October 2, 2013  California Delta – inland from San Fransisco

Last time I wrote we were in a café in the old Haight Ashbury neighbourhood watching the return of the hippies.  It was a kick being there, not only for the fun atmosphere, incredible people watching and Ben and Jerry’s delicious ice cream but also to admire the amazing architecture.  Many of the original mansions are now multiple family dwellings with some three storey heritage houses containing as many as nine suites.  Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me but Jim took some terrific videos of the traditional and not-so traditional architecture, which is similar to those referred to as the Painted Ladies also in San Fransisco.  Getting to Haight Ashbury was an expensive cab ride ($28.00) so we decided to bus back, using our new Ipad to help guide us with the bus system.  We are now finding it invaluable and wonder why we waited so long to get one!  Anyway, after two or three bus changes over an hour we eventually made it back to the dinghy beach at Aquatic Park around 8:30 p.m. cold and hungry.  We rowed to Martha and Doug’s boat, Thea, and they graciously provided us with hot leftovers from the potluck we missed.  What great people!

The next day saw Thea, Avant and Falcon all heading in different directions.  Avant heading for Alameda near Oaklands and Thea heading to Half Moon Bay and on to Monterey.  Jim and I sailed across San Fransisco Bay to the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge community of Sausalito.  En route we sailed around Alcatraz, the famous prison referred to as The Rock, long since shut down and now a major tourist attraction. 

Alcatraz Island, closed high security prison

This sign says it all!

Remains of a building on Alcatraz Island

 

Sausalito was definitely high scale, with average meals at the few restaurants ranging from $25 - $30 an entree (and out of our price range).  Real estate was off the charts for the hillside homes, many upscale luxurious mansions and expensive enormous duplexes containing outdoor elevators to get from street parking up the steep hill to the house.  We stayed at a mooring buoy as guests of the Sausalito Yacht Club and enjoyed grand showers at the yacht club before wandering around the area.  After a very rolly night we left mid day for Alameda, an large island full of marinas off of Oaklands on the east side of the bay. The channel dividing Oaklands from Alameda was a mass of freight terminals and freighters loading and unloading goods.

After our initial phone call to  arrange for moorage we decided to name it ‘Helpful Alameda’.  The slip we were assigned at the huge Marina Village Yacht Harbor was about ½ mile from the Harbourmaster’s office.  We mentioned to Corey, the young harbourmaster, that we had to get to a specific supply store before closing time and asked him to call us a cab as soon as we were docked.  Not only did he call us a cab but he picked us up in his own car and drove us to the harbour office to meet the cab – saving us much needed time.  He also consented to take delivery of our autopilot parts we had to have shipped in from Washington.  On the way back from our errand a wonderful bus driver told us – very nicely – that we didn’t want to go on his bus and pointed us to another stop and told us of better routing back to the marina…then he handed us four free tickets to get there. It took 1.5 hours to get back but we saw some of the older downtown areas, which were vibrant and colourful and walked the last mile as dusk.  The next morning I approached a boater in his mid-thirties walking by Falcon and asked he knew where we could get our propane tanks filled and he said, without hesitation, that he was going to fill his own tank in an hour and would gladly drive across town and take ours to be filled at the same time.  Wow!  People are so nice.  We also really enjoyed walking around Alameda and feeling like we were definitely in sunny California.  We had a good 4 mile walk looking at Victorian, craftsman style and post-war architecture under the hot mid-day sun while we wandered from ships chandlery to ships chandlery to purchase needed supplies.

We left Alameda late afternoon and anchored at a mid Bay getaway called Treasure Island near the Oaklands Bridge before heading up into the Delta.  We had heard about the Delta area and wanted to check it out. 

Motoring under one of the may bridges on the Sacramento River

The Sacramento River and San Joaquin River wind their way inland from San Fransisco with dozens of intricate waterways branching off just begging for exploration.  One of the locals told us “We’ve got 1,000 miles of waterway here, and 950 miles of it is less than 20 feet deep!”

As we left the Bay area we were aware of the changing scenery.  No more flash office buildings, expensive restaurants and freeways.  The landscape took on a much more industrial feel with oil refineries, a sugar refinery and lots of huge old factories.  Arid rolling hills appeared on both sides of the Sacramento River with little clusters of housing and marinas sprinkled about.  Our first evening stop was Pittsburgh, which was named New York of the Pacific then New York Landing before being changed to Pittsburgh. 

Palm trees lining the marina grounds

The Capitol - an old restored theatre

Railway Road lined with palm trees

Enjoying Japanese dinner at Mojo's

Coal and steel processing plants were the original foundation for this little community, which has a number of tribute sculptures scattered around the old town core.  It is still an industrial town but the marina area was nicely secluded from industry by canal lined houses, lush vegetation and thick palm trees.  The marina was beautiful and we were impressed with the infrastructure of the area.  Many local boaters love to fish and we saw one sign on a boat saying “Lets rip some lips”.  The old town was rejuvenated within the last five years with a few inexpensive but trendy restaurants and stores dotting Railway Road, a few public parks adorning the area and an historical post office turned museum rounding things out.

Monday was a frustrating day as we tried to arrange for shipments from Washington to fix the autopilot.   We walked for a couple of miles and found the ‘real’ Pittsburgh – the fast food restaurants,  malls and traffic.  We found ourselves travelling on a main road running under an active railway then over the four lane freeway.  We were hot and tired but, by late afternoon we had things figured out and left Pittsburgh to anchor in the river. 

Sunset on the river

Beautiful horse being groomed next to the river

Not as pretty as the horse, this cow takes a sip from the river

We anchored beside the rural farmland where we could hear cows mooing and tropical sounding birds singing as dusk descended upon us.  The wind whipped up the river all evening but our trusty anchor held firm once again but we were happy to get away under sail in the morning, heading into extremely quiet and calm narrow channels.  Another interesting feature of the Delta is the appearance of giant windmill turbine farms along the Montezuma Hills on the north shore of the Sacramento River. 

A few of the hundreds of windmills

It’s hard to conceive of their scale, each being more than 400 feet high with each blade exceeding the size of a large airplane wing.  Hundreds of these awesome wind turbines silently go round and round producing 1.5% of California’s energy.  Amazing!

We have fallen in love with the Delta area and will miss it when we have to move on!  It is peaceful, laid back, full of little towns and a great place for easy down-wind sailing. The area requires a tremendous amount of attention to navigation and I have to thank Jim for putting in many intricate routes on our chart plotter to make sure we always had at least 15 feet of water under us.   We ultimately turned around when we started seeing signs of 9 or 10 feet in channels that were too shallow for Falcon so we didn’t get a chance to see what they were like.  Various types of boats use the waterways and rivers including jet boats, freighters, tugs and barges, power boats, cruise-a-home trailer-like boxes and even the occasional sailboat. 

A freighter passes us on the river - extremely close!

Flat bottom cruise-a-homes are popular in the Delta

Bird hunters use these 'blinds' - see the motor sticking out

Fishermen motor by at high speed all day, every day

Fishing no more

Barge of soil moves towards a raised bridge

Thick floating vegetation lines the shore.  The water hyacinth is an invasive species imported from the Amazon in the 1880’s as a decorative plant.  You can see how pretty they are close up, which must have been why some early settlers thought they would be an nice addition to the waterscape.

The Delta area also features more marinas per square mile than I have ever seen!  Happy Harbor, Pirate’s Lair, Spindrift Marina, Sea Horse Marina, Lloyd’s Holiday Harbor and Riverboat Marina are just a very few of the dozens of little winding marinas that are often hidden in bayou-like passages barely visible from the main channels.

Pirate's Lair Marina - the flat roofs house the boats

  We dropped the hook and took the dinghy for a little run to check out marinas and had the old burger and fries lunch at the Pirate’s Lair Marina.  Later that afternoon we re-anchored in an out of the way slough surrounded by agriculture that was barely visible on the other side of the rocky dikes built everywhere to protect the food producing land.  There was no breeze as we settled down for the evening listening to a cacophony of frogs.

In the morning we pushed off heading up Three Mile Slough where we radioed for a bascule bridge to be raised.  The bridge operator told Jim he would “Get busy with it”.

Going up!

Holding my breath as we went underneath the bridge

We hurried up to get under the bridge so he could put it back down and let the traffic resume.  Jim pushed the throttle forward and we were under it in a couple of minutes, looking back at the lineup of cars that sat waiting for the bridge to lower.  Such power! We dropped anchor and spent the afternoon in the town of Rio Vista where we made a run to the bakery.  Rio Vista, like many other small towns, sits along the Sacramento River.  As we finished our ice cream cones we returned to Falcon and continued motoring a short distance to another anchorage spot on the river.  Just before that no fewer than seven large Sheriff zodiacs whizzed by, with one of them peeling off to check on us and ensure that we knew where we were.  We politely answered and waved goodbye just before dropping the hook at the side of the river. 

Falcon at anchor

"Bug Inn" sitting in Rio Vista



The wind calmed down near dusk and all was quiet some of the night.  We couldn’t hear any cows but we sure could smell them!  We really enjoyed our 3 days in the Delta and could have easily spent 2 – 3 weeks here.  We’re certain we’ll come back via land in the future.  Thursday, October 3rd was spent motoring in strong winds back towards the San Fransisco Bay before returning to Alameda to pick up our autopilot parts.    We’ll be heading back to the open ocean in a couple of days to continue or exploration down the coast of California with stops at Half Moon Bay, Santa Cruz, Monterey and then Morro Bay.  After that…who knows!

Sunset in the Delta