I’d like to add some more personal, subjective points to Don’s excellent recent article about our local sailing conditions, that make San Francisco Bay the world’s most desirable place to sail.

1) Let’s compare it to some other great sailing venues in the world. The Mediterranean? Wonderful, historic harbors, but believe it or not, you can just fly to them. It lives up to its reputation of having no wind or too much, and also expensive fees. Polynesia or the Caribbean? Just as beautiful as you’d think; but how about those tropical storms, hurricanes, and cyclones? (These are the same thing as hurricanes–don’t be fooled!)

2) In summer, when the wind is controlled by the microclimate caused by the reliable thermal low in the Central Valley, you can pick your conditions: Want to rock and roll? Sail the slot. Want a mellow pleasure cruise on the same day? Then visit the Oakland Estuary. Want a warm, relaxed weekend to lounge around, swim, and play with water toys? Try the Delta.

3) The wider San Francisco Estuary is gigantic, larger than any similarly protected waters in the world. According to the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, “The Bay’s shoreline is approximately half the length of the California coastline.  The Bay is approximately 550 square miles, which is larger than all but nine cities in the United States. It is almost 20% larger than the City of Los Angeles and is larger than the combined sizes of San Diego and San Jose.” All of this features protected waters that will never, ever, see 20-foot swells.

4) The geography is spectacular, unlike the Chesapeake, and festooned by one of the most beautiful landmarks in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.

5) San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, with restaurants that will satisfy the tastes of the most sophisticated gourmets.

6) We have an amazing bunch of local sailors, many of them world champions, to push the envelope and set the bar for the rest of us.

7) Our local sailing rag, Latitude 38, was interactive before interactive was a thing. There is no other sailing periodical like it. A huge amount of the writing is not by professionals but by ordinary sailors in the letters, changes in latitudes, and world of chartering sections.

8) We boast a long and storied nautical history, beginning with Juan Manuel de Ayala y Aranza, and featuring such notables as Richard Henry Dana and Jack London.

9) It has been the nexus of many controversies over its use, and has therefore been, and continues to be, the beneficiary of passionate campaigns by regular citizens to conserve its natural beauty and wildlife.

10) The fog and cold summer breezes are what make it possible for us commoners to sail on the Bay. If we had balmy weather like they do in the Caribbean together with all the blessings listed above, the slips would be enlarged for mega-yachts and the berth fees would be for millionaires only. The chill keeps out the riff-raff; you have to have a bit of a tough hide to sail here.

11) We have the Tradewinds Sailing School and Club.

If you have been certified through Basic Coastal Cruising, you will have learned how to properly connect mooring lines to the buoys at Ayala Cove, named after Juan Manuel de Ayala y Aranza, the first captain ever to sail into San Francisco Bay. But our favorite Cove has been shoaling up just like the rest of the Bay since sea levels rose when the great ice sheets retreated 10,000 years ago. Now I’m not quite that old, but old enough so that observable geological changes have taken place during my tenure. Years ago, when I first hiked out to Arch Rock at the end of the Bear Valley Trail in the Point Reyes Seashore, there was a massive rock arch there, and there was no problem with the depths at Ayala Cove. Now the arch is gone, and we have to pay attention to the tides when visiting Angel Island. I’ve changed a bit myself.

San Francisco Bay is an estuary at the end of the Sacramento River, which carries sediment all the way from the Sierra. As a matter of fact, the sediment is the Sierra. Some of that sediment makes it out the Gate and creates the Four Fathom Bank, but a huge amount is left on the floor of the Bay. If you look at Raccoon Strait on the chart, you’ll see it is very deep, and that is because until the end of the last ice age, when the ice melted and sea level rose over 300 feet, it was a ravine that carried the Sacramento out through the Golden Gate and 25 miles west to the coast, the ancient shore of the Pacific Ocean. This ravine, now filled with water, continues to be scoured by every ebb and flood as does the Golden Gate, and for this reason they have not silted up.

Below is a bathymetric image of the topography of the bottom of Raccoon Strait looking towards the Golden Gate. Notice: 1) How deep the Strait is relative to Ayala Cove. The fact that it is a cove, or indentation in the hills, has meant that over the centuries, it created an eddy where water slowed and dropped its sediment, resulting in a beach. As the ocean rose following the melting of the glaciers, the beach rose with it. The same is true of Keil Cove across from Ayala Cove, the bight between Point Ione and Point Stuart, Richardson Bay, and Belvedere Cove. If the water were to be drained from the Strait, the areas in light blue on the nautical chart above would be flat ledges next to a steep, daunting cliff descending to a cavernous gorge. This sedimentation process continues today, which is why we need to be vigilant when sailing there. 2) The big hump on the bottom just westward of Ayala Cove and opposite Tiburon creates the riffles in the water that you will always encounter there in a strong current, as the rapidly flowing water rises to clear it. 3) The deep holes off of Point Stuart and Peninsula Point are caused by the flow of the current rushing around the points through this constriction, just like the rapids on a river. In a strong current, you will notice turbulence near both the western and eastern approaches to the strait.

Together, these features dramatically illustrate the power of water to shape land. They also reveal an entirely different sense of the roiling flow that lies hidden below the two-dimensional current that we see on the surface. Our marine mammal friends spend their time in this very different world. Similar sculpting takes place anywhere there’s a strong current meeting a constriction or obstruction, like around Alcatraz and of course through the Gate. It’s a ghostly, powerful world down there.

Back to the practical matter of shoaling at Ayala Cove: If you are staying overnight and the boat settles on the bottom in the evening, it won’t hurt the boat, although it may spill your tea as the boat heels. But you’ll have to plan your arrival and departure so that you can get in and out. Of course, you can look the tides up online, using the tidal corrections for either Angel Island (west side), or Angel Island, East Garrison. This will show you a beautiful sine wave. But suppose you don’t have an Internet connection. Here’s a method to figure the slope of the rise and fall of the tide for Ayala Cove, which will also be of service at Sam’s, Clipper Cove, Richardson Bay, and any time and anywhere you have only a tide book:

1. Find the tides at the Golden Gate in your book.
2. Apply the correction for Angel Island (west side), which will work for Ayala Cove:
Time High water +13; Low water +21
Height High water -0.2; Low water 0.0
3. Use the Rule of Twelfths in the paragraph below. This is a way to create a sine curve for the rise and fall of the tide without having a graphing calculator. It allows you to interpolate between the high and low tide to determine when there is enough water for your boat to enter without grounding.

There are about six hours between low and high tide. Divide the total difference in height between them by 12. In the first hour the height increases by 1/12. Then in the second hour by 2/12, in the third by 3/12, in the fourth by 3/12, fifth by 2/12, and the sixth hour, 1/12. These together will add up to the tidal difference. To go from high to low, do the same thing in reverse, subtracting instead of adding.

Just put that steep cliff, close by out towards the Strait, out of your mind.

We sailors like our “A-” words. They sound salty. The prefix comes from Greek and means “on,” “at,” “or in the state of.” I’m going to assume you know ahoy and ahead and astern and a-lee and aboard and abeam and ashore and aground, but we can list a whole sailbag full of other ones:

A-weather: Towards the wind, just as a-lee means away from the wind.

A-hull: Sometimes in a storm we may douse all sail and lash the helm to leeward. This is called lying a-hull. Similar to “under bare poles.” It’s a very clever storm tactic when your brains are too bashed in to think of anything else, but what’s even more clever is not to be in that storm.

A-try: Similar to ­a-hull or hove-to. The objective is to get the boat, by whatever sail configuration achieves it, to lie with her bow about six points (67.5 degrees) off the wind so she doesn’t wallow in the trough and capsize. That would wreck your day.

Athwart/athwartships: Across the boat, perpendicular to the centerline. “The traveler runs athwartships.”

A-peak: When the bow is directly above the anchor, the anchor is a-peak.

A-trip: When the anchor breaks free, it is said to be a-trip.

Aweigh: When the anchor is a-trip and no longer on the bottom, it is aweigh (not “away”).

Aloft: Up the mast. Yes, but did you know that alow means down on deck? That’s where you drop your wrench. Of course, below means belowdecks, but that’s not an A-word, is it?

Adrift: This means floating without steerage, guided just by wind and tide. Also, anything aboard is said to have gone adrift if it has come loose and is preparing to clobber you in the head.

Abroad: Spread, as in “She had all plain sail abroad.”

Abaft: Behind. This is a preposition, a relative term used with a reference point as the object of the preposition, as in “abaft the beam.” Its opposite, less commonly heard, is afore; before is more common. Aft is an adjective or adverb, as in the aft cabin or aft starboard scupper.  

Awash: An object almost submerged is awash. The deck, for example, or a rock or shoal that can just be seen above the water level.

Avast: This is an order meaning to stop some nautical procedure, as in “avast hauling!”or “avast the Metallica!”

Aback: A sail is aback when the wrong side is filled. This occurs when you tack accidentally, which of course would never happen. It can also be done purposefully, as in heaving-to.

A-choo: There is no evidence that this had its origin in seamanship, but no evidence to the contrary, either. Let’s claim it before the golfers or fishermen do.

A-main: All of a sudden. “The squall hit us a-main.”

A-hoo: I don’t know where I got this but I didn’t make it up. It’s obscure, but distressingly often, I find it useful. It means “messy,” “disorganized,” or “all screwed up.” “After the gale passed, the deck gear was all ahoo.”

Aloof: Yes, this has a nautical origin. In sailing, it originally meant keeping your luff as close to the wind as possible—a-luff—and in particular, was used when failing to point high enough would put you on a lee shore.

From Tradewinds Member Al Z.

Hope all is well with you all at Tradewinds. I just had a detailed and extremely informative chat with Nick by phone who very kindly suggested I write you, Matt, in case you wish to post this in a Newsletter to members. I’ve taken your wonderful 101, 103 and 104 courses and enjoyed them immensely.

In short, I wanna relay a strong recommendation to all sailors on the Bay to get a life jacket that has both crotch straps and a spray hood – the latter of which doesn’t come standard on any PFD sold at West Marine but one can be purchased from spinlock. Here’s why:

On Saturday I was sailing on a boat I’ve been racing on several times, a J125 out of Brickyard Cove Richmond, in high winds, reaching 25 knots. We were heading downwind when we raised the spinnaker and all seemed well (despite  other boats in the race calling it quits due to the gusts). Then there was a super sudden bluster that came so fast there was no time to let out a sheet. I was on the main sheet and only had time to kick free the traveler before I was flying. And the skipper has said in hindsight, even if we had let the main out and made  other adjustment in a non-second, it wouldn’t have offset the force of wind that pitched us on our side. It came like a fire cracker.

The racing boat pitched sideways, bodies were air-born and I was MOB. After being under the boat, I surfaced with my Mustang 70 inflated and thought all would be fine. Surprisingly, I wasn’t feeling very cold at all and was floating on the water. But I was taking in a stomach full of sea water every 10 seconds from the swells and spray, so by just ten minutes I had probably 60 stomach-fulls and was starting to weaken. No matter which way I turned or covered my mouth with my hand, I was getting hit. It took the crew over 28 minutes to get me after failed passes in the rough conditions and I didn’t think I was gonna make it in part because I didn’t have a splash hood attached to my Mustang PFD to stop the swells from hitting me. With that hood, I could’ve been fine and waiting, I think, for hours.

My PFD did an okay job keeping me afloat but it couldn’t block the heavy spray even with my hand covering my mouth. Once my crew finally got me, three sets of hands holding me sideways off the side of the boat, they couldn’t hoist me up initially due to my weight while wet and the force of water tugging at the submerged half of me. So, I was taking in white water in the face, starting to drown in a horizontal position. Eventually, of course, they pulled me aboard. But there were many lessons here. 

First, you gotta get a life jacket with a spray hood and crotch straps that keep your PFD from rising so your head can stay high. Second, your crew needs to practice how to slow a boat in windy conditions to pull a MOB back on deck because it’s incredibly hard to do this quickly and it’s a critical element in the rescue procedure. Happy sailing and be safe!

Best regards,

Al Z.