Sailing from Frisco to Fort Bragg

by Gregg Stevens

Sunrise was still an hour away when I made my attempt on the Golden Gate. I had fallen considerably behind schedule and arrived there at max ebb tide, meaning that ten zillion gallons of water was pouring out of San Francisco Bay and slamming into the ocean swells. By the dawn's early light my course ahead looked like a big set of Colorado River rapids. And while I could often tell the difference between an anchor and a rudder, my nautical experience was not as extensive as I would have liked for a voyage of this nature. I was making the 180-mile passage from Napa to Fort Bragg alone under sail. Right about then I was beginning to think that I may have bitten off more than I could chew.

Sundancer is a 27-foot Catalina sloop built in 1971, and I had recently paid $5,000 for her. In the high priced world of yachting it's not unheard of for a fellow to spend $5,000 on one sail, so Sundancer was basically the nautical equivalent of a 30-year old Chevy Nova. But nonetheless that $5 grand was more money than I have ever spent on any one thing, and it firmly marked the very farthest limits of my investment capital. If my boat was to be berthed in Noyo Harbor I would have to sail her there myself before the storms hit or I ran out of money completely. When I finally cast off in my new role as Master and Commander of the Sundancer, I only had $41 left to my name. I was hoping to dispel the myth that sailing is a rich man's sport.

A huge container ship was being escorted in through the Gate as I was exiting, so I gave it plenty of room. But directly under the Golden Gate Bridge the rapids got so steep that I had to shut the motor off, since it was coming clean out of the water. The sails were not catching the light wind. and I ended up bobbing around in the waves like a log. I may as well been in a raft for all the control I had. The current was rapidly pushing me into the middle of the channel and that's where the container ship was. By the time I got power to the sails and built up enough speed to tack away I was in its bow wave and two boat lengths from its enormous hull. That 500-yard clearance had shrunk to 50 feet so quickly it was absolutely stunning.

I made it out to sea with no further problems, and it soon turned into a beautiful day for sailing. Hundreds of birds were floating around out there, pelicans often cruised by to check me out, dolphins escorted me for a while and a small humpback whale jumped halfway out of the water 20 feet away and scared the hell out of me. It was what sailing is all about, and it was right where I had wanted to be for a long, long time.

For countless years I have had a plan. When my children are all grown up and self-supporting, I expect to step onto a sailboat and sail out into The Big Wet, stopping where and when I please. I figured that if I could somehow get by on the Mendocino Coast all these years, I could somehow get by in Tahiti or New Zealand just as well. After a lifetime of reading sea stories I intended to have a sea story or two of my own. But first I would need to be able to successfully sail from one point to another without becoming a hazard to navigation. And that's what this boat and this voyage were all about: Training. If I couldn't fumble my way into Noyo Harbor then sailing to Bora Bora was a hopeless cause.

By noon I could see Point Reyes in the distance — I was working against the wind and the current so I had to tack back and forth quite a bit. And I seemed to be getting nowhere. By late afternoon Point Reyes didn't look any closer and the wind had died off completely. So I dropped my sails and motored toward Drake's Bay with the intentions of anchoring for the night.

There I was, happily motoring through gentle swells in a dead calm. Moments later, I was fighting a 20-knot headwind in rough, choppy seas. It was as if someone had flipped a switch and turned on the weather.

I ran like that for almost two hours. The sun was setting, Drake's Bay was still a long ways off and the ocean was almost too rough to use the motor. I got my mainsail up just in case, and I finally entered Drake's Bay in dense fog and complete darkness with the wind wailing eerily through the cliffs. Anchoring in a strange place at night is not a terribly safe thing to do, but any port in a storm is a good one. Or so I thought.

Somehow in the chaos of blindly keeping the boat straight and dropping the anchor I managed to wrap the anchor line around the prop, which instantly killed the motor. I tried to power up the mainsail but within moments the wind had spun the sloop around and was driving it onto the rocks. Sundancer put her nose in between two huge boulders, dragged her keel in the gravel and came to complete stop just inches from disaster.

I was pretty well freaked out by now, and I knew that I had better do something real quick. The tide would start to rise in an hour and I didn't want my boat to be stove in by the rocks when she floated again. So I grabbed the anchor and jumped over the bow, got upwind as far as I could and set the anchor in chest-deep water.

Then I discovered that I could not get back into the boat. I was wearing two pairs of pants, a sweatshirt and a jacket, and was completely saturated. I must have weighed 800 pounds and pulling myself up onto the deck from the rocks proved impossible. I had anticipated problems of this nature and had tied a loop of rope off each side of the boat when I began my trip in case I had fallen overboard. So I swam to the back of the sloop and after several failed attempts I finally got my foot in the loop and flopped into the cockpit like a fish being landed.

I sat there — cold, exhausted and soaking wet — listening to the wind howl and the keel scraping in the gravel, and I watched those rocks for hours. I have to say that was one of the most miserable nights I have had in quite some time. At 3 in the morning Sundancer floated again, so I quickly backed her out into the bay and anchored properly. But apparently I had not yet made enough foolish blunders in one day. For as I was climbing into my sleeping bag I sat on the fire extinguisher and emptied its contents all over the cabin.

I decided to lie at anchor throughout the next day. The wind was still blowing pretty hard, and I wanted to see if Sundancer was taking on water. And I also needed to get some chow and rest up for the next leg of my journey. But I can't say it was very relaxing staying there in gloomy old Drake's Bay. I spent a considerable amount of my time contemplating the half-inch thick anchor line, which was the only thing keeping the sloop from destruction.

The wind died down just before sunrise, so I got underway and rounded Point Reyes soon after. I had little more than a light breeze to work with, so I slowly cruised north a few miles offshore. My intentions were to make for Bodega Bay, spend the night and fuel up for the last stretch home. There was nowhere decent to stop between Bodega and Noyo, so it would have to be a non-stop, 80-mile, solo dash through the Graveyard of the Pacific in October. I can't say I was looking forward to that part very much.

By afternoon the wind had died completely, so I fired up the motor and continued north. Then someone flipped that weather switch again. The wind hit with a load roar and the ocean turned bad in a heartbeat. Shortly after that, the fog came in so thick it was as if a wet towel had been wrapped around my head.

I had the Bodega buoy plotted into my GPS, but it didn't do me much good. When the GPS showed that I was right at the buoy I couldn't see it because of the fog and blowing spray, and I couldn't hear it because the wind was making too much noise. And somewhere on the other side of that buoy was Bodega Rock — a place I had no desire to get close to.

My Viking ancestors sailed the seas by the shape of the waves and the feel of the wind on their faces. I had a satellite navigation unit in my hand and I still didn't know where in the hell I was. I became so disoriented that I began to think my compass was broken. My only option was to head out to sea and get as far from land as possible.

By now the wind was blowing something fierce, and to top things off I hit a big ebb tide coming out of Tomales and Bodega bays that turned the ocean real mean. Before I could even catch my breath, I was fighting my way through steep ten-foot seas — some of them much bigger and many of them breaking like waves on a beach.

This was not how it was supposed to be. I had studied weather maps and buoy data and forecasts for months. It had seemed like a real good week for the trip. In fact, the weather radio was still talking about pleasant sailing conditions. This unexpected blow had caught me at a real bad time and place. I knew that at my level of skill in the boat I was sailing, I was in way over my head.

For two hours I fought for every inch of sea room I could get. I had far too much sail up for these conditions, so it took total concentration to keep the boat under control. If I spaced out for a moment the sloop would come up into the wind and the sails would flap furiously.

I looked up and noticed that one of the clips holding the mainsail to the mast had broken. Then another one went. The only way out of this mess was to get the mainsail down and run south all night under the jib alone. And that prospect terrified me, for in order to drop the mainsail I would have to go out onto the deck while the uncontrolled sloop went wild through those big, ugly seas. Sundancer has no guardrails around her deck like most sailboats do. And while I was tied to a safety line, experience had shown that getting back aboard the boat was almost impossible when it was sitting perfectly still. In all my years I don't think that I have ever dreaded a job more than I dreaded dropping that mainsail. But it had to be done, or my problems would only multiply.

I was waiting for a milder set of waves when I happened to glance behind me. And I beheld a sight I will never forget. The fog had lifted and the clouds parted, and there was Bodega Bay, five or six miles astern, all lit up by the setting sun.

It was a sign from God, and if the wind had not been blowing so loudly I probably would have heard a chorus of angels singing. I was not about to pass up this particular miracle. A breaking wave pushed the sloop down and laid it over, so I took that opportunity to hang a U-turn and point the bow at Bodega.

Going with the wind and waves improved the situation considerably. But the seas were trying to push the sloop sideways and roll her over, so it was still a pretty wild ride. Sundancer was hauling ass, relatively speaking. And that was a good thing, because when I looked behind me I could see that the fog bank was racing me in and gaining on me by the minute. If it caught up to me I would probably have to turn around again, and I would be in even worse shape than I had been.

I surfed a breaking wave between Bodega Rock and the headland, and made it to the harbor entrance with the last of the light. After dropping the sails I motored through Bodega's narrow, twisty channel in the fog and the darkness. And with an enormous sense of relief, I tied up at the marina and stepped foot onto dry land for the first time in four days.

I sat in the cabin, eating ramen and drinking tea and listening to the wind howl through the rigging: shaking the boat briskly with each gust. And I considered what it would have been like to run out to sea all night in that gale, blindly sailing through the shipping lanes in the fog and praying that I could clear Point Reyes and the Farallones. Bodega was clocking 30-knot winds that night, and it was blowing even harder by sunrise. Four-foot swells and a gentle breeze my ass. I swore that I would never believe another weather forecast as long as I lived.

Postponing my trip was a hard decision to make. But there was no way I was going back out there. So I rented a slip with an IOU, squared away the boat and bummed a ride home.

That gale blew for over two weeks. If I had not made it into Bodega that night I would have been almost to Hawaii by the time it calmed down. Holding on for dear life the whole way. We had some real nice days in Albion, but then I would turn on the weather radio and hear of 40-knot winds and 20-foot seas. And I was awfully glad to be on land. But I still had a mission to accomplish, and it weighed heavily on my mind.

The wind finally died down for a couple days, so I headed back down to Bodega to try it again. This time I brought along one of my sons to spell me at the tiller. Greggory is a big, strong guy in his early 20s, and I kidded him that I had only brought him along in case all else failed and we had to paddle the damn boat to Noyo. I never imagined for a moment that we might actually be doing that very thing.

There was not a trace of wind when we left Bodega Bay at dawn, and it stayed like that all day as we motored up the coast through gentle, rolling swells. It was a warm, sunny day and there were plenty of whales to be seen. It would have been the perfect day at sea, except for one small detail. We were fighting a surprisingly strong current, and it affected the fuel consumption dramatically. Halfway to Point Arena I realized that we probably wouldn't make it all the way to Noyo. And it's not like there are a lot of gas stations out there. So the knowledge that we would be running out of gas that night somewhere off the Mendocino Coast took some of the fun out of an otherwise glorious day. All we could do was continue north and hope to find some wind.

When darkness fell we were five miles off the town of Elk and motoring through a clear, moonless night with Point Cabrillo lighthouse as our guide. I was surprised by how many lights there were on this stretch of coast. We could easily identify all the little towns and some of the bigger inns. The lights clearly marked the coastline all the way to Point Cabrillo, so navigation was not a problem. Fuel was a problem.

Off Mendocino we had less than a gallon of gasoline left. And I would need that to maneuver through Noyo Harbor and up the river to my slip at Dolphin Isle. We had run that poor, little Evinrude outboard for 15 hours straight. But now it was time to sail, regardless of the fact that there was no wind at all.

The rest of the night was devoted to trying to round Point Cabrillo. We could sometimes catch just the faintest hint of a breeze, and we would work it for every foot of headway we could get before it went away. Four times we made it past the lighthouse. And four times the breeze died completely and the current would drag us back towards Mendocino. At sunrise when it became obvious that our fifth attempt would fail as well, we burned just enough of our precious fuel to finally make it around that damn point.

We floated around off Caspar for a while, waiting for another tiny breeze. But the air was just as still as could be. At one point we actually paddled that 6,500-pound boat in the hopes of getting even another quarter mile before we had to start the motor. But while we were making some progress through the water, the GPS showed that we were actually moving south. We had no choice but to start the motor, head towards the harbor and hope for the best.

A mile off Todd's Point we burned out the last of our fuel pulling up to a commercial fisherman to ask if he could spare some gas. There have been occasions in my life when a complete stranger has helped me out of a jam, and this was one of those times. Greggory and I were mighty happy sailors when we pulled away from that kind soul with gas in the tank once again.

Soon after that Sundancer was finally tied up safe and sound in her new home. It had taken 28 hours to get there from Bodega Bay. And 28 days to get there from Napa. Another strong gale hit the very next day, and the weather has been bad ever since.

My odyssey had taken a lot more time and money than I had originally planned. And I had considerably more gray hair than I did only a month before. At no point was that trip what you might call terribly relaxing. Certainly not the pleasure cruise many people might picture when they think of sailing. But as strange as it may seem to the average land-dweller, I just can't wait to get back out there and do it some more.