Sailing Adventures of Rebecca and Crew

After enjoying a sunny Benicia day, we headed out around 9am on Monday for Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay.  Arrived at Raccoon Straights, and the mouth of Ayala Cove around 1pm; quick trip on a flood tide.

Marcus has fond memories of taking our kids on the ferry with their bikes and biking all over the island and having a picnic lunch. Although it was $30 per night for a mooring, we are pretty sure we will not pass this way again, well by boat anyway!  We made a pass to see how the mooring field was laid out and to watch how another boater was picking up a mooring.  A mooring is a big ball or something like that that floats and is anchored to the ocean floor.  Some have a big eye that you hook with a boat hook and tie your boat to; sometimes you are to tie bow and stern to separate moorings.  This particular configuration was bow and stern, and you had to “lasso” it and work your stern around tie to the opposite mooring ball. 

The initial catch was good, and we deployed the dinghy to secure the stern, however, with the current Marcus, rowing the dinghy, couldn’t pull the boat over to the stern buoy.   A friendly neighbor hopped in his dinghy, and helped us secure it, thank you new friend Jim!  We settled in for a nice late lunch.

Later we rowed in to pay our mooring fee and explored the island a bit.  Very nice, green and as it was late afternoon, the deer were out feeding.  Having no natural predators on the island, they were practically fearless.  There are great hiking and biking trails and the view of San Francisco from the top of Mt. Livermore is great.  Still nursing bad knees right now, will have to save that hike for another day.

Dinner of left over Chinese food from Benicia, and we settled in for the night. The bilge pump started running, which means there is water in the lowest part of the boat, so Marcus works at trying to find out why.  His attention to detail, especially about little things like that are why I am comfortable sailing with him. 

Tomorrow we will prep the boat for our trip out the gate.   We will leave on the outgoing tide around 3:30pm and should arrive in Monterey Wed afternoon, a 20 hour trip.   I am excited and ready to slowly head south.