Intermediate Coastal Cruising

Last weekend I took the Intermediate Coastal Cruising course on a 32' Catalina. This included the on-the-water test, but I still have to pass the written exam. This shouldn't be too difficult though, so soon I will be qualified to charter boats up to 35'. These are much larger than the 26' Santa Cruz sailboats I've been doing day trips on for the past two years. They have a living room area, a galley, a head and can sleep six people! You can go to someplace like the Caribbean or Mexico and charter a boat for about the same amount you would pay for a hotel room, which I plan on doing ASAP.

The course was much fun. Saturday started with heavy rains, but things cleared and we enjoyed 25-30 knot winds until after sundown. Finding a place to anchor for the night was difficult since the heavy Northernly winds made the instructor's preferred location less than ideal. Finally we dropped anchor near the coast of Belvedere right under the 10+ million dollar homes, with our stern facing straight towards the skyline of San Francisco. On Sunday as we sailed near the Golden Gate bridge a family of porpoises followed us for 30 minutes as we surfed six foot swells. I love sailing.

One funny thing that happened was when I was in the school office and I noticed a new Learn to Sail poster they had put up. It had a photo of mine from Flickr on it! I had put it up with a Creative Commons license, so I was mostly pleased to see it used, but when I looked it up later online I noticed that the license I had chosen for it was non-commercial and attribution-required so they totally stole it. Maybe I should have my lawyer offer a discounted charter settlement.

Another thing that happened was that on Saturday morning as I jumped off the boat onto the dock, I dropped my keys into the water. This was a big set, with keys to my house and mailbox, car, motorcycle, safe, six keys for the RV, two client office keys and a couple of keyless entry electronic gizmos. On Monday night I was able to get a big magnet on a rope from the harbor master and I spent some time dropping this magnet into 22' of murky water. I figured my chances were low since there had been strong currents and 50+ hours since I had lost them, but amazingly after twenty minutes I pulled them up! And the electronic transmitter still works even!

Comments

[Brad]

Hey Dav,

Fun to see that you're sailing. I'm an old sea dog from Santa Cruz days (early-mid 90s), mostly sailed Moore 24s down there, though I was checked out on up to 40' boats with Pacific Sailing (charters) down at the SC Harbor, back then. Maybe we'll be out on the water sometime together.

I noticed that the link to your wife's weblog explaining your name changes was missing a "_soon_be" at the end--it's a bad link currently from your About page.

Happy Birthday to Tesla (another cool name--have you got yourself an e-sports car by that name yet?)... Btw, the evite (from fun@pivot) is how I ended up here today.

Cheers,
Brad

[dav]

Hi Brad.

Thanks for the link notice. A lot of Mie's links changed a while agoand I haven't set up the proper URL rewriting yet.

Yeah let's go sailing sometime! Between working so much lately and raising Tesla, I haven't been out much at all this summer. In fact just for that class really.

I'd buy a boat, but that costs even more than the Tesla roadster!