My best friend from elementary school (Ransom) and his family came out this Saturday for a sail. We planned this months ago, and as we seem to hold little sway with the weather gods, had to take what was offered on that front. When they arrived it was slightly overcast and the tide was negative. We wasted no time getting the boat ready to leave though, and made it off the dock in what seemed like record time.
The sail over to Angel Island was ideal. We had 6ish knots out of the SW until we passed Treasure Island and then it picked up to about 10 in the slot. We made a long tack towards the island and another back towards the city before reaching then running into Alaya Cove. The docks were crowded and we had a pretty hairy encounter with two smaller (~30’) boats that were trying to take the 50’ slip that we were queued up for.
We spent a few leisurely hours enjoying the dockside and beach experience before we had to load back onto Convivia for the ride home. The trip back to Emeryville was exactly what I had hoped for. We sailed wing on wing almost the whole way with steady 15 knot winds on our stern. Just past Treasure Island I got a call from Chris and Lisa Holt. They had seen us sailing by and wanted to race back to the harbor. I doused the main to even out the sail ares and we spent some time sailing together until they had enough of humoring us and breezed on by. We’ll get you next time Holts :)
As we were cleaning up the boat the grey and blustery weather that had been holding back all afternoon started to spit and sprinkle on us. We hastily finished up and got the kids ready to disembark.
We rounded off a wonderful day of sailing with our usual, dinner at Picante. The Richardson/Shamels seemed to love the food as much as we did and we only lost one kid (completely) to sleep.