Ah, finally, alone with Mahdee. David left for Florida on Tuesday. He and his sister are having grand times fishing, boating, swimming, et al, in the Florida heat. Mahdee and I are have grand times doing pretty much nothing. Every day I work a bit on her foresail cover –until the winds get too much and then I either sand a bit of something that needs a bit of varnish or I put another coat of varnish on something that I sanded and varnished the day before and is ready for another coat. Very nice. The routine can change to where I clean something, then try to work on the cover, then do some varnish. That’s how it goes. In the evenings I watch a Redbox DVD “chick flick” that I know I could never get David to watch with me. I also have been catching up on my correspondence as well as Wooden Boat Forum reading and posting there. David will be back on Tuesday. So, Mahdee and I are having great times until he returns.
Category Archives: misc
Paradise Cove on the Tiburon Peninsula for a day of baking
We enjoyed two lovely nights in the Montezuma Slough. We anchored in a wide and fairly protected part of the slough–not an official anchorage at all, but a place where no other boats were passing through and where we felt our single anchor would have no problem holding with good scope and swing. When the winds weren’t howling away at us, it was wonderful, peaceful, everything was just beautiful. I’d look out and around and sign in contentment stating it was just wonderful. When the winds came up, at first it wouldn’t be noticeable but slowly both David and I would be a bit more and more tense until finally, I’d be saying “oh, this is horrible!” and thus the time passed between perfect and horrible in the Montezuma Slough! The bipolar experience was funny and we laughed about it.
Because David will be flying out to Florida for a week and I will be alone on the boat, we decided to move Mahdee into a marina. The friendly and inexpensive marina at Brisbane is very close to the San Francisco Airport, so we decided to go there. We figured we’d anchor Mahdee in the Mare Island Straight on Saturday afternoon and David would retrieve Buttercup (our car) from the giant parking lot for the Vallejo:San Francisco ferries and position the car in the Brisbane marina. So, yesterday he did that, riding his folding bike the 11 miles from Brisbane to downtown San Francisco and the ferries to return to us via ferry in the afternoon. He had a great ferry ride across and up through the Bay. Lots of big wind and waves and recreational boats doing crazy things. Just the sort of entertainment he likes.
We left out of the Mare Island Straight early this morning with the ebb tide helping us out. Big winds clashed with an outgoing tide so the Pinole Shoal was a bit choppy. Mahdee is a champ motoring and we motored along at 8 knots really only effected by the big waves as we just got to the beginning of the San Paublo Bay. We were followed by a trawler (about our size and matching our speed) which was constantly covered in crashing waves up to their second deck level. They looked to be a displacement hull, but the two boats, motoring, were experiencing the conditions quite differently. I certainly liked our situation better! Our plan was to set sail from the area of the San Paublo Straight on south. However, by the time we were closer to the San Paublo Straight, I’d convinced David for us to stop in the pretty setting of Paradise Cove so I could spend the afternoon cooking and baking on our wood burning stove rather than sail further down to anchor just outside the channel at Brisbane and do the same. It’s not pretty at Brisbane. It was a good idea; we spent our fine Sunday afternoon sitting in the charthouse with the binoculars looking at all the lovely sailboats being heeled over and rounding up in the wind gusting. I made chicken curry, crumb cake, and brownies and we drank hot cider as the surprisingly cold winds blew. We were circled by a cute Nordic Tug which seems to have come across the bay for the only reason of circling Mahdee and then going back home. They waved as they circled and went on their merry way.
The Delta Part II
Oh, what fun…
It was a (not unexpected) 2 am “move the boat in the pitch blackness” exit from that anchorage. Must say that I cannot believe the anchorage is actually included in a cruising guide. I’ll have to track down the cruiser who showed me the guide and get the author name/info to share that this is no longer a reasonable anchorage to use. It probably was…maybe 10 years ago before some of the slough silted in and directed quite a bit of currents through the anchorage location. I guess I need to get myself over to the cruising wiki and put in some info, huh?
Well, I was (as usual) doing my night-long anchor watch since I can’t sleep when I’m worried about our holding. Looking at the gps track on the little Nokia N810 screen and taking a quick look around outside every few minutes, I could see that the stern anchor was way off to our starboard side and thus the outgoing tide was pushing us sideways towards the shallow edge of the slough. What I couldn’t see (without going outside to the foredeck and it was cold and windy so I didn’t go there) is that the bow anchor was also having the same problems from the same direction. Then, the bow anchor seems to have dragged off its shallow muddy bar into the deeper area where the boat lay at anchor. That shifted the entire boat aft about 30 ft and to port about 15 feet which showed up on the GPS immediately and put us within about 8 ft of the edge of the slough behind us–when I looked outside, I knew we were grounded since I’d done lead-line soundings (from the dingy) all around the boat earlier in the evening. Durn.
I started the engine, woke up David and told him we’re grounded, and headed outside to figure it out and try and get us off the ground behind us before we ended up further aground. Thinking: Shoulda just anchored in the major portion of the slough itself (used by boaters coming and going and well, that’s bad form to anchor in what is essentially a channel) instead of trying to use this tuck-away spot which clearly had as much (or more) current going through it as any other portion of this slough. This is NOT an anchorage!
We ended up, within a few short minutes, motoring off the mud bar that had been to our port side which we were pushed upon by the ebb tide currents (thank goodness for a stout strong engine and soft fluffy mud), miraculously turned the boat in the too-tight anchorage, her bow sweeping over the other mud bar (to starboard) and motoring into the main channel’s eddy swirl by the cut between two sloughs. Within 10 minutes we’d selected a spot in the middle of the channel about a quarter mile away and dropped a single anchor, counting on the strong currents to keep us parallel to the shorelines in the narrow area until daylight in 3-1/2 hours. We were able to quickly haul in our main anchor (a 105 lb CQR that I’d wondered how we were going to get off that shallow mud bar) but decided it best to leave behind our stern anchor and rode to be retrieved in the daylight.
While the un-grounding and re-anchoring was very quick and we didn’t seem to damage anything (need to dive on the boat in clearer waters) nor lose anything but sleep, several things conspired to make this experience vexing for me:
On the way out the door, I’d not turned on the back light for the depth sounder (mounted inside but viewable from the helm) so I couldn’t see our actual depth (duhh!);
I’d not taken the hand-held GPS outside with me to see our actual position in the dark (another duhh!);
Our compass (in cockpit binnacle) is unlit and I couldn’t see it w/o a flashlight;
We don’t have a rudder angle indicator and I couldn’t see my marking of “king spoke” on the wheel hub in the dark. There was no marlin wrapped around the king spoke–I’d started varnishing the wheel the previous day so no physical landmarks on the smooth shiny wheel. Because it takes so many turns lock-to-lock, and one can lose count of the turns, I usually open the lid of the steering box anyway and take a look at the worm gear to figure out rudder position when working quickly in tight quarters.
To see the compass and inside the steering box at night, I typically have a little led flashlight in my pocket. I was in my sleep shirt with a life jacket hastily thrown over it. No little led flashlight (another duhh!).
I had brought ouside with me a bright Milwaukee V28 flashlight (basically a spotlight but not quite) to use to view the worm gear and my surroundings but it immediately blinded me if I used it so I’d not have night vision for maybe 30 seconds afterwards.
Finally, vexing and inhibiting my ability to see anything: My very long hair. Usually tied back with a band, braid, or scarf, here I was hatless and the high wind whipped my hair into my face almost constantly. I was thankful of the wind as it was blowing us away from the shoal of the slough and away from the bar we were being pushed upon by the current. But even so–I couldn’t see a thing for all that hair.
We won’t even get into the issue of my less-than-stellar night vision which was even more hampered by having spent the previous day outside in the bright sun only shielded by a hat–no sunglasses.
Luckily, David has excellent night vision and, as a former Navy pilot, is used to protecting his night vision with sunglasses during the day and by not looking at bright lights at night. Unluckily, I’m the one with much more familiarity with our boat’s performance in tight quarters so I couldn’t just hand over the helm to him.
I finally resorted to shining my bright flashlight on a bit of reflective paint on an (uncharted) channel marker in the middle of the anchorage area. With verbal directions from David, and this guiding star, we quickly exited the anchorage. But, as soon as I could no longer gauge distance by seeing the little bit of reflection, I was hopelessly disoriented. David directed my actions–and his directions made no sense to me since I though we were in an entirely different place than we were and couldn’t see that we were being swept by the currents into the cut between two sloughs…but I followed his directions to get us away from the eddy and the heavy currents pulling us sideways. Once my night vision returned in about 2 minutes (after exiting the anchorage no more flashing the V28 to see both the channel marker and the worm gear position/rudder angle), I could see the sides of the slough, hubby could go to the foredeck and we could use our usual hand signals to anchor in the channel.
In the morning, David rowed over to retrieve the stern anchor (a 30-ish lb Norhill that we purchased for the purpose of kedging) which was easy to find because of the two fenders attached to the rhode. He had quite a time (in the dingy) getting it out of the mud bar that we’d dragged it into while turning the boat out of the anchorage. He used a rolling hitch with the dingy painter to eventually free it.
After having breakfast, we motored an hour or so over to a nearby “slough to nowhere”, the Montezuma, which has no through traffic, re-anchored, and enjoyed a windy but sunny day of doing..not much. We’re there now, rather wind-bound for a bit and finding no reason to move elsewhere other than the lack of cel phone signal. My Internet connection is via a tether to my cel. We hoisted the 1.9Ghz antenna up a flag halyard and it seems that I now have an iffy connection so I thought I’d post this update.
On our list of things to do: install light in binnacle. On my personal list of things to do before going outside at night–take my regular jacket with flashlight, turn on the depth sounder light, and tie back my hair! Also on my list–use sunglasses during the day to protect my night vision and do not use the V28 as a flashlight unless I really want to be blind in the night. We both agreed that we’d stick with our own impressions of anchorages–not what the cruising guides say.
Well, I’m running the Honda EU2000, doing a load of laundry (we got amazingly muddy from retrieving the stern anchor and washing the dingy afterwards) and catching up on my web surfing.
