We spent a couple of good days in San Francisco. There were no bridges and no fog, but the three-quarter circle bay encloses a wonderful sand beach fringed by low grasses. The big tourist draw is the climb to the top of the point to look down over the blue bay below and admire your very own cruising yacht floating lovily in liquid space.
Our guides were an older couple from one of the other boats who knew the lay of the land from several years of cruising the Sea of Cortez. We were accompanied by Sarah and Eddie who seemed in fine fiddle considering the antic evening before. Mitch and I were running fashionably late for the prearranged start of the hike, so we headed our four strolling companions off by landing the dinghy a little down the beach.
The trail started almost at the southern point of the bay and switchbacked steeply up from the sandy waist through shoulders of red and grey rock that sprouted plenty of desert scrub from what should have been lifeless gravel. The last fifty feet was boulder hopping over lots of sharp corners and across deep crevices. I don't consider myself old with my sixty-one years, but my career of cubicles has left me with some relimbering to do for adventures like this. I'd like to say that I'm proud of myself for even attempting this climb, much less accomplishing it. Ta dah!
Hopping and crab-crawling along the craggy ridge, someone jokingly offered to hold my camera for me in case I fell. I joked back saying, "No. If I go off this edge I'll have time to get a few pictures before I stop at the bottom." To tell the truth, I'm not that comfortable with high places, especially when there are jagged precipices to bounce off of on the way down.
We all made it back down to sea level alive and with only a few bumps and scrapes in time for Kevin's noon o'clock bocci ball challenge on the beach. Though my own showing was only honorable, my crew was the victorious champion of the world. Mitch and I had come prepared for snorkeling, and begged off a rematch so we could walk across the narrow isthmus to explore the bay on its eastern side. That turned out to be a disappointment, so we trundled ourselves back to our anchorage and explored the rocks under the bluff bounding the north side of the bay where we found several moray eels guarding their turf from itinerant snorkelers and flocks of colorful reef fish.