October 13th, 2006: Fort Bragg, CA to Sausalito, CA
Author: Adam/Kris
Our original plan was to stay in Fort Bragg until Monday morning, when we would receive our forwarded mail and leave on the noon tide. Well we forgot about Columbus Day and the mail didn’t arrive until late Tuesday afternoon. On the bright side, this gave Adam time to have Fisheries Supply overnight a replacement tiller pilot to us (much less expensive than anyone in the bay area, btw). Huge props to Fisheries Supply! We also made use of our free time by finally installing our lifelines and clutches for the main halyard and reefing lines. We departed Fort Bragg for San Francisco at 8am on Wednesday morning, on rather calm seas with 5-10 knots of wind. San Francisco was just 27 hours away.
Adam calibrated the tiller pilot and, given the lack of a sailing breeze, put it to use. About an hour into our passage we encountered a pod of Pilot whales, which we had never seen before. Several hours later we found that we were still successfully motoring using the self-steering system. The oar, which Adam had lashed down much firmer than before, didn’t pop off and the tiller pilot was working as expected. And so went our entire passage. Our sailing breeze never came so we motored down the coast. This time was spent monitoring radar, GPS and charts in the cabin, scanning the horizon every 15 mintues, and watching episodes of Arrested Development on the laptop. This was by far the most luxurious passage that we’ve made thus far. If we’d had a sailing breeze it would have been darn near perfect.
Sausalito is a bit of a sailor’s Mecca, being home to a wide variety of boatwork facilities and multiple marinas. Of course Sausalito’s inherent geographic benefits have always been the primary attractor for sailors: close proximity to the ocean, excellent shelter from inclement weather, an extensive natural anchorage, and a nearly constant sailing breeze. The stunning view of the San Francisco skyline isn’t too bad either.
We had been informed by our friends Meghan and Jeremy that the Sausalito Yacht Club is generous with their mooring balls during non-peak times, and when we arrived in Sausalito we took up a mooring ball next to their boat Madeline. The SYC is kindly letting us use their dinghy dock and exceptional facilities.
We have been in Sausalito for a few days now and are really enjoying it. Sausalito is definitely not the most inexpensive place we have been but by being frugal we have managed to keep expenses down. Sadly our linkage issue has reappeared. This time it is the throttle that is coming loose. The result of this is that when we try to snuff the engine by pulling the throttle back to the point where it depresses the engine kill switch it doesn’t work and the engine just idles happily along. Since we have a loose pulley in the base of the pedestal and repairing this issue requires slackening the cables we figure we might as well tackle the steering quadrant issue while we’re at it and in a place where facilities for these kinds of things are ubiquitous.
As a result of our leisurely pace we’re thinking we’re going to skip much of central California. The tentative plan currently is to leave the bay on or around Thursday and make passage straight to Monterey where we will spend two days and see the famed aquarium. From there we will either just blow past point conception and stop in the channel islands for a night before making a long passage to San Diego. We have set an arbitrary goal of Nov 4th for our arrival to San Diego so we can see our friend Harry and also to speed us to our second and last arbitrary time goal of Thanksgiving in La Paz. Our first visitor from home is coming to wherever we are on Thanksgiving and we want that to be La Paz. This is a very aggressive schedule when you consider the uncontrollable variables. If we have bad weather or a major failure we’ll always elect to miss our dates than to take unnecessary risks. If we had a guarantee that everything would work and the weather would cooperate this would be an easy schedule. We are really looking forward to being in Mexico and enjoying a couple months of leisure before we have to move on due to weather.
So far we have left every port with a better boat than we arrived in and have been very fortunate to have mechanically uneventful passages .
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