Oakland Yacht Club Buffett Party

I forgot to blog about what we did LAST weekend.  I mentioned we were trying to find someplace to go-I checked the Oakland Yacht Club website and discovered they were having a Jimmy Buffett party with live audio from his concert in Mountain View.  We were able to get a slip assignment for Saturday night so we cruised on over there. 

Some very nice people with a Krogen helped us into the slip.  We saw them at the party that night and found out the original owner of the Krogen was someone we knew from Coyote Point.  Small world.  The party started at 5:30 with everyone gathered around the TV to watch the Giants play the Phillies.  The party price of $15 included a cheeseburger and fries and two drinks.  We enjoyed some DELICIOUS margaritas as we watched the Giants win! The game ended just in time for the concert.  The audio quality was great and for $15 versus $150 it was not a bad way to listen to the concert!  Most of the folks were dressed for the occasion and luckily Matt and I had brought Jimmy Buffett concert tee shirts from the 2008 "Year of Still Here" tour so we fit in.  We did not make it to the end but instead went back to the boat and went to sleep! 

In the morning we debated going back up to the club for breakfast and we ended up making banana nut muffins on the boat then heading back to CP.  It was raining a bit but we found driving from the lower helm was no problem.  Once we got back we went up to the club to watch the 49ers beat the Raiders (YEA!) though the Giants lost :(.  We decided to stay on the boat again.  It was slim pickin's for clothes to wear to work on Monday but after such a great weekend we didn't really care.

Weekend Plans

This weekend we are taking the boat to a state park, Angel Island.  More specifically we are going to Ayala Cove.  The first Spainard to sail through the Golden Gate into San Francisco Bay was Juan de Ayala and he anchored in Ayala Cove!  Angel Island has been a military base, an immigration station (the Western version of Ellis Island) and I'm sure some other stuff I could remember if I wasn't typing this at 10:40 at night.  (I am not a night person.  Or a morning person.  I'm a sleep a lot person.)

We invited several friends from our yacht club to join us and at this point I think we have one who may come, if it isn't raining.  I really don't care if it is raining or not, I'm going.  Now that we know our heater works great "I ain't scared".  Plus we haven't used our new to us dinghy.  I think I blogged that a good friend of ours has pancreatic cancer and he came to the Marin cruise (our first weekend on the new boat) for a day and gave us his dinghy.  It is really nice and even has a trailer.  I would never have forgotten my dear friend Mike in any case but I shall think of him every time I use that dinghy.  We look forward to playing with it this weekend.

We think we have our food planned and purchased for the weekend.  The downside of Ayala Cove is there is nothing there except a snack shack type place with very limited daytime hours.  We will be out on a mooring ball and will have to use the dinghy to get to the island.  So we have to come prepared to be self sufficient. For the past few years we have led a cruise out from our yacht club to Ayala Cove and we've had to plan and provision for several meals and activities for a group.  I am looking forward to only having to worry about the two of us!  We plan to lunch at the snack shack Saturday, then have flank steak for dinner.  Sunday morning we will have bacon and eggs then head back to our marina.  We will spend Sunday on the boat as I fly out early Monday from SFO, which is near the marina.  I have to pack my bags for a week business trip before we leave for our weekend boating adventure!

So far we are really enjoying this whole powerboat thing!

Boat Stuff

We had a great time Saturday as race committee.  After we saw off the fleet we decided to try and label the wires running up the wire chase from the lower helm station up to the flybridge.  We took the wood casing off the chase and Matt stationed himself there with a flashlight and I climbed into the compartment at the front of the flybridge.  To get in there, I had to crawl through a not very big opening and of course I ended up having to crawl in and out of it a few times over the course of the ~two hours we worked on this so I ended up bruised, scrapped up and a little sore.  Wow, just like sailing! 

We managed to get maybe ~75% of the wires labeled but that is just the ones that lead to the flybridge, there are other wires in the chase that lead off in other directions so that will be a project for another day. 

Towards the end of the project (as dictated by the fact that the fleet of racers was rounding the last mark and heading towards us so we needed to resume our race committee duties) Matt said "I think we are getting boarded."  I am in a kind of confined space I cannot quickly get out of so I did the "who, what, where".  He said a fairly official looking zodiac was headed our way but he could not tell if they were USCG or what.  So I managed to extricate myself in time to actually see them and hear the conversation.  Turns out they were Fish and Game and they thought we were out fishing.  Since we weren't, they weren't interested so I had climbed out for nothing.  Oh well, back in the hole.

Somewhere over the course of the weekend we realized the water in our bilge was coming from our starboard shaft packing.  Matt borrowed some wrenches and some manpower and tried to adjust it last night to no avail.  He and the other guy could not even BUDGE the thing.  So the mechanic is supposed to come today or tomorrow and fix it.  Estimated cost is $150. I am not sure if he is going to adjust what we have our replace the packing but hopefully we will get the drip under control.  We did at least figure out that our float switch works and we identified which of the three "Bilge pump" switches on our three electrical panels does what!!  Two of the three have to be on to override the automatic pump.  We still have not figured out why five things have two switches that both have to be on--and these two panels are both at the lower helm.  Ah the mystery and allure of boats!

We had such a good time on our Redwood City trip the other day that we are trying to think of somewhere to go this weekend.  We were thinking Redwood City again, South Beach (in San Francisco) or Encinal (in Alameda).  We decided it was too soon to go back to Redwood City, South Beach has potential to be nuts due to its proximity to the Giants ballpark and unfortunately there is a cruise in at Encinal.  We are thinking of going to Oakland Yacht Club, which is next door to Encinal and having some sort of Jimmy Buffet party with live audio from his concert.  Sounds pretty cool!  We'll see what shakes out!

October 9 Plans

This Saturday is our sixth wedding anniversary so we thought we'd do something really romantic--be race committee for a club race and then host a pot luck dinner at the club!  I suppose this is fitting since we DID meet at the Yacht Club (in June of 2003) and we had our wedding reception there! 

I am really itching to work on our wiring.  I took apart the wire conduit that leads from the lower helm to the upper helm and the overhead panel above the lower helm to feed the "limo light" cable through there and found all sorts of interesting things, including a fairly heavy duty looking wire that was cut and a wire that looked like a lamp cord or cheap home extension cord.  Actually there were LOTs of cut wires.  I would really like to clean the wiring up and in the process remove all the electronics that don't work.  For instance, the GPS the lower helm does not work.  Actually, to quote the P.O., "it works, the display just doesn't work."  I am not QUITE sure what about it "works" if there is no display???  The antennae works? and with no display, that helps HOW??  Hopefully checking out all the wiring may lead to some things working again...  Hey, it COULD happen!

Weekend Wrap-Up

Our yacht club asked us to do a dinner Friday and give a presentation about the Pacific Cup.  The boat owners put together a slide show / video and Matt and I served tacos for dinner.  That only took three trips to Costco and one to a Mexican restaurant for beans and rice.  I did the shopping and Matt did the cooking and prep.  Several people pitched in to help with the room set up and clean up and all in all we had a great time AND we got this nice note from one of our members:

Hi Jennifer and Mat:

Besides being a lot of fun, the dinner you prepared was the best of the year. I love taco's. All the best, --

WOW!  So after THAT we had to take off and relax for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday morning we took the boat down to Westpoint Marina in Redwood City.  The marina is so new that it and the channel through the slough that lead to it are not charted.  It was somewhat nerve racking to get in there but we made it!  Matt was not totally lined up with the slip and came in a little too close on starboard but the docks are designed with rounded edges so we just got a little scratch.  The Owner of the marina was down there before we even had the dock lines tied and gave us a warm welcome, complemented us in the boat and then went to get us a 50 amp to 30 amp converter so we could plug in.  He also pointed out the wi fi and the slip side pump outs that were available to us.  We really like the place and look forward to the day when the proposed further development is in place.  Right now it is a mile walk to get to the yacht club and restaurant up the rode.  After we got the boat settled in we set off on that walk to go check out the "port fest" at the port of Redwood City.  It was super fun and we ended up finishing the afternoon at the Sequoia Yacht Club.  They cruise to Angel Island for the weekend on the day after Thanksgiving every year and we let them know we were coming up Thanksgiving day and would be there the whole weekend.  They also invited us to come to South Beach Yacht Club in San Francisco with them to go ice skating in December.  AND one of them offered to drive us back to Westpoint, though we ended up having a friend come up to have dinner with us at Bella's and she drove us home after.

Here is Matt on the boat at the slip in Westpoint.

We were in bed by 9 and had grand plans of leaving early Sunday morning.  We actually did not leave until almost 11, which we can pretend was due to the tides as that gave us a nice ride home on the ebb tide.  I drove a lot of the way and then turned it over to Matt to get us into the slip as I got out the lines and fenders.  It was his best docking yet, just absolutely spot on.  He made a comment that of course he did great with nobody around and I pointed out that someone on the next dock had actually been watching.  I have seen this same guy watching us several times and Matt said he has heard that this guy just got his boat and is afraid to drive it.  Our motto is it is only fiberglass but this guy's boat looks a few decades newer so I guess he has more reason to be paranoid about getting in and out of the slip???

We have a few different boat projects going, including installing GFCI outlets (1 down, 1 or 2 to go depending how they are wired) making covers for the outside of the windshield windows, finishing the throw pillows... we have a two page to do list...

This Saturday is our anniversary and we are going to be race committee then host a potluck.  Hopefully Sunday will be "our" day and we can relax and work on some of our projects!