Trip Report
San Francisco, California
September 13-20, 2003

Good winds, good weather, great views and favorable tides during our trip to San Francisco Bay blessed the Sailing Club. We boarded, checked out and provisioned our five boats at Club Nautique in Alameda, CA on Saturday afternoon, September 13, 2003. We had a Gib Sea 43, two Hunter 410's, a Jeanneau 40 and a Hunter 380 for the 30 people on the trip. Members of the Club came from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Minnesota, and England to visit the San Francisco Bay Area for a week.

Sailing got underway Sunday afternoon and we found a nice breeze in the South Bay as we headed north under the Oakland Bay Bridge by Yerba Buena and Treasure Islands. Coming out from under the lee of the islands we sailed across the slot to Angel Island. The winds were strong; with frequent gusts over 30 knots. We were able to find open buoys in Ayala Cove at Angel Island and, after some learning time, all tied up - bow and stern to the buoys. We weren't able to raft up, so each boat had to figure out how to deal with dishes that were originally intended to be passed around to the 30 people on the trip.

The weather was good again on Monday, as it was the whole time we were there. We took advantage of fair winds and a flood tide to reach and run some four hours from San Francisco Bay into San Pablo Bay and across it to Vallejo. There we berthed at the new Vallejo Municipal Marina. Some stayed in the dock area for dinner; others took the Cab to a local restaurant.

Tuesday the bus showed up early ready for our 11 AM departure to the Dry Creek General Store where our lunches were made up and waiting for us. The Store handled all of us in 35 minutes! We then drove to the Lambert Bridge winery where, after a pleasant tasting we had lunch while enjoying the beautiful views of the Dry Creek Valley.

Our second winery stop was at Mazzocco, where a vertical tasting of their famous Matrix wines had been set up. Mazzocco is known for its Zinfandel wines and its Chardonnays as well as its Matrix wines. The wine store and the wine related items in the store proved attractive to all, as they had at Lambert Bridge.

Last we went to Porter Creek winery, a small, boutique winery that produces only about 2,000 cases of wine each year. As Porter Creek wines are showing up in a few highly rated New Jersey restaurants it was interesting to taste them at the source. We were standing next to the Creekside and Hillside fields while we were tasting wines with those names on them.

Well fortified after our trip to the wineries, some boats had dinner aboard and others went to the Waterbarge Restaurant on the dock in Vallejo.

Wednesday we motored back from Vallejo to the Bay taking advantage of an ebb tide that morning. When we got to the Bay, around noon, we found that we were in the middle of that day's race between Alinghi and Oracle , a match race between the America's Cup winner and the principal challenger for the 2007 competition. One of our boats was about to be the third boat across the starting line until the Protector Boats warned it off. All five boats got a lot of action watching the race. All got a lot of practice tacking, too.

That evening we tied up in a 3 and 2 boat raft at a side tie in the City Front Marina owned and operated by the City of San Francisco. We were directly behind the Oracle Tent. While we are sure the team of BMW and Oracle didn't really need our money a good number of Oracle souvenirs and a few Alinghi items made their way onto our boats. We crossed the grass at the head of the dock and walked to the waterfront to watch the end of the second Alinghi-Oracle race of the day. Dinner and evening sight seeing in San Francisco ended the day - for some the day ended in the small hours of Thursday morning.

Thursday was a free day in San Francisco for our crews. One party went on the Alcatraz tour; others went all over the City. That evening we had dinner at the St. Francis Yacht Club in a private room that had a view from the Golden Gate Bridge on the left to the Berkeley waterfront on the right. The dinner was excellent and we are grateful to our friends who arranged for the dinner and for the slips - which were very hard to come by. As a special favor to the Sailing Club Larry Ellison, of Oracle, had postponed his $250,000 fireworks display from Monday to Thursday. It began just as we were rising from dinner and the show was given from three barges, in the Bay about 200 years off the Yacht Club front. We watched it from the starting line deck of the St. Francis.

Friday most of us went out under the Golden Gate Bridge, then general sailing in good winds, ending at berths in Richardson Bay (Sausalito). Saturday we sailed again watching the final day of match racing - Oracle won by 4-3 both in the races driven by the boat owners and in the races run exclusively by the America's Cup pro racers.

We turned the boats in Saturday afternoon. Members variously rented cars for a few day's extra stay, went off with friends, took planes home or stayed Saturday night on the boats rising at O Dark 30 for early morning planes on Sunday.