San Francisco to Monterey

Above is a shot of Sister Midnight sitting in Aquatic cove, part of the Museums grounds in the heart of San Francisco’s waterfront.

After a few days swinging on the anchor here we moved to Pier 39 to hang out with the sea lions. Pier 39 is just along from Fishermans wharf. Both places had once been very busy commercial operations, either dealing with fishing boats or general cargo. They both have now become major tourist attractions, full of restaurants/bars and gift shops. Property prices here are so high it doesn’t make sense to be shipping goods through these wharfs, all of the trade is done by container ships over at Oakland, or similar terminals.

Pier 39 does have a marina, the east side is full of day trip boats, ranging from big boats doing ‘around the bay’ or ‘sunset cruises’ to a sailing experience on an old Americas cup yacht. On the west side, there is room for a few dozen yachts, but more famously there are a dozen pontoons set out just for the sea lions to laze around on. We had 2 days with the sea lions before we were able to move to a slip on the east side. You can see some sea lions on our pontoons at night. At one point I had a face to face showdown with a sea lion who wouldn’t let me get back to the boat.

We spent 2 weeks in San Francisco exploring the place. I hadn’t realised just how hilly it is, but the transit system is easy to use, and for $5 you get a day pass that covers all the trolleys and busses, but not the famous cable cars. I have included some pictures of the great architecture below and scattered around this post

The Long Now Foundation
The foundation are a group of enlightened people who have decided to build a clock out in the desert that will run for 10,000 years without any human intervention. The project is nearing completion now and the organisation behind it has a bar ‘The Interval’ just a few piers along from Aquatic Cove. I had to visit, mostly because they have a piece of art behind the bar that I was heavily involved with the design of. It was a commission I got from the artist Brian Eno a few years back to display his art project called 77 Million Paintings on 4 slim LCD displays. The images change on a continuous basis and should not repeat until after 77 million iterations. I designed the software and hardware that is on display at the bar, but I didn’t know it was destined for an organisation that deals with extremely long time periods. This piece runs on windows XP and uses SD Memory chips for storage, and so by its very design, has a short life expectancy. Still it was good to see it running in a very trendy bar.

At the end of one of the piers is an old amusements aracde with antique exhibits. I particularly liked these machines, but also enjoyed a game of space invaders on the big old upright consoles.

There are many funky buildings here, It’s interesting as most of them were built or rebuilt after the great earthquake in 1906.
Below Kathy is on one of the refurbished piers with some historic ships behind her.

Alcatraz
So as part of my birthday present to Kathy I bought her tickets to Alcatraz, I checked but they only did returns 😉
It was a very interesting tour, and must have been a pretty grim time for those incarcerated there, especially with the sights and sounds of SF wafting over the short stretch of water between the two.

The bridge
Of course the Golden Gate bridge is probably San Francisco’s most famous landmark. We had fun sailing under it, but Kathy had an old photo of her by the bridge taken in 1983 some 36 years ago, and wanted to go back and find the same spot. This seemed like a good challenge to me, so I fired up google street view and started looking for possible locations.

Fortunatley street view had great images from all the roads and footpaths in the area, and using the wires and the point where they cross the supports and the background hills made it fairly easy to get the spot.

Of course when we got there it was quite different, a new fence and viewing area. What pleased me was to see the square holes in the concrete filled in where I suspect the old wooden fence was fitted. In retrospect I think we were out by around 6ft, but that will have to do.

The engineering is stunning for the bridge, the wires that run the length of the bridge are amazing just in themselves.

City Lights & the Beat Poets
SF has a proud literary background and played a big part in the sixties counterculture movement, some of our favourite writers and poets made their mark here, along with many great musicians. Kathy had a particular desire to check out all the Manson related locations so I took pictures of her in front of lots of houses, places were either gruesome murders were planned or committed. We also saw the house were Kerouac wrote ‘on the road’.

Below is the room were the Beat Poets would recite their works and it was in this room that Ginsberg (He of Howl fame) and William Burroughs unleashed their radical poetry on the world.

No shortage of cruise ships here, this one was particularly massive, I think it was dutch.

Mission & 24th
Mission is a region just south of the main downtown area and we accidently found it when looking for some book shops, it has a very Mexican feel to it, which might explain some of the goods proudly being displayed for sale.

We had a great indian meal there. the area is also famous for large murals

Leaving the bay

Before we left SF I had some boat jobs to do, a few weeks earlier the cable from the solar panels to the battery charger / controller had failed. This runs down the backstay, then follows a tortuous path through the back of the boat, through the engine compartment and quarter berth. I had run a wire from the panels through a portlight down to the controller and it was getting in the way. This meant emptying out the lazzarette and all of the quarter berth. While this job was under way I decided to finally hook up the inverter that came with the boat. This is a big pure sine wave 2kw inverter/4 stage charger with sensing switch over. It’s a fancy bit of kit and probably costs thousands of dollars, but it had sat there idle all this time as it works with 110v, I had rewired the boat for 240v and I couldn’t see a role for it. However I realised that the boat has been in North american waters for a year now, and will probably do another 1 or 2 years before we head off into the pacific where I’m not expecting much shore power at all. On top of that I was not happy with the toaster that ran on 240v from a step up transformer, and given that the gas grill has stopped working, toast at sea has become a problem. Finally Rick up in Sointula baked a loaf for me using his breadmaker running off his inverter, so I bought a 110v toaster and I’m on the lookout for a bread making machine. I found that the inverter was already connected to the batteries via a big isolating switch, so rather than replumb it into the boats mains wiring, i just ran a trailing socket from it and popped a couple of slices into the toaster.
It was very fast to make some great toast, but it was disturbing seeing the meter displaying 90 AMPS being drawn from the batteries, I did the maths and worked out 4 pieces of toast cost me about 40 minutes of sunshine (Solar Power). I had got used to making ice from the sun, but peversley it seemed more odd to make toast from the sun.

So we left San Francisco in the afternoon to make a night passage to Monterey, this was a voyage of about 90 miles, to long to make in Daylight, so by leaving in the afternoon we would arrive in the following morning, the wind was forecast to be 20-25 knots from the NW which would have been great, we got the sails up and made a good 5 knots for a few hours, then the wind dropped and on came the motor.

Kathy cooked a nice soup for the evening

The next morning was quite calm and peaceful, I made toast with the new setup and that worked well. We saw Dolphins and Whales on the way down.

Arriving in Monterey
Just as we approached Monterey the wind picked up, as we followed the marks leading to the entrance their was plenty of sea life on view.

Of course Monterey was the home of John Steinbeck, and we had to visit Cannery row, the title of one of his books.

Monterey is lovely and we are enjoying just chilling out, I have picked up a few days of programming work which fits in well, and helps pay for the berth and the new Water pump needed for the engine.

Our favourite supermarket so far in California has been Trader Joe’s. the local one here has a great pumpkin display, as it has been halloween here for a few weeks already.

We should be in LA within a week.

Paul Collister.