Welcome 48 North Readers!

We're thrilled to have our recent blog entry on the passage from Neah Bay to San Francisco featured in 48 North magazine's September Boat Show issue.  You can see it here.  There's one little bitty matter we need to clear up, however.  The article's byline is "Karen and Jim Palmer."

We have not entered the witness protection program and remain, very truly yours, Karen Sullivan and Jim Heumann.

*Postscript:  As of Sept 9, the online errors have been corrected.  

San Francisco Bay Odyssey, Part 2

The hills of Berkeley have amazing views. That's the Golden Gate Bridge behind the tree growing out of Jim's head.

We liked this sculpture, a nifty protest-music-old age combo.

And kites? Oh yes, fabulous. These are giant shivering ground crabs.

And this is an inflatable dog.

Everyone loves to fly a kite.

Wordplay:  Before we left Port Townsend, a friend wrote, “…keep us posted, and while you’re at it, could you think of a better word than blog?”  Hmmm, what it is about that undignified word for this egalitarian form of journaling or opining, or even, in some cases, actual journalism?  

Jim, hard at work on the blog.

The word has a swampy feel, and it also rhymes well.  You can almost hear the imagery:  frogs bellowing in bogs, or, at sea, a basso-profundo horn telling you the obvious:  Fooooooooog.  There’s an exploratory, groping-in-the-dark quality to this humble word, which can, if a blogger isn’t careful, aptly describe the feel of the writing: squishy, inexact, and confusing, an oobleck... nay, a clog of verbiage for readers to slog through.  Like the sentence you just read.

Karen, upon hearing Jim awaken and stretch:  Good morning!  Coffee’s made.  I’m blogging.

Jim:  Then you must be a bloglodyte.

Karen:  AAAAAA!

Alameda's houseboats are every bit as colorful and cool as Sausalito's.

Which brings us to the reason for this little tangent:  we post on this blog only when we have enough material to tell a good story.  Or to explain some aspect of seamanship we’re working through.  And occasionally, to express an opinion.  Our blog posts are mostly distillations of experiences, with a little hindsight thrown in if we have it.  That’s also why the phrase “a peppy periodical on a peripatetic perambulation under sail” appears under the title.  It’s a buoyancy cushion for that soggy, bloggy word.  But thank you for the lovely emails encouraging us to post more often (disguised as “Where ARRRRRE you?”)  It feels good to get such positive feedback and messages from friends and family.  Having surprisingly unreliable and intermittent internet connections has contributed to the sporadic-ness (and length) of posts, too.  Just so you know, Karen's keyboard is all raked off now.

Below is our friend Dai aboard his Morgan 32, Summersalt.  He's sailing for Hawaii soon.

A Wide Swath in the Bay:  After Sausalito and Berkeley, we went to Clipper Cove, then Alameda, and now we’re back in Clipper Cove.  The hospitality of fellow sailors knows no better example than what we’ve experienced all around San Francisco Bay.  Sockdolager with all her salty fittings must be like catnip at the dock.  For example, within half an hour of tie-up at Berkeley, we were hosting five guests, including a young Russian sailor named Sergei, whom Jim blithely asked, “So, were you with the Russian Mafia?”  Good thing Sergei had a sense of humor; he replied archly, “You don’t leave a job with the Russian Mafia.” 

Catamaran sailors Mark and Nina Montgomery from our Emergency Offshore Medicine class in Denver last March were in Berkeley when we arrived, so we had a hilarious reunion aboard Sockdolager and their boat, the Woofie.  

Dana owners Chris Humann (watch his sailing kite-cam on Youtube here) and his partner Justine (both of the Dana 24, Carroll E) treated us to dinner and an excellent tour of Berkeley.  Here's Chris on the boat, which he has sailed in several singlehanded TransPac races to Hawaii.

Here's Jim in his chauffeur-driven limo (just kidding, that's Justine, our excellent Berkeley tour guide and fellow Dana sailor.)

Lawrence Boag and his wife Barbara (of the Dana Graceful Exit-see video here) also treated us to dinner and a tour of Alameda.  

We visited with Jay Bowden from the Dana Little Lara, and with Brian Cline, proud new owner of the Dana, Maris (ex-Cami). 

Little Lara in Clipper Cove.

 You wouldn't know it by the relaxed look of him, but Brian just finished putting the rudder back on Maris and was less than an hour from launch.  It’ll be fun seeing Brian down the road (he leaves the Bay in November for Mexico.)   We also met rigger Guy Stevens and his wife Melissa of the Ericson 46 Aiki, for a wonderful evening of Stromboli and music, and Livia and Carol of the Estrellita, a Wauquiez 35. 

Sockdolager and Estrellita share the anchorage at Clipper Cove.

Livia runs the Interview With a Cruiser project, which is great reading for sailors at all levels. 


And now you know why it’s been awhile since we’ve posted!

Gizmology:  The Cape Horn wind vane that steers our boat at sea is utter magic.  I (K) can’t stop saying this: It steers way better than either of us could.  It makes me feel like bowing down before it on each watch.   That something so simple and elegant could perform such a difficult and important task is sublime.  The only analogy I can come up with for my feelings about it is the cartoon where cave men are standing around a TV wondering how all those teeny people got inside it.  I also can't figure out why the font in this blog goes up and down in size, but I refuse to bow down to a computer.

 

Jim cleans and re-uses our existing Hayne Hi-Mod mechanical wire terminals for the new backstay.  This is why we spent the extra bucks for reusable terminals.

Heave-to Re-do:  We replaced the backstay to accommodate a hanked-on sail that we can use for heaving-to.  All it took was one well-planned trip up the mast and twice as much time as Jim predicted.  But when we went out onto San Francisco Bay to test our new idea for heaving-to, we got a surprise.  As you might remember, heaving-to in a gale off the southern coast of Oregon was done with mixed results; the boat did fine and wasn’t damaged, but she did not “park” herself at the 45 degree angle to wind and wave that we wanted.  We’d flown our storm trysail without a headsail back then. 

Bringing the center of effort aft would solve the problem, we thought, which meant flying a sail off the backstay, which meant moving the backstay’s single sideband radio insulators to where they wouldn’t interfere with the sail.  Done.

Here's our storm staysail flying on the backstay.  It normally goes just behind the jib, nearer the bow.

We went out on a 25-knot day and tried different sheet leads and sail heights, ending with the sail flying as low as possible, but it didn’t matter.  The boat stayed mostly beam-on to wind and sea. After several different configurations we attached the tack of the staysail directly to the mainsheet, which we'd decoupled from the boom via a snap shackle.

The boom rested nicely on the stainless handle on the dodger, and was secured with lashings.  We may fashion a canvas "cradle" for lashing it in this position.

Disappointed in the results, we began discussing the addition of a bulky sea anchor to our gear.  We surmised that there must be a lot of other boats with this issue, considering that the Dana is by no means a radical design. 

Then, just to see what might happen, we flew a little scrap of genoa, normally and not back-winded, to find out if the boat could sail the way a yawl does, with “jib and jigger.”  She did, and then out of curiosity we pushed the tiller all the way to leeward, to see what she’d do.
PRESTO!   The boat stayed perfectly hove-to, 45 degrees off the wind, making less than a knot of leeway according to the GPS.  The little slick of calm water trailed out to windward at just the right angle, and we stared at each other, dumbfounded.  Neither of us can explain why this worked, and we don’t know if it will in higher winds, but that’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Here's the clew of the backstaysail (facing forward) and attached to the boom vang, which goes to the base of the mast and also can be trimmed from the cockpit.  And there's that little scrap of genoa that made the boat heave-to perfectly.

We are going to experiment with various wind speeds for this setup, and also combinations of storm trysail and staysail.  You’ll be the first to know.

Jim went fishing.  Unfortunately, he didn’t go catching.  But just in case, we call this little gizmo The Decider.

The Great Clipper Caper:  We heard a voice saying, “Helloooo, we have a message for you.”  Karen went topside to see a Boston whaler with two jeans-and-T-shirt-clad guys in it, and became a bit worried that maybe someone we knew was in trouble.  The Casual Guy In Charge said, “You’re in violation of the law and we need to give you a citation.”  After ascertaining that the violation (of Police Code Section 1.1, a misdemeanor) was for not applying for a permit to anchor in Clipper Cove for more than 24 hours, Karen fixed the stinkeye on him and said, “We’re a cruising boat headed south, and we only plan to be here a few more days.”  But bureaucracy being what it is, we got this nice orange 9X12 notice (not plastered to the boat, thankfully, though they admitted with glee that the glue was really hard to get off) and called the number listed on it.  The Treasure Island Development Authority person was very nice, and in two long phone calls took down our document number and other info.  Evidently there had been a bunch of derelict boats in here at one time.  It’s a lovely peaceful anchorage now, though, and this sign of the times seems to be the price for it.

Finally, a bit of fun with boat names.  In Alameda there are some doozies.  Like Starfish Enterprise and Freudian Sloop.  But it was the way some boats were placed that got my attention.  Maybe the management has a sense of humor on where they put boats.  Maybe the dockmaster’s some wag named Willy Tippit.  Who knows.  But Midwife was three slips from Hot Flash.  Uncorked was mere staggering distance from Comfortably Numb.  Bad Boy was a discreet two docks away from Redeemed.  And Cock Robin was right next to My Mirage.  I don’t know about you, but something’s going on over there in Alameda.

Even if something funny isn’t going on in Alameda, we think this ship should be named the “NYK NYK Wise Guy.”

Warm Welcomes Throughout the Bay!

Moonrise over Sausalito and a passing rower

It's hard to imagine Royalty being treated any better than the reception we've had in the Bay Area.  We are  testing the limits of the axiom, "There's no such thing as too much fun."  So many new friends and so much laughter is good for the soul, and we'll write more about our odyssey soon.

In Sausalito we thought it might be fun to locate the offices of that fast-paced and fun sailing magazine Latitude 38, but then thought, geez, they're probably pretty busy and we don't want to bother them, and besides, we don't know where the office is anyway.  This is one of those "Six Degrees of Separation" stories, except along the waterfront among sailors, it's never more than one degree of separation, even in a metropolitan area of two million.

Here's how it happened:  Jim called a greeting to a nearby scuba diver in the water, who, upon finishing his dive, brought his boat over to ours and, covered from head to toe in seaweed, introduced himself as Tim.   He said, "Have you guys met LaDonna yet?"  LaDonna is the Editor of Latitude 38, and we admitted we hadn't.  "You gotta go over to her boat, then," he said, so we did, pleased that the "office" is a Pacific Seacraft 37 that Karen had already looked over.  LaDonna and her husband Rob immediately invited us aboard for a lively conversation, and the next morning visited us aboard Sockdolager.  She sure works fast, that LaDonna; an article in 'Lectronic Latitude appeared even before we had sailed the nine miles to Berkeley yesterday afternoon!  You can read it here.  We are going to sign up for the 2012 Puddle Jump, about which you can read here.  Rob, a musician, noticed our boat guitar.  There is a jam session in our future.  We plan to stop back in Sausalito before leaving the Bay Area.

Since arriving in Berkeley, we've been happily engulfed in a whirlwind of socializing.  Seven new friends in two days!  It's also amazing how many Dana 24 owners there are, but most especially how much they cherish and sail the living daylights out of these mighty little boats.

San Francisco Bay Odyssey

Last of her kind, the lovely Balclutha is a fascinating ship full of history, and has one of the best, most realistic interpretive displays we’ve seen. There are even bags of grain in her cargo hold.

Summer has arrived on the old Sockdolager.  We’re in Sausalito, right in front of Galilee Harbor, where the contented quacks of a pair of resident jet-black ducks wake us up each morning.  Behind us at low tide are visible the bones of an enigmatic old 132-foot brigantine named Galilee.  She was built by a famous shipwright in 1891 for the South Seas trade, and later converted to a 3-masted schooner for fishing in Alaska, where her condition deteriorated.  In the early 1930s she was bought by a Captain John Quinn, grandfather of our Port Townsend friend and poet Peter Quinn.  Captain Quinn and his wife brought the Galilee to Richardson Bay and converted her to their home, the first “house-boat” in Sausalito.   They lived aboard her for many years.  There were  some efforts to preserve her because she qualified for National Historic Landmark status, but her luck ran out and here she lays in a salt marsh, kept company by the ducks, a yellow-crowned night heron, and some crows.  Click here for the story and here for a photo of the ship in her sailing days at the turn of the century.  A community of houseboats, artists, and, later, hippies, grew up around the Galilee.  Colorful houseboats and equally colorful liveaboards are a fixture in Sausalito now. 

Ruins of the once-beautiful brigantine-schooner-houseboat Galilee

A Bit of Nostalgia:  While Jim has been here several times before, the only other time Karen was in Sausalito was in 1976, and she headed straight for the docks.  Coming upon a stout seaworthy 28-foot sailboat, she stood quietly admiring it.  Suddenly the bearded owner popped his head out the companionway, and Karen who was fairly new to sailing at the time, said, “Sorry to have bothered you, I was just enjoying your boat.”  The owner smiled and said, “Why don’t you come aboard?  Annabelle’s just made cookies and we’re having tea.”  Astounded at such friendliness to a perfect stranger, Karen went aboard the good ship Amøbel, and for the next two hours listened to tales of the sea spun by Gordon and Annabelle Yates, who’d just sailed to San Francisco from Europe via the Panama Canal.  Holy mackerel, did Karen ever enjoy that.  Only much later she realized what mentors this couple had been to sailors whose writings she was reading in books and magazines.  

The other day we were walking the docks and stopped to admire a stunning wooden 8-meter named Yucca, with perfect lines, an incredible double-ended fantail stern, and obvious racing pedigree lines.  The owner saw us and invited us aboard.  He’s had her for 46 years and three masts (each dismasting an interesting story), and he is still madly in love with his boat.  There’s something about Sausalito…

Sunrise in Sausalito as seen from our companionway.

Summertime, and the Livin’ is Easier:  This is the first real summer weather we’ve had in a long time, and wearing T-shirts, shorts and crocs is a novelty.   The chilly damp we’ve had up to now had coated everything in the boat with moisture—so much that a spreading glaze of mildew had to be vinegared off the woodwork.  It feels good to dry out.  We’ve actually rigged an awning for shade!  Summer does not seem to have arrived yet across the Bay in San Francisco, but we know where to find it now.  Karen is nearly delirious with joy at the sound of palm trees rustling in the wind. 

Visiting with our Japanese friend Dai, who has solo sailed his Morgan 32 down the coast from Vancouver, and is headed next to Hawaii.  Dai makes no secret of his physical handicap, but that hasn’t stopped him.  He has also ridden a horse across Japan, and skydived. 

Wonderful San Francisco:  Still, the foghorns, cable cars, steep hills, Chinatown, and the fascinating waterfront in San Francisco with its Maritime Museum are not to be missed.  We hung onto the side of a cablecar as it went clattering up the hill.  No straps, no safety bars, just hang on or you’ll fall off like roadkill—amazing, they don’t protect us from ourselves!  “Watch it on the left!” calls the Gripman (driver), as an oncoming truck’s mirror threatens to scrape off a few riders.  He’s not kidding, and everyone scrunches in, saying “S’cuse me” to the seated riders we crowd.  How is this little thrill still possible in our litigious, safety-crazed world?  The Gripman operates a brake lever that makes the cablecar stop by pressing a piece of pine onto the street. Not walnut or teak, they’re too hard and get too smooth, but pine, which stays rough with the friction.  Is low tech beautiful, or what. 

Safety sign for cablecars.  Karen is on the middle left.

A Mechanic's Hog Heaven:  At the top of the hill is what they call the cablecar museum, but really it’s more like Grand Central Station.  Here they let you lean over a rail and look down on spinning pulleys, corner gears, and miles of steel cable that run under the streets to pull the cablecars along their routes.  You can go down some stairs and see a corner section in operation under the street, too.  There are over 10 miles of 1 ¼ inch cable, and it must be replaced every 75-180 days. To make a loop for, say, the Hyde Street run, you need 16,000 feet of cable made into a loop with (please sit down, rigging and tugboat friends) a wire splice that’s NINETY feet long.  The whole place hums and smells like hot grease.

A Chocoholic's Hog Heaven:  Oh yes… do not fail to visit Ghirardelli Square’s shameless tourist-trap chocolate factory, where they hand out little squares of free chocolate at every entrance (and there are FOUR separate entrances, heh heh) where you can slurp down a lifetime’s worth of chocolate dopamine in one frosty Nob Hill Chill.  Your waistline won’t thank you, but your brain-freeze-happy taste buds will.

Inner workings of the cablecar system.  Now if someone could invent a wheel system made of chocolate...

Conversation with a passerby on the dock who’d just learned our cruise is open-ended:

Passerby:  How long are you going to be out for?

Jim:  Depends on how long we live.  (Cue jaw drop.)

Later, in the dinghy, as we go from the boat to a beach bar:

Karen:  Do you think there will ever come a point when we’re tired of this?

Jim:  Could be.

Karen:  When do you suppose that might that be for you?

Jim:  Oh, maybe twenty years.

Karen makes a pilgrimage to the famous City Lights Booksellers, near Chinatown.  It was started and is still owned by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who once shipped out during World War 2 on one of the “Coastal Picket Force” comandeered private sailboats that patrolled the US east coast for enemy submarines; the coincidence here being that Karen once co-owned the Schooner Windsong, one of those patrol boats.

A treat for the senses:  Karen’s friend Tilikum R. alerted her to the fact that seven Polynesian double canoes, or vakas, would be sailing into San Francisco from Hawaii, on a 15,000 nautical mile journey to raise awareness of the health of our oceans, especially the Pacific.  They're from all over the Pacific.  As we watched from the breakwater ashore, the canoes sailed together under the Golden Gate Bridge, the sail colors of five of them matching the Bridge's orangey hues, and if you closed out the other distractions, it was possible to imagine being in another time. 

We happened to be walking on the beach at Aquatic Park when five of the vakas came sailing in and ran right up onto the sand in front of us! 

Three of the vakas on the beach.  Later, we went aboard the Hine Moana from the Cook Islands for a tour and to help them raise the sails.  It was unbelievable how the ship came alive with the sails shaking in the wind.  They were happy to take us with them, but since we had no way to get back across the Bay to Sockdolager, we reluctantly got off and watched them sail away.

They left for Monterey and points south, and we hope to see them again along the way, including back in Polynesia.

Finally, news of Karen’s belted-out rendition of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” while sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge was well-received.  Thanks for the song suggestions for this newly-established tradition for entering harbors.  Here are enough to get us a few more miles south, but the rest of you had better get busy.

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Cruz”

“I got Sunshine on a Cloudy Day, and When It’s Cold Outside, I Got Monterey”

“Santa Barbar-bar-Bar-bar-bra Ann”

“Do You Know the Way to Marina Del Rey”

And really finally, everyone needs their very own "Demented Helmsman" photo.