-style mansion in a gondola on a cable; and Beringer, where we visited the tunnels carved into the hillside to store the wine. Unfortunately we were not very taken by any of the wines, except there was a very nice port wine at Beringers, of which we bought two bottles.

Back on the boat we tried to sort some boaty things. We got some new wash boards made up for us to finish off, did some internal varnishing and painted the bilges ready to take future stocks of food. It took a long time to organise the purchase of an Iridium satellite phone but impossible to source a new log and depth sounder set suitable for a steel boat. Unfortunately the rate of exchange between the dollar and the pound is getting worse every day. Until a month ago it was 2.00 dollars for a pound. It is now down to 1.70 dollars. So everything is now costing us much more.

One day we made another trip over to SF city by bus, underground, and cable car. The public transport system works very well. We travelled on the ancient cable car across the city from Union Square in the south to the north shore, over the hills. We had lunch in a soda shop designed much as it might have been in the fifties with malts, milk shakes, burgers, and jukeboxes full of the old fifties and sixties music. In the afternoon we walked through the Golden Gate Park, round a lovely lake that had lots of wildlife, round the Japanese Tea Garden, and through the Conservatory of Flowers. Out the other side of the park we came to Haight-Ashbury, home of the Grateful Dead pop group, where the hippies hung out. There are still a lot of youngsters sitting around on the sidewalks and some strange shops along the street trying to keep alive the memory of the sixties.

Alameda was a pleasant island and the weather had been just perfect with hot sunshine and a breeze by day and cool nights. Whilst enjoying this, there had been some really nasty weather going up the coast, but Sunday was the day we snowbirds were leaving San Francisco Bay. The weather looked quite reasonable for several days. We were not in too much of a hurry as we would prefer to stay behind the "Baja Haha" a rally of 180 yachts which would be leaving San Diego on 26th October and sailing the same way as us down to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. Solana, Naida, Kristen and Ned on Bristol Blue, and ourselves left Sunday 10th October, and Peggy and Chuck on Alert left the next morning. Angus and Rolande had had to return home for a wedding and would not be leaving SF for another week. As we left the Golden Gate behind us, the Blue Angels (the US equivalent of the Red Arrows) began their air display by performing a loop the loop over the top of us before flying inside the bay for the rest of their display to honour Fleet Week.