sailing casita

The next morning we walked into town for some breakfast and then checked in with the office and paid for our one night. That sentence is accurate but not the whole picture. What actually happened was we woke up around 7am and spent the morning being locked IN the marina, then waiting around at the marina office for someone to show up so we could pay, then giving up on that and goint to breakfast, calling the marina office every 20 minutes or so with no answer, and then back to the marina office, thankfully they were open (apparently their phones were out of order) so we were able to pay for the slip. We would have liked to get back on the road pretty early but in addition to all the delays paying for the slip we had to wait for the tide again. It was deep enough in our slip but on our way in we went over several areas that were much shallower, so it wasn’t until 11:30am that we were back underway.

We motored back down the Napa River at higher rpm than usual hoping to get back to Carquinez Strait in time to catch at least part of the flood tide. Shortly after reaching the Strait and just as we were going under the Carquinez Strait bridge Devon discovered a lot of water coming in from our “dripless” shaft seal (the seal keeps water from coming into the boat where the shaft for the propeller goes through the hull). To be fair it’s called a dripless shaft seal, not a “leakless” shaft seal and at this point it wasn’t dripping, it was flooding. We were still at a pretty high rpm from our motor down the river, Devon immediately had me bring the rpm down and after a few minutes he determined that at our typical cruising rpm water was no longer coming in. We briefly considered turning back and returning to Alameda, but with no immediate threat we chose to continue on to the Delta. Fortunately the previous owners of our boat were really good about keeping documentation for the various equipment and systems on board so when we got back to Alameda after our trip Devon was able to figure out how to do some adjustments and the seal longer leaks, even at higher rpm.We were very happy to figure out that we hadn’t missed the floodtide but since we were quite a bit behind schedule we decided to motor sail rather than sail, with the jib and the motor running at moderate speeds were able to make 7-8 knots upstream, which was great.

The wind picked up throughout the afternoon and it was mostly from behind and occasionally on the beam so we probably could’ve made great time under sail alone but we really didn’t want to enter a strange anchorage in the dark so we kept the motor on. We reached the upstream side of Decker Island at 4:30 and had the anchor down at about 5 PM. We found a nice spot in the lee of some trees, the wind was blowing about 20 knots at this point and the trees provided a lot of shelter. As evening fell the wind calmed, we made a nice dinner, had some wine, and relaxed into Delta mode.

Here are a few shots from our first evening at Decker Island. The quality is not great because these are stills pulled from a video shot in low light.