Author Archives: Brenda

Hello Autumn Days

Posted on by under anchoring, living aboard, Musings, photos

“The days pass happily with me wherever my ship sails.” – Joshua Slocum.

For these past several weeks, our ship sails the waters of the California Delta. Fed from the Sacramento River, the Georgiana Slough is our anchorage for now. The rich agricultural history of the Delta is still here: Pear farms, grapes, fields of ripe tomatoes, corn ready for harvest stands dry and golden in the fields. New Delta friends tell us that in the days gone by there were packing sheds alongside the sloughs and docks everywhere because the fruits were taken to market on the rivers and sloughs–not by truck. Today, we see the farm trucks going by with their loads of hay, grapes, tomatoes, and other good fare. Heavy equipment on the levy road; it makes me smile and remember growing up in a farming community in Indiana. River otter, mink, muskrat, woodchuck, familiar furry neighbors. The birds overhead include eagle, falcon, swallows, phoebe, egrets, heron, and the usual assortment of songbirds and unidentified little brown birds. Fish jumping, big and small, but no anglers are successful in luring them to hook. I call out to the passing fishermen “did you catch anything?” and I hear “no, not today” even as I see a big fish jump near Mahdee.

Slough sounds and sights from the dinghy:

The evening sun shines over the slough side and onto the calm waters.

Blackberry days are over and the rose hips are the autumn gifts to the birds and canoeists along the slough-side.

Beryl’s new bird-watching spot is just outside the companionway door.

The ending of yet another beautiful day on the water.

On The Georgiana

Posted on by under anchoring, News, photos, sailing

This is an interesting and peaceful place to be. We have Mahdee tied into her spot 6-ways-to-Sunday. Well, two anchors and four lines to shore (to four different trees, two of those…big trees!). Our GPS shows us moving, oh….maybe a foot! David is teasing me about our situation but I like it alot. The brow/swim platform is down, Tinker in the slough and we can enjoy swimming, rowing, or if we feel like it take out the canoe. So far we’ve been empathetic to Beryl’s desire to keep the canoe on deck where she can sit under the shade of it and enjoy watching everything around without a creature knowing she’s there.

Our new spot for now:

We’re quite close to Walnut Grove, so on Thursday afternoon I rowed us up to the town center for a late lunch. Well, it turned into an early dinner instead. I thought it would take maybe 30 minutes when we left in the late afternoon. However, I’d forgotten about that little thing called “currents” which always flow downstream in the Georgiana and the winds were pretty strong blowing, strangely enough downstream as well. I managed to get a blister on my palm from rowing hard for the mile and a half to our destination in town. And even so, it took us an hour to get there. All I could think was “so nice it will be on the way home! I’ll drift!” David enjoys my rowing. I enjoy my rowing, usually, but this was a little much.

On the edge of town, there’s a lovely little floating home that I had to take pictures of as we went by:

We visited Mel’s Mocha and Ice Cream as our meal location. It’s a fun little shop, good ice cream and sandwiches:

One of those places with too many choices:

And great signs like these:

And after a “Grand” sandwich, a Sprite, and a dip of Mocha-almond-fudge ice cream, I was wired for the trip home:

We futzed around Walnut Grove drifting on the Sacramento River, watching the sun lower over the trees and fishing boats.

The row (drift) homeward was calm and surreal.

You see unexpected things here. I saw a motorcycle with sidecar sitting under a tree on the levy as we drifted downstream.

I wonder what we’ll see next?

Picking Up The Mail

Posted on by under food

Well, the nice lady at the Walnut Grove Post Office said our general delivery package arrived on September 6th and, well, wouldn’t we like to come pick it up? So we promised her we’d be in on Monday the 16th. I am super excited to add another of Monica’s knitting wonders to our boat.

Our days of easy blackberry picking over, David made one last dash to the patch yesterday morning in the canoe. Upon his return, we hauled in the anchors and followed another boat out of the Potato Slough so we could learn the “short cut” into the Mokelumne River from the South. There are a couple sand/mud bars that run down the middle of the lower Mokelumne River, some with tule tufts atop, some without. When we visited the Delta in 2010, we stayed to the NW channel and followed close around that W side of the River until entering the Georgiana Slough. This time, we were taking the SE channel and following it up around until almost the Georgiana Slough. A new Delta friend assured us they’d never seen less than 7′ or so of water in this section. I saw 6′ on the charts and made a mental note that we’d just make sure our exit from the Potato Slough was at +1′ tide (roughly noon).

The winds were up in the high teens as we entered the San Joaquin River, so we were crabbing our way along the narrow channel following the petite Mary Joy when I suddenly thought “how smart is this to follow a boat with a three foot draft (board up) through the shallows?” and just about then, the FLS was blinking red-red-red all around, the depth was showing 6’10” and then I could feel Mahdee’s 6’4″ draft drag across the bottom, but thankfully we kept moving along and the depths increased to more than 30′ almost instantly. Ah, sigh.

As we continued on up around the bend, I started getting worried again when instead of making a hard jog to the left to avoid a big area that the charts show as 6′ deep and having a wreck in it, our friend led us onwards. David was at the helm and I watched the FLS. Sigh, good depth of 11 or more feet all the way through.

The remainder of our trip was pleasant and uneventful. We anchored as far up the Georgiana Slough as was practical without being in the town of Walnut Grove. We are about a mile from town center. The slough has roadways on top of the levies on both sides and it would have been quieter about 2 miles from town where one side is a farm road. The shorter walk warranted the increased traffic noise. The trees are bigger in this area and overall it is prettier, too.

The view off the port stern side of the boat is of the open waters of the Georgiana.

Beryl was much more interested in the view off the starboard stern where little fishes might lurk in the shadowy waters below.

The view towards the front of the boat from the cockpit is also nice.

While Beryl and I were inspecting and photographing the views, David was eating a dinner of…blackberries, of course. This time the recipe was to eat Ikea Knackebrod Flerkorn/multigrain crispbread with a blackberry-beef-walnut-almond-salad spread made with honey, mayo, and a bit of balsamic vinegar. Yummm…

After a refreshing night’s rest–the boat couldn’t move more than a couple feet in any direction since we had bow and stern anchors combined with bow, stern, and mid-ships lines tying us to big trees on shore–David walked into town and retrieved my general delivery package. He also stopped by a little butcher shop and bought the first fresh meat we’ve had in a couple weeks. So it was Yummy decadent mushroom and onion hamburgers for lunch.

I opened the much awaited general delivery package and said “wow!” Here’s a photo of the awesome afghan that our friend Monica made for cold nights aboard Mahdee:

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