A day of hiking
20 August 2012 | Angel Island
Julie
We escaped the rolly anchorage near Sausalito and picked up a mooring ball, or rather two mooring balls at Angel Island State Park. To make sure that all boats have room, they require that you pick up both a bow and a stern mooring ball. This keeps all boats close together without swinging around, banging into each other. Jones Island in the San Juans should take note! It seems like it would be quite a process to pick up two balls instead of just one but it wasn't bad at all. We have several hundred feet of line coiled on a spool and mounted on a rail at our stern. We use this primarily for stern ties up in Canada. It works great for this application too. We just looped the line through to stern mooring ball then motored forward and grabbed the bow buoy.
Angel Island has been called the Ellis Island of the West Coast. There is a 5 mile road leading around the perimeter that took to to an old immigration station, a fort, a nike missile site and several batteries. The immigration site was very interesting. There is a museum there but unfortunately it is closed on Mondays. There were several signs around the site explaining how most immigrants were processed and released in about 3 days, several people ( usually Chinese) were detained for 2 weeks to 2 years! They were housed in crowded barracks with dirty bathrooms and their small exercise yard was enclosed with barbed wire fence.
I will post pictures when I have a better internet connection.
The Americas Cup trials are in San Francisco Bay this week. We saw them off in the distance today. They are FAST! Part of the bay is restricted later this week so that they can race. Many of the marinas are taking advantage and doubling their slip fees for transient boats.
We plan to hike up to the 788 foot summit of Angel Island tomorrow.
I'm not quite sure how this works but the wind has been around 20 knots in the bay but only about 5 knots just outside. It must funnel though Golden Gate. I'll have to look into why this happens.