sailing casita

For Devon’s birthday we planned a short trip to Half Moon Bay, from Friday to Sunday. To get an early start through the Gate we decided to anchor Thursday night at the San Francisco Aquatic Park, so I rushed home from work and we cast off from the marina in Alameda at 6:30. Somehow there is always a ridiculous amount of stuff that needs to be done/organized/stowed so we figured we could get it all done while motoring to the aquatic park, pop a frozen lasagna in the oven when 45 minutes away, drop the anchor and have a nice hot dinner. I stayed at the helm while Devon worked down below, the conditions were quite calm but we were headed straight into the sunset. At one point I asked Devon to come up and check the AIS. I could see a large cargo ship on the other side of the Bay Bridge but with the glare from the sun I couldn’t tell which way it was moving and I wasn’t finding it on AIS. Well he had a good laugh, it turned out to be Alcatraz!

We finally got to the aquatic park at 8:30 and then had some trouble setting our CQR anchor. Our only previous experience anchoring there was on ‘Imi Loa using a Spade anchor and everything went smoothly. On our 3rd attempt the CQR set and held. By the time we had snubbers on and everything secure it was 9:15 so we had a late (cold) dinner but it went down nicely with a glass or two of wine. With still lots to secure before heading out into the ocean it was after midnight before we got to bed.

We set an early alarm and had the anchor up by 5:30am. Dodging swimmers in the morning twilight, we slowly motored out of the aquatic park and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge. We had been really looking forward to a good sail but the wind gods chose to favor us with very light south winds instead of the usual NW winds. We tried sailing for a while but Casita needs a decent breeze to sail to windward, with about 5 knots (on the nose) we weren’t going anywhere, so we gave up and started the motor. Between the late night (with wine), the early morning, too much coffee, and no breakfast we weren’t feeling amazing. Add in some exhaust fumes and we both started to feel a bit ill. The forecast was for light north winds for the return trip, which would mean we could end up motoring all the way down and all the way back. The fun to suck ratio was looking less and less favorable so we decided to cut our losses and head home. We turned around and motored back to Alameda and had a very nice weekend doing not much at all.