This is a light to moderate day of traffic on the Bay. The weekends are crazy, and the big ships can come at any time.
There are people on the water whose purpose is to drive a boat. There are the professional freighter captains with their floating freight trains, the patrol and police boats looking to respond to emergencies like really helpful sharks, the tour boat captains performing their precision maneuvers in large boats at high speed, the ferry captains who are more on the lookout for wildlife and idiots to tell their passengers about/avoid, and then people like us, those idiots.
Our purpose is to drive *this* boat, in all manner of situations. We’re out for unfettered fun, a crime to some, but we are also, as a pair, very alert. There are so many sights to see and catalogue, so many new dangers to assess and try to avoid, and so many fickle cues from the weather to try to learn.
Don’t get me wrong, however; we’re still idiots. We’ve never been here before. We don’t know how things work here. We barely know all the rules of the road, which means that we don’t actually know the rules of the road but we do know the basic rule of, “Don’t hit anything, and don’t let anybody hit you.” It’s worked very well for us, owing that aside from a sandbar we’ve never hit anything, but it leads to a lot of frantic guesswork. Ten bucks says the other guy’s doing the same.
We’re getting to know how the water works though, and the air, and the shores. We’ve also got a pretty good handle on the boat by now, assuming you have a functioning rudder, and years with a fisherman father who operated his boats like they were patrol boats taught me a certain ‘mariner’s efficiency’. All in all, I think we’re in pretty good shape.
All of this is just to say, I love you Mom. We are back on the water and we are very safe.
Our anchorage tonight on Angel Island, a former military island base, now a wildlife conservation area. Unfortunately, my years of environmental consulting suggest to me that this might mean there’s a lot of leftover contamination in them thar hills.