This was my best day of sailing yet! Six of us met at pier 40 in San Francisco at 10am on Labor Day and, after a quick coffee run, motored out in a 34' Catalina that Jean was kind enough to charter, since she's a member at Spinnaker SF. We had pristine SF weather... mid-70s, bright sun, with around 10-15 knot winds mostly out of the northeast.
I'm going to keep the words to a minimum, because I shot a lot of pictures, and you know the saying...Our course was wherever we felt like going. Everyone wanted to go under the Golden Gate Bridge, so we headed north under the western span of the Bay Bridge and then out the Gate. It wasn't nearly as rough as I thought, which was great. When we passed under the bridge, we all howled on Norbert's queue and made a loud echo! Who knew...
Next we all got hungry, so we sailed around Marin and up to Sausalito, where we docked and had lunch at a nice little cafe on the water. That was a short stop, and off we went to sail around Tiburon, through Racoon straights, and around Angel Island. The back side of Angel Island is known for lack of wind, so we had to motor through for a few minutes. We passed a small sailboat without a motor, and one person was actually rowing with a paddle!
I wanted to get close to Alcatraz, so we sailed past the gate (which was funky with all the wind shifts and gusts) and around Alcatraz. Then we turned toward the cityscape and sailed along the SF waterfront, rounded Treasure Island, and passed under the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, where we could see the new bridge being built. By then, it was almost 8pm, so we headed back to the marina at pier 40, pumped out the head, motored back to our slip, and buttoned up the boat. 
It doesn't get any better than this! If you'd like to see more pictures of this fantastic day, go to my Picasa web album.
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