Hawk in San Francisco
03 August 2006 | Point Richmond, CA
Since our last update, we have made the passage down the coast and are now in San Francisco. Before we left Puget Sound, we spent a very enjoyable week in Port Madison where we shared the harbor with Lin and Larry Pardey aboard TALEISIN, their 30-foot classic wooden cutter, and Linda and Steve Dashew aboard their brand new WIND HORSE, an 83-foot aluminum powerboat. It's hard to imagine three more different cruising boats than TALEISIN, HAWK, and WIND HORSE! At a hamburger barbecue put together by Tad and Joyce Lahmon, whom we first met in Scotland in 2000, the company consisted of six couples that had circumnavigated at least once, and three couples who had sailed to Cape Horn.
We spent about ten days in Port Madison, and during most of that time I was busy with the final page proofs for my new book, BLUE HORIZONS, which chronicles our voyaging on HAWK. During that time, the weather was perfect for a passage south to San Francisco, with strong northerly winds from a high pressure system offshore. But by the time we reached Neah Bay at the mouth of Juan de Fuca Straits on the 4th of July, the high had wandered off and a series of low pressure systems brought strong southerly winds. We may have missed the weather window, but we were just in time for a spectacular fireworks display courtesy of the Indian reservation. The show was as good as many we have seen in big cities, with a ten-minute crescendo that filled the sky with a dozen colors to the cheers of the hundreds of people lining the shore.
We waited in Neah Bay for ten days before the weather finally returned to the normal summer patterns. We could have left earlier, but we saw no reason to hurry when we knew we'd have a much more pleasant passage once the northerly winds came back. We left Neah Bay on July 15th and anchored in Drake's Harbor just under Point Reyes four days later after a fast downwind run in winds of 25-40 knots. The passage would have been uneventful except that we paid more attention to the weather forecast than to the conditions we were actually experiencing. We were consistently over-canvassed on the passage because every forecast called for the wind to die in the next 12 hours - and they were all wrong. HAWK came through just fine, but we had a few more bumps and bruises than we should have.
After a good night's sleep, we left the next morning for the run in to San Francisco. By the time the sky was blushing pink, we were motoring along a sandy coast surrounded by Guillemots chasing after silver fish splashing on the surface. We got our first glimpse of the towers of the bridge rising up above the low brown hills, with the cone of Mt. Tamalpais a handspan to the left of the northern tower. We reached the bridge around 9:00. The infamous Potato Patch, the shoal that lies north of the channel leading to the bridge and that can have treacherous waves, was covered by rippled water as the tide ran over it, but it was so benign that we could have motored right across it. The bridge was beautiful - a burnished red and so elegant, nestled between the hills on either side, providing the perfect frame for the skyscrapers jutting up against the pale sky across the Bay. We had both pictured coming under the bridge in fog and not being able to see the city at all, but here we were motoring in with nearly perfect visibility. I took lots of photos trying to capture the moment, the beauty of the bridge arcing across from brown hill to brown hill, the sweep of the bay, the beautiful houses jutting out over the water in Suasalito and Tiburon, the sense of wealth and power and the weight of population.
We built HAWK to do three things: to sail the Patagonian channels, to re-visit Australia, and to sail under the Golden Gate Bridge. We had as perfect a moment as it's possible to have coming in on that beautiful morning through the soft air. But that doesn't mean we're done. After all, Chile's still down there, and we intend to have another go!
We hope that you too manage to realize your most cherished dreams.
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK