As we pulled into Alameda, Alan, one of Christine's crewmates from her Mahina trip, met us at the dock and helped us pull in. Alan offered any assistance he could give us as we repaired and reprovisioned; it was nice to meet a friendly face.

We needed to keep our stay short in the Bay Area as we needed to get the boat ready and leave before a high pressure system (no wind for days) moved in and stalled us, so we apologize to our friends in the Bay area we did not call or get to see. We were extremely busy - removing the boom, then re-rigging was a substantial job for us while keeping three kids on the dock and away from travel lifts. As we would be losing close to a week, Christine organized the shopping list for Dale for our third provisioning effort (a charm?) for the leg to Hawaii. We also had a dead laptop to deal with. Dale took our old laptop in to be checked out. As the motherboard was fried it made more sense to buy a new computer. Bill at USATEK was able to recover the data off of the hard drive for us. Alan drove me to buy a new one. Alan was a great help to us. Late Wednesday night was installing software and restoring the data, when I realized Christine's emails had not been recovered. Dale called Bill in the morning: he came and picked Dale up, recovered the mail, and dropped Dale off for no charge! People continue to be extremely helpful to us.

Svendsen's boat yard took also took great care of us. Chris got right on our boom repair and re-seated the casting. Adam lent me a bike cover the 2.5 miles to top off our propane tanks and Barrett gave us some extra screws for our furlers, as some had worked loose.

Once we had everything back together I went aloft to check all of the fittings and gear and make sure nothing else was working loose. Loctite is becoming my new best friend. On the way down the coast, two of the lugs in our headsail furler worked loose - some red Loctite should stop that from happening again. Ever. Hopefully I won't have need to take it apart.

Our weather router advised us to leave Thursday night before some inclement weather and light winds settled in. We hustled to get out of the yard, fuel up, and set sail. We were in for a surprise as the only gas dock in Alameda closed at 4:30. Fortunately we found a 24 hour fuel dock nearby. On checking the chart, I noticed depths on the approach of 3 - 6. Surely fathoms, as we draw 6 feet. Never assume. A quick look at the key told me we would not be reaching that fuel dock. The last dock open closed at 6:00 across the Bay. We couldn't quite make it. As we had burned about 1/3 of our fuel motoring in with the broken boom, we had to have more diesel to set out. So, we spent the night at the Golden Gate Yacht Club Marina and walked up to Baker and Chestnut streets for a wonderful (and expensive!)Greek dinner. We are learning to be more flexible on this trip (a lesson to be learned over and over again.) We filled up in the morning, topped off our water and scooted out the Gate.