Tomales Bay Adventures

9-3-12 - Spud Point Marina, Bodega Bay, CA - Day 63

 

Tomales Bay; the good and the bad, could have been this posts title.  First; where is Tomales Bay? Why would a person want to go to this place? I've been to a bar before, why are you so scared of this one?  Here's some basic information on the area if you really want to know: Tomales Bay information  For us, the reality is that we are not exactly sure when we will be back in the San Franciso Bay area, with a boat and with this much time to explore.  Therefore we ought to take this opportunity to check out some of the great places on the Northern California coast before we head South.  Tomales Bay also seems to hold a sense of allure among the sailing community of San Francisco.  It is this place that really isn't that far away, it's reported to be incredibly beautiful, with lots of things to do; but many if not all of the people we've talked to had never made it there.  This can be attributed to many factors of course.  Like ourselves time is the number one reason I believe.  Most people seem to think that the San Francisco to Tomales Bay and back trip should be done over about ten days or so.  It's not a long weekend sort of trip, more like a long week if not more.  This keeps a lot of people away.  Secondly is the notorious bar at the entrance.  If you would listen to some people there is a sea creature that lives there and it gobbles up unsuspecting boats just for the fun of it.  (a "bar" is not a place to get a beer, but rather a place where the ocean goes from really deep to really shallow in a short distance causing the incoming swells to increase in size and potentially break like they do on a beach)  Many people, us included until now, would hate nothing more than to take a week off work, spend three days getting to Tomales Bay only to find the waves breaking on the bar stopping their entrance to the sacred bay.  These were the reasons that had kept us away until now and probably the reasons that we were most likely the only non local and non trailered sailboat in the bay on a holiday weekend.  Fortunately for us time was not an issue so our logic was that if the sea creature was holding court at the entrance we would go to Spud Point Marina and at least say we tried.

As you can read previously, our trip into Tomales Bay originated at Drakes Bay with a 6:00 AM departure.  We had nice wind but with a schedule to keep we motor sailed most of the way.  If you read the guides and follow all the advice, you are supposed to cross the bar at high tide between the hours of 8:00 and 10:00 in the morning with a swell of no more than five feet.  The conditions for this were perfect on this day, but as mentioned it meant we had to leave Drakes at 6:00 AM and not do less than 5 knots the entire twenty five mile trip.  Ultimately we mad it to the entrance on time, we had a small swell, we called the locals for an update on the conditions at the bar and for some reason we were still nervous.  We looked thru the binoculars to check for breakers and re-read the guides and information we had, and as we inched closer and closer to our first encounter with menacing breaking waves, I looked down at the chartplotter and realized we were already past the bar and life was good.  The reality is there is a very real danger and a very specific route you should take when entering the bay, but that is a discussion you can send me an e-mail about for the specifics as a discussion of passing bla bla bla green #3 


yes there actually is a green #3 buoy

can buoy to starboard with seven feet of water and within fifty feet of the shore etc, etc will be mind numbing for anyone who doesn't intend to go to Tomales Bay.  Either way our entrance was thankfully uneventfully.  On a technical note I will say we used the MeHaffy's cruising guide and notes from the travel log of Libations Too ( http://rollinscs.com/boatpages/cruisinglogpage6.htm ) as our basis for our route and decisions.  Their advice was all good and sound.

Now on to why we would go to all this work and take these risks.  Tomales was a beautiful place.  The first place we dropped our anchor at White Gulch, I spent a few hours sitting in the cockpit watching a herd of tule elk graze on the hill side, various shore birds were flying around eating out of the newly exposed low tide areas and generally it was exactly what everyone says about the area.  Ultimately, there was a lot of wind being funneled thru the canyon at White Gulch so we moved to an inlet just North of Sacramento Landing on the West shore of the bay, just off of a small beach that I am convinced was put there just for us. 


AW at anchor with my beach on the left

It was in this place we spent five nights anchored.  Four of them were great and one was not so good. 

Tomales lived up to all the hype.  We launched the dinghy and spend around the bay to different locations,  thinking it was easier than moving the big boat and re-anchoring multiple times, checking out the attractions.  We really didn't want to give up our private beach.  One day we went North and beached the dinghy where we set off on a long hike / walk that turned our to be more walking along the road than hiking, but none the less was a great way to see the peninsula. The entire peninsula was at one time used as a dairy ranch that produced butter, so there was some fun things for Elizabeth to see at the turn of the century dairy farm at the end of our walk.  Then down to McClure's beach on the Pacific side of the peninsula before the long walk back to the dinghy.  Thankfully we ran into some people watching a herd of the tule elk on the road and we talked to them for a while.  We took off on our walk and soon they came up behind us and offer a ride back to our trail.  I guess we appeared to be trust worthy!  We got back to the trail and a herd of cows had blocked our gate, so as they scattered we hopped the fence and headed on our way. 

Dinghying around Tomales

View of the Pacific towards Pt. Reyes

 

White Gulch - our 1st anchorage

McClures Beach on the Pacific



McClure's Beach

 

We spent a day at Hearts Desire Beach, then over to the "town" of Marshall for fresh oysters and clam chowder.  Apparently, Tomales Bay's other claim to fame is being a big oyster growing area so the oysters are usually less than a day old when you get get them.  I can attest to the fact that they were delicious.  How can you beat eating fresh oysters overlooking the bay with you own boat in the background?  Then to finish the evening off we had a little beach fire on our private beach as the fog rolled in.  At one time I declared that this was the "best day yet"  I never should have tempted fate with such a statement as the next days would prove to challenge our happiness.





Oysters at The Marshall Store.
You can just barely see AW way in the background

Beach fire on our "private" beach

 

The following day we returned from a morning dinghy ride to the far South end of the bay to Inverness.  It was a very wet ride back to the boat, but we knew this would be the case so it was all in good fun.  We had a good lunch in Inverness and met the fire chief who was very friendly and gave us some old fire hose for chafe guard on our anchor rode.  The plan was to run the engine to warm up some water in order to have a hot shower.  The discussion of showers, and then hot showers, and things of this nature could be a full post in itself so I'll wait until a latter date to explore that discussion.  When I went to start the engine nothing happened.  This can be attributed to many things so I quickly checked off the easy ones as being ok and then we slowly settled into the fact that we had a real issue on our hands.  There are no good pictures for this part of our time in Tomales Bay as there was really nothing to see.  We spent the rest of that day trying to diagnose the issue with no success.  So we went to bed knowing that we could not leave in the morning, and knowing that we were in some way helpless.  We had discovered that our engine did not work at 4:00 PM on the Friday before the Labor day weekend.  There would be nothing open for three days, we were in a bay that, as described, is not easy to get into, or out of.  This is certainly not a place you would plan to sail out of.  There is not even a dock inside the bay we could sail up to.  If we could sail out of the bay, the nearest harbour is Bodega Bay with a 1.25 mile long channel that isn't even fifty yards wide, and the next nearest place with a marina is San Francisco some 55 miles away.  The next day we notified Vessel Assist, a towing company of sorts, of our predicament just to give them a heads up in case we were to need their services.  They frankly told us it would be three or four days until they could help us.  So the day after the "best day yet" we had a very ominous feeling hanging over our heads as we awoke to try to diagnose this issue.  This feeling is difficult to exactly describe.  We were safe and had been anchored in the same place for four days.  The weather was decent and supposed to stay that way.  We had all the power we needed thanks to our solar panels, we were not out of food and there was fresh water at the beach just South of us.  We had fuel for the dinghy to get to shore.  By no means were we ever in danger; yet it is a very disconcerting feeling of helplessness knowing that you can not leave.  You have three days to figure this out and there is no one to help.  I can spare you the blow by blow account of the fifteen hours of work it took us to figure the issue out.  There were multimeters and many attempt to start the engine involved.  We tore apart the back of the boat tracing wires and checking for possible connection issues.  We eventually did diagnose the problem and lived to tell the story.  It was lucky for us that we had the slightest bit of cell phone coverage and therefore Internet ability with which we were able to access the Catalina 34 forum where we asked some questions and received some valuable advice.  We even received a call from a C34 owner in Erie, PA with some advice that ultimately sent us in the right direction to solve the problem.  The help we received from these people was incredibly helpful and I hope I have the opportunity to help someone in the future as repayment.  By the end of our second day working on the issue we had bypassed the safety systems that ultimately were what failed on the engine and we fired up the engine finally.  I think I literally jumped for joy at the sound of the engine.  That night we went to bed satisfied and proud of ourselves that we had solved this issue with the tools we had on board and a lot of perseverance.

Exiting the bay was much like entering.  We were very tentative.  The engine ran great but it was somewhere in the back of our minds that we had bypassed the oil pressure alarm and if that became an issue it could be catastrophic.  The fog was quite thick as we approached the bar and we fought a three knot flood current in order to pass at high tide.  Just as we approached the final buoy to cross the bar the engine began to overheat.  Not knowing what the issue was we immediately turned around and drifted with the current back the way we had come.  Using some tricks we had picked up in the Delta, I backed down aggressively and cleared the seaweed and grasses off the prop.  That small panic solved we pushed on for the foggy entrance.  Besides the thick fog the exit went just as planned, and all of the sudden we found ourselves motoring across Bodega Bay with little visibility. 

So the sea creature at the bar did not get us and that ended up being the least of our Tomales Bay worries.  Our systems worked well allowing us to spend five nights at anchor with no worries and we had the "opportunity" to learn about our engine.  I think I can say that it was a successful, maybe a little stressful, trip.

Can you see the jelly fish in this picture?

 

Breakfast in the cockpit, pre engine troubles

Leaving Tomales Bay

 

PS: you can check out the new "SPOT Adventures Archived" link on the right for our exact path on this trip.