sailing casita

At 6am we motored out of Middle Slough and turned up the San Joaquin headed for Potato Slough. The winds had died overnight but they picked up during the morning. It made the river pretty rough and choppy as the wind and current were opposing each other. It was early afternoon by the time we got to Potato Slough and we were so ready to drop anchor and relax!! Unfortunately it was not to be. The wind was really howling by the time we got there and there was very little protection. Potato Slough has a bunch of little islands but only one that we saw had any trees that were large enough to provide some protection from the wind but there were already lots of boats anchored in their lee. While we were considering our options a huge gust came up that we almost couldn’t fight as it was blowing us toward shore. It was pretty close quarters and we didn’t like the rock levees all around us so we decided to get the heck out of Dodge!

The Delta is a huge confusing network of waterways that can be pretty overwelming. Much of it is too shallow for a keelboat and the whole area is very flat so the charts don’t give you any information about shelter from the wind, which is dependent almost entirely upon trees. Being extremely tired from two restless nights and long days we just wanted to relax. Looking at the charts and some limited internet access on my iPhone we decided the best idea was to go to the Rio Vista Marina (actually the Delta Marina but I always thing of it as the Rio Vista Marina) on the Sacramento River. It turns out there were two marinas literally around the corner, less than half a mile away, that would have been great but we didn’t realize it at the time and I think we were too sleep deprived to recognize it anyway. So we went back out to the main channel of the San Joaquin River. There is a slough called the 3 Mile Slough that connects the San Joaquin to the Sacramento, it empties into the Sacramento just downstream from Rio Vista. The charts, both paper and our garmin chartplotter, showed the 3 mile slough to be pretty shallow, down to 10 ft in places. But Navionics on the ipad showed the slough to be much deeper, mostly over 20 feet and rarely below 15. The thing with charts is that they don’t get updated that frequently and in river deltas it can silt in pretty quickly so chart depths aren’t very reliable. Even though we would be fine in 6 ft of water you just never know what the depths are really going to be so anything below 15 ft on a chart makes us nervous. As it turns out the ipad had the more current info, there must have been some dredging at some point because the slough was pretty deep all the way through. There is a bridge at the Sacramento River end of the slough that we had to request to be lifted, then we were in the Sacramento headed to Rio Vista. The Delta Marina in Rio Vista is very easy to get into, it has a good fuel dock and side tie guest dock, and the people in the office are very friendly and helpful. We were so happy to be tied up nice and secure and get some showers! After showering we walked into town, only a few bocks away, and had dinner. We spent 2 days in Rio Vista, did a lot of walking around town and got a few groceries.

Then we headed to Franks Tract, which is off of the San Juaquin so we back tracked through 3 mile slough. We found a really nice spot to anchor at Franks Tract and stayed there for 3 nights. We anchored in about 15 feet with bow and stern anchors, we ended up also tying off to a tree ashore just to better position ourselves. We had some fun zooming around in the dinghy, the weather wasn’t super warm but it we had a nice time lounging on the pool toy drinking mai tais when it did warm up. There were three other boats nearby but it was surprisingly not crowded. The area is beautiful and was very peaceful. There was the occasional fishing boat that would speed by but mostly it was very serene.

There was another front coming in with more winds and we needed to be heading back anyway so after a few days, on Memorial Day, we hoisted the dinghy onboard and packed it away and weighed anchor. We ended up motoring all the way back to Alameda that day, it was a very long day. We hit some really nasty chop near Pittsburg, we were making almost no headway and taking lots of spray in the cockpit. The vinyl in our dodger had failed so badly from the sun that you couldn’t see through it so we had to unzip the middle window, which meant no protection from the wind and spray. It warmed up and mellowed out near Carquinez Strait and in San Pablo Bay but it was pretty nasty and choppy and very cold when we got to the Bay. It was so bad that even though it was Memorial Day there were only a handful of sailboats out on the Bay. It was pretty rough and we were really cold, especially with all the spray we were taking. We still had little following seas all the way to Jack London Square, which is pretty unusual. It had been a nice trip but it was nice to be home too!