We currently plan to sail back out of San Francisco Bay on the morning of September 30th. While Nojan works on an engine fuel filter change (and I stay nearby to be ready with things like the garbage bag or towels and tools as needed), I thought I’d write up some notes on what we did with our time here.

As noted in my previous post about considering going up the delta, we are from this area so we don’t feel that touristy here and there’s also not a ton of stuff we are nostalgic about. The main reasons we expected to stay in this area for 4-6 weeks were (1) spending time with family in the area before potentially not visiting much at all for several years, (2) having a place we are familiar with so we could focus on any boat maintenance/upgrades we wanted to do rather than being distracted by exploration and (3) we don’t want to get to Mexico before mid-November so even leaving San Francisco Bay now gives us plenty of time to explore the CA coast on our way down.

Even though our primary goal was not tourism/exploration, we did expect we’d do some. One thing notable about SF Bay compared to Puget Sound is that there aren’t as many places to go comfortably anchor for the night and not as many sort of interesting little state parks to go on shore and explore from said anchorages. As a consequence, much of the boating here comes in the form of going to stay at another marina for a while.

We spent our first week here at Schoonmaker Point Marina in Sausalito. When we first arrived, we knew our friend had arranged for us to be able to stay at the Marin Yacht Club in San Rafael for the month of September, but Schoonmaker wasn’t sure we could stay there until we headed north on September 1st. Luckily some space freed up and we didn’t have to change marinas our first week.

During our time in Sausalito we spent a lot of time cleaning and reorganizing the boat post-passage and got a bit of exploration in taking long walks to shops, restaurants and bars along the Sausalito waterfront. We visited the Bay Model which is a fascinating (and free) attraction maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Before modern computer models of the tides and salinity were completed and calibrated, this huge physical model of the bay and the delta system was used to help engineers model the impacts of complex decisions regarding water flow around the area. Another key destination for Nojan in Sausalito was to visit the No Name bar. He had memories of going there back when he lived in the area and we spent one Friday evening there drinking on the back patio and talking wild sailing stories with a local old salty guy. From Sausalito we took both Nojan’s parents and my parents out for some very short sails on the bay.

The trip up to Marin Yacht Club on San Rafael Creek was a bit hairy. We had to motor through a narrow (100 foot wide) channel that is said to be dredged to 2.5 feet at MLLW. That means we needed the tidal height to be over 3 feet to safely get in and out of the marina. On September 1st we went in at a 4 foot tide and had over 20 kts of gusty wind on our beam. The channel is well-marked but because of current and wind one needs to point outside of the channel to keep the boat going straight down the channel. Our Raymarine chart plotter was an invaluable tool in helping us to keep our effective course (including being set by the winds and current) within the channel. I carefully watched the course while Nojan watched our depths. We saw as shallow as 7.8 on our depth meter at the entrance of the channel where there is some known shoaling. We were quite relieved when we turned the corner from the channel into San Rafael Creek and then went into Marin Yacht Club where our friend was waiting to direct us into the slip he’d arranged for us.

Marin Yacht Club has been a very wonderful place to stay. Unlike some of the East Bay marinas we had been considering, MYC is very protected from the high winds experienced in the bay. Winds are typically so low in this area that we only heard very minor slap of loose halyards against masts on 2 or 3 nights we were here. The club graciously welcomed us to their amenities including Friday and Sunday night dinners and bar as well as use of the swimming pool. If you are a member of a yacht club with reciprocal privileges here it’s worth considering a stay for some calm nights. In terms of shopping and restaurants, it’s about a 1.3 mile walk (or potentially splashy dinghy ride) to Andy’s Local Market at Loch Lomond marina to the east or a 1.3 mile walk to a shopping center with Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods to the west. Just a little further to the west is downtown San Rafael with all its shops and restaurants.

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Downtown San Rafael also has a station for the SMART train which has three other stops of interest to us: Marin Civic Center, Downtown Santa Rosa, and the Larkspur Ferry. The Marin Civic Center is itself a point of interest for tourism as it is the last major Frank Lloyd Wright public building which you might recognize from the film GATTACA. It hosts farmers markets and is next to a large park which also hosts monthly antique markets and other events. However, we like that stop on the SMART train because it is walking distance from where Nojan’s parents live. They were happy to come and pick us up at the marina, but we enjoyed getting our walks in by walking 1.6 miles to the San Rafael Transit Center and then walking 0.8 miles from the Marin Civic Center Station to their house. Right now the train is not running on Sundays due to lower ridership during the pandemic. Pre-pandemic it had a couple trains scheduled on Sundays designed for helping people get to the airport in Santa Rosa.

One Tuesday we took the train to downtown Santa Rosa to do our obligatory pilgrimage to Russian River Brewing to have some of our favorite beers: Pliny the Elder and some of their Belgian sours. We ordered some food and each got a big tray of tasters. Nojan got the full set and I got “only” the California ales. I regretted this as we recalled that while their IPAs are good, their sour Belgians are really some of our favorites. After our time at the brewery tap room in downtown Santa Rosa we went into an antique mall and happened upon an old issue of Time magazine dated on the exact date of my parent’s wedding that I bought to commemorate their 50th wedding anniversary. Taking the train up to Santa Rosa was pretty fun because it took about the same time as driving but went along a path that showed us more of the area’s sloughs including the Petaluma River and Petaluma Marina.

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As we met more people at the Marin Yacht Club we got more comfortable with the risk of going in and out of the narrow shallow channel and finally decided to make an outing to Angel Island. Visiting Angel Island by boat involves a few options: (1) anchor in a couple coves that have depths that drop off quickly so you risk problems with your anchor setting and have a lot of passing boat wake (2) tie up to the docks at Ayala cove and pay for day use only or (3) use the mooring ball system and pay for overnight stay. Learn more here: https://angelisland.org/visitor-information/boating-camping/ We chose the third option which involves needing to tie both bow and stern to a mooring ball. This setup allows for far more boats to use the cove and not swing around in the winds and currents but it is also very challenging. We found some websites and YouTube videos with advice. We probably took about seven attempts at tying up before we finally got it to work. First we were using a line that was too short and had to keep letting our stern line go as we couldn’t make it to the bow buoy. We got a longer line an then realized we needed to be pointing towards the current more and essentially drift down onto the buoy we were aiming for at the bow. Finally, after our fourth attempt we noticed that the set of buoys we were trying to use seemed to be slightly farther apart than another set and we tried the other set instead. On that set we got really close our first two times and finally go ourselves attached on the third try. If we had been really dedicated to tying up comfortably, we would have gotten on our dinghy and run a second stern line so we could have one from each of our stern cleats but we were fine with just one stern cleat tied to the aft buoy.

Angel Island itself was great to visit though neither of us felt like walking the full circumference that day. It would be a great place to visit with bicycles. There are also some unpaved dirt paths for hikers. We walked the hilly paved road up and over to the United States Immigration Station. https://www.aiisf.org/ I’d never been to Angel Island before but Nojan came here for some day camps and other activities as a kid. Since then there have been some major investments in preserving and telling the story of the USIS. We were able to learn a lot of history from outdoor signs and exhibits. The immigration story on the west coast includes a lot of difficult and important history such as the Chinese Exclusion Act as well as the separation, extended detention and questioning of non-European immigrants before they were allowed to leave Angel Island. There are also deer and birds as well as really wonderful views all around San Francisco Bay from the hills of Angel Island. During the night tied up the mooring balls in Ayala Cove, we are pretty sure our keel sank a little into the soft mud but it wasn’t a problem as we didn’t plan to leave until the tide was higher.

Another overnight trip we took on the boat was to South Beach Harbor marina to go and see an afternoon Giants game against the Padres. My parents came over and stayed on our boat in San Rafael the night before the game then we motored over to SF the morning of the game, stayed overnight at South Beach Harbor after the game. The game was a baseball game. I was there with three people who like baseball. On the trip over I was looking forward to having some cotton candy but when the cotton candy guy came to our section I changed my mind and got kettle corn instead. The cotton candy was so big and we were sitting in the sun so it no longer appealed to me. The morning after the game we went to Lambretta cafe to get coffee and saw the vintage scooters. Heading back to San Rafael there was enough wind to sail back really quickly. Both days we had to keep out of the way of multiple races going on as part of the Rolex Big Boat Series on SF bay. We got to watch some pretty intensive boat-on-boat action and managed to stay well clear of the different fleets. Only had to turn away from the course once.

The weather was cooler in San Francisco the day we saw the game and it was with hopes of more cool weather that we returned the next week planning to get a nice bowl of ramen at one of the better ramen places in town and some Mission-style burritos from El Farolito. We walked the 1.6 miles to the San Rafael Transit Center again and and took the train one stop in the other direction to the Larkspur Ferry. The walk from the train to the ferry was probably over half a mile and then we took the ferry in to San Francisco. The ferry building on the Embarcadero has lots of interesting shops. We thought we’d go to a museum at the Golden Gate Park before getting the ramen for lunch. We found out that the California Academy of Sciences admission is nearly $40 per person with taxes now and decided it wasn’t worth it for us. We weren’t in the mood to see any art museums either so we walked to Kaiju Eats ramen and izakaya on Geary in the Richmond area near USF (where Nojan went to law school). It was not as cool as the week before (the weather site says it got to 86F in SF that day) and luckily the walk didn’t take us over the big hill by USF so we weren’t totally overheated by the time we got to the ramen place and were able to enjoy our steaming ramen. Then we started walking fairly aimlessly and getting very warm going up and down hills in parts of SF neither of us had been in before. When we got to the Castro we wanted some cold drinks and just could not find anywhere with iced tea. I got a cold brew coffee and eventually we found a place with some nice iced hibiscus tea for Noj. After cooling down we found a beer garden and had a couple beers. Then we decided we still had some energy so we found a GIG car rental and drove it to the Mission and had El Farolito burritos. After that we walked to a place that had a bus that would take us all the way back to San Rafael Transit Center. We didn’t walk all the way back to the marina after that – instead used Uber or Lyft or something like that. All told we walked 10 miles that day.

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Our final boat outing from San Rafael was last Thursday when we finally decided to head up the delta. We didn’t go very far up the delta. We stayed one night at Benicia marina and visited with my cousin and her family. Benicia is really nice and I’d recommend staying there. We were there on a Thursday night and saw the local fleet go out for their weekly race series. We were considering continuing on to Suisun Bay and trying to anchor along one of the sloughs but with forecast high winds in the afternoon and not being able to find really great information about recommended approaches to anchoring there online, we just decided to head back to Marin Yacht Club rather than risk grounding, snagging the anchor, or having anchor drag issues. I’m sure one can probably find some guide books that help with this. If one wants to go further up the various sloughs and rivers there are some docks and marinas to choose from too. We also still had our to-do list waiting for us and decided we wanted to spend more time with our parents before leaving SF Bay. So choosing not to go up the delta had a lot of pros and not a lot of cons. Another Coho Ho Ho boat went much farther but they have a slightly shallower draft and had been really wanting to go up there.

So now we feel we’ve seen enough stuff and more important done a lot of boat upgrades and maintenance and are well-rested. We currently plan to head to Sausalito on the 29th and leave the bay on the morning of the 30th, going out far enough west to avoid the breakers and potentially dangerous conditions of the shoals off the west side of SF before turning south for a short sail to Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay. We are thinking we will stay in Half Moon Bay only a few days before heading to Santa Cruz. Our scheduled dates get less clear after that. Many in the Coho Ho Ho fleet that we left Seattle with have already gone well past Monterey seeking “warmer weather.” I’m quite happy to stay in the cooler central California coast a little while longer.