sailing casita

Tuesday (August 12th) we spent at Decker Island mostly just relaxing and enjoying the sunshine, it was a nice uneventful day. There were only a few other boats in the anchorage, one was a pretty large sailboat, a CT 50-something I believe, so we had the place pretty much to ourselves. We just enjoyed not doing much of anything as the boat swung at anchor. The most excitement we had was when the owner of the CT and his daughter stopped by on their dinghy to chat. Wednesday morning we relaxed and enjoyed the sunshine.

In the afternoon we decided to launch the dinghy so we inflated it on the foredeck and use the spinnaker halyard to hoist her over the side and used our Garhauer crane to deploy the outboard. When we tried to fire up the engine it didn’t run very well. We had made the mistake of storing it with gas in the tank and carburetor so Devon removed the carburetor and gave it a good cleaning. It wasn’t a complicated task but a little nerve wracking knowing that a small slip could result in a critical piece ending up at the bottom of the river (which is what happened the first time we cleaned the carburetor in our slip). Once that was done we had some fun exploring the anchorage and stopped by the CT for a quick visit.

The trip to Rio Vista was uneventful except for a little stress when we had some trouble finding the deep water on the way back to the main river, a little frustrating considering we had no trouble on the way in. We got to the marina at about 5:15, after the office was closed. We had called ahead so we knew there was room at the guest dock and had the codes to the restrooms and showers. As we were preparing to take on fuel a woman came down from the office saying she had forgotten to give us the codes for the wifi, I felt it was very nice of her to go out of her way. Every time we have been at that marina we have been impressed with the friendliness and helpfulness of the staff. When we topped off the tanks we had a nice surprise, we had only used 5.6 gallons since leaving Alameda! We have a Hart Tank Tender to monitor the fuel level but we haven’t calibrated it yet so it doesn’t provide any quantifiable data. This was our first longish trip motoring in this boat and we had no idea how much fuel we would burn, but considering the engine is a 66hp turbo we were afraid it would be a lot! We had motored 10.3 hours so that averages out to 0.54 gal/hour. That is similar to the 3ym30 we put in ‘Imi Loa. At first we thought the fuel vent was clogged but we verified it wasn’t. We were able to see the fuel level in the fill hose because the hose is (non ABYC approved) vinyl so we knew the tank was really full.

Wednesday evening we walked across town to Lira’s market to get some more salt (for the electro-scan, we were going through it faster than we expected) and a few other items, including better marine TP – the stuff we got at West Marine was really lousy.

Thursday we left Rio Vista at approximately 8:30am. The route to Franks Tract took us through 3 Mile Slough which has a lift bridge at the entrance. We were impressed with how quickly the bridge tender got the bridge up for us, and that we could actually understand him on the radio. When we got to Franks Tract we were surprised to see it emptly and were happy to anchor in the same spot as last year. The only trouble we had was getting our (new) Fortress anchor to set in the weedy bottom. It took three tries (using the dinghy) but eventually it was well set and we relaxed into a beautiful evening. We inflated the pool toy from last year and had a nice time just lounging and drifting around in such a beautiful setting.