The Golden Gate.

Few harbours can match San Francisco for its scale and spectacular setting, entered through the Golden Gate with its world-famous bridge, so narrow that for two hundred years it was missed by explorers travelling this coast.

First to do so was Francis Drake, who came this way in 1579 and anchored in nearby Drakes's Bay to make some repairs on the Golden Hind. Today, Drake's Bay is the last isolated and peaceful anchorage coming south down the west coast, before the hustle of the overcrowded southern California coast - in terms of both people and yachts.

Once inside the Golden Gate, having avoided the notorious "Potato Patch" in the entrance and negotiated the strong tides, we wondered where to go. The few marinas on the San Francisco waterfront are packed and very expensive, and so like many yachts we turned left into Richardson's Bay, where we picked up a mooring belonging to Sausolito Yacht Club. We were able to stay there for free for several days. Californian yacht clubs with their own marinas or moorings have 'reciprocity' agreements with one another to allow members to use each others facilities, a courtesy they were prepared to extend to us as members of English yacht clubs, though we were hardly in a position to reciprocate! We have novelty value because so few European yachts come this way. However, at Sausolito Yacht Club was the only other boat from Europe we met in 2008. Dutch couple Hans and Rose had arrived via South Africa, Australia, Japan and Vancouver. Their yacht The Wind Cries was their own design, looking like an overmasted tore-out course racer of the 1970's, with a daggerboard and moving water ballast, as unlike a conventional blue-water cruiser as we could imagine.

Travelling Companions.

Do not suppose that we had been lonely up until then. Cruising south down the west coast of the USA from Vancouver, we had found ourselves encountering the same yachts in each port we visited, until eventually there were seven or eight of us, socialising and sailing together. Like us, they were leaving Vancouver or Seattle and headed to Mexico for the winter - snowbirders they are called.

For most though, this was their first experience of long-distance cruising, the fulfillment of several years of planning. Boats were shiney and gleaming, not yet having acquired the knockabout look of long-term liveaboards, and a mistimed bump at a rough fuel dock still caused their owners much grief.

If they had been novices when we first met them, by the time we reached San Francisco they had become battle-scarred veterans, no longer phased by the thought of a night passage, or of continuing even when the new refrigerator broke down. But Mexico lay ahead, and the first encounter with an 'alien' country, where even the most rudimentary necessities of the boating life would be in doubt. Were we ever that way?

Customs.

For us though the first requirement was to phone in to Customs. We were obliged to do this in each major US port we entered: a rule for foreign yachts being enforced for the first time in 2008. Mostly it was easy enough, Customs staff found the new paperwork irksome, so just checked us on their computers and said OK. In San Francisco though, first the guy said we must attend in person. We pointed out that our cruising licence exempted us from having to do so. Having conceded this, he refused to check us on the computer, and we had to read out every last detail on our passports, boat registration and cruising licence while it seemed that he very painstakingly wrote them all down as our phone bill mounted. Finally he asked if we had anything to declare, and seemed surprised when we replied that if we had had anything, we would have declared it at our first port of call in the USA. This Customs guy must have had nothing to do.

The Bay.

San Franciso Bay is a huge cruising area. The main bay is divided into three by bridges. Just through the Golden Gate is the central bay, with Alcatraz Island in the middle (that dot on the map just north of San Francisco), the popular boating destination of Angel Island to the north, and Treasure Island to the south now forming part of Bay Bridge. We were fortunate to anchor off and hike the five miles around Angel Island just a few days before its woodlands were destroyed by fire.

South of Bay Bridge is a vast pool, becoming rather shallow towards the southern end. Alameda Island is a major yacht center, the channel on its northern side is a sucession of marinas from one end of the island to the other. To the north is another huge area, San Pablo and Suison Bays, leading to the 'Delta', a maze of navigable waterways and rivers. The total bay area is over 400 square miles and 270 miles of shoreline, while one can navigate 50 miles up the Sacramento River to California's state capital, Sacramento. Our pilot guide identified no fewer than 70 marinas and mooring places in the bay.

The bay is sheltered by the steep coastal range on which San Francisco and Sausalito are built, pierced only by the Golden Gate. The wind is funneled in through the Golden Gate and even when the rest of the bay is flat calm, sailing can be very lively in the central area, around Alcatraz island. At weekends it was packed with yachts both racing and cruising, more on the water than we have seen since the Solent: none more so than the day the Maltese Falcon arrived in the bay - to be T-boned by a local racing yacht! We were fortunate to avoid the same fate when we got mixed up in a race at their turning mark behind Alcatraz, where a sudden squall caused many to broach wildly out of control.

Fog.

San Francisco is notorious for fog, specially at this time of year. Locals told us to expect three foggy days followed by three clear ones. On the foggy days the sea-fog swirled in under the Golden Gate bridge filling the centre of the bay and smothering the lower parts of San Francisco until all we could see were the peaks of the skyscrapers. It usually missed Sausolito, but whispy fingers of fog would threaten along the peaks of the sea range above us until sometimes they grew strong enough to pour right over and smother the bay beneath. As well as unusual and at times spectacular, the fog was quite localised. When we moved to Alameda Island, we had none at all.

San Francisco.

Plenty enough has been written, sung and filmed about San Francisco for it to seem very familiar. We were fortunate enough to spend a few days as guests of the prestigious St Francis Yacht Club, and took the opportunity to tour the city. It seemed a little faded from its glory days of the hippie sixties, specially in the Haight-Ashbury district, but the extremely steep roads resulting from a grid laid out with no regard to the terrain, give the city a unique feel as well as creating its #1 tourist attraction, the cable cars, on slopes too tough for regular buses.

Some of the old energy is still there, specially around Chinatown, and we enjoyed the huge open-air annual Blues festival, though this too had an air of nostalgia about it, with a mostly middle-aged audience. The Golden Gate park on the western side of the city, reminiscent of New York's Central Park, was a pleasant surprise, and we particularly enjoyed the Japanese Tea Garden.

Afterwards, we moved to a marina on Alameda Island where to our surprise, most of our companion yachts from the north had also precipitated. The price, just $20 per day for a modern full-service marina, may have been a contributing factor.

From Alameda we took time out to see some of central California, including Yosemite National Park, and Brodie, a ghost town from the gold-rush days, 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.

Farewells.

After a final party of our yachts it was time to move on south. We had been waiting for the "Baha Haha", an annual rally of 180 yachts that goes south to Mexico, to reach their starting point in San Diego. Until then, every marina and anchorage en route had been full. The wind was again blowing hard in the central bay and we reefed right down, but clear of the Golden Gate it died away completely and the motor came on.

Farewell party aboard 'Bristol Blue'. Lyn cooked - the menu was shepherd's pie with spotted dick & custard!

Pilot Book: Don Douglass & Reanne Hemingway-Douglass Exploring the Pacific Coast, San Diego to Seattle FineEdge Press, 2003. (specially chapter 4).

Charts: Maptech Waterproof Chartset 1210: San Francisco Bay and The Delta..