THE SAME MOON
August 8, 2007
“Full moon’s out.”
I see it. The trees end. The creek spills into view, and there the moon sits, hanging over Marshallberg. I whisper goodnight to my son and glance out our pilothouse windows to see the same orb slip into a not-quite-black sky a continent away. Amazing.
I miss sailing under the sun’s heat, gliding over grassy shoals, laughing as dolphins cavort at the bow. I miss North Carolina waters. There’s wind aplenty here in San Francisco Bay. And cold. Stingrays glide along the rocks at the bay’s edge. Jellyfish puff and drift, puff and drift beneath Sea Venture’s just-cleaned hull. Fog edges the city skyline.
Mark Twain once said that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Today it’s blowing thirty. The bay dances under us. Some nights the waves slap our transom like bandits demanding entrance. Tethered here at the dock I’m getting my sea legs while the fruit basket swings giddily above our new galley counter.
The marina empties on weekends. White triangles pace each other around buoys, while we work on boat projects. Autumn approaches. It will soon be exit time. We want to spend next July fourth without mufflers and gloves even if the fireworks will have to be of our own making in another country.
Sometimes I feel already in a different land. On the dock we’re home. Folk from all walks of life, in all sorts of boats, from every state and a few other nations, live or sail from here. We share the same passion, no matter what boat gets us where we’re going. But just beyond the marina? The highways are peopled with kamikaze drivers. Gun shots blast nightly and sometimes during the day, blending with the sound of sirens and horns. So many angry folk litter the roads and the stores of Richmond.
I want to tell them to go sailing. To breathe deeply. To take a moment to see. Really see. Let a smile inch forward to break the scowl because there really is beauty just over their shoulder. It’s a different kind of loveliness from Carolina shores. Here are rocks and cliffs, hills jutting brown during the rainless summer months, blasting into green during the California monsoon of winter. There’s heat just up the Sacramento and San Juaquin Rivers, sucking the cold wind off the ocean and just past us. Back home, we’d hole up in wind like this. Back home, the clouds would mean storm’s a-brewing. Here, Michael just laughs and shakes his head while fog slithers over the city.
A Belgian woman lives on a Chinese junk next to Sea Venture. Her pilothouse stands sentry yards above ours. I can’t imagine sailing the cumbersome boat, but it used to be a working vessel, so somewhere, sometime, someone must have hoisted those tanbark sails. A previous owner had a thing for tractor engines: two huge ones line an inside passage from the galley/saloon to the forward cabins. Imagine walking through such an engine room on your way to the head with those things rattling and roaring, hidden only by draped curtains. You’d need earplugs. Perhaps even nose plugs—and courage that you wouldn’t fall onto the hot iron.
Two slips over is a large racing sloop from Hawaii. The skipper, Andy, used to run diving catamarans on the islands and has tales of capsize and rescue, diving under the pontoons with little air left to pull out passengers. Now he puts that 57-footer in gear, flashes out of his slip, and takes folk sailing on the wild and wooly SF Bay. If he can finish repairs before October, he will be heading south with the Baja Ha-Ha.
Others from here are getting ready to join the two hundred boats that cruise with the Ha-Ha from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas every fall. Reading about the festivities, Michael and I picture Sea Venture in their midst, lumbering into harbor at the tail end of the fleet, trying to find anchorage space or supplies as the last-comers, thinking we’d be better off waiting until after Turtle Bay has recovered from the rally before we descend upon that sleepy village.
This year? We hope. If only the wind would slow enough to get the new roller furling rigged. And the Monitor windvane installed. And the new Strongtrack tacked on the mizzen. And the new booms mounted. If only. We can see the Golden Gate from here. It’s really not that far away, a day’s sail, out past the rocks and hazards, a sharp left turn, and we’re gone.
