Better To Know Where

By Tom Marlow

Better To Know Where (BTKW) is an exciting look at a sailing voyage in San Francisco Bay. The author brings you aboard his small yacht on an insightful three day voyage through space, time and philosophy. Rooted in aesthetics and the waterfront history of the San Francisco Bay, the novel starts with the basic premise embedded in the title and never looks back. Both technical and Zen aspects of sailing are discussed along the way. Follow along on the voyage as the author weaves drama and tragedy with history as he takes you along with him on a romp aboard his 30 foot sloop Summer Wind. The stunning images are worth the price of the book.

The voyage starts at the Oakland Yacht Club slip where Summer Wind is berthed and goes on a round trip voyage all the way to land locked Petaluma via the Petaluma River. There's plenty of entertainment along the way too and you can follow the drama when Summer Wind is stuck in the river with a dead engine while a fully loaded barge ismaking it's way downstream, unable to maneuver or stop. Full of insightful and entertaining moments, go along for the ride to learn what it means to be a San Francisco sailor.

Learn why the sailors wind is so consistent on San Francisco Bay. Learn how wine became one of California's biggest exports before collapsing, only to be revived again. Get the insider skinny on hypothermia, venturi effects and Clipper Cove. Learn why a sail boat is like the stock market and why the Polly Klaas coincidences don't add up to a conspiracy. Look for whales with the crew as they navigate 'the slot' and agonize with the skipper as he nearly loses his young son to death by drowning. It is all there and more... Before your finished, you'll have repeated to yourself "I didn't know that" more times than you care to remember.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Marlow
• Release date: Sep 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310483752

Tom Marlow

Tom Marlow was born in 1951 in Toledo Ohio (holy Toledo!). After his formal education in computer science, he was employed at Ford Aerospace, NASA Ames Research Center in California and as a self employed software developer. During most of those years, he was engaged in writing software in obscure machine languages. After leaving the hi-tech world behind, he started writing in English, a slightly less cryptic language.Love of sailing and travel have influenced his writing. He started sailing as a pre-teen on an older brother's Sunfish, which was little more than a surfboard and sail. In subsequent years, he sailed aboard larger yachts for thousands of miles to destinations including Hawaii, Central America, BVIs and Greece. His sailing exploits are documented at www.ketch-22.com.He now lives in San Jose California with his wife Naty who shares his love for travel, but not for off-shore ocean passages.

Book preview

Foreword

In order to present the best possible experience to the reader, this third edition was released to take advantage of a new publisher and new publishing tools that have evolved since the first writing. A small number of typographical errors were corrected but the text remains largely the same.

Why was there a second revision? The second edition corrected some errors, omissions and awkward phraseology. Suggestions from past readers have been graciously offered and incorporated in the second edition as well. Most visible is the chart of the bay area that graphically illustrates the geographical context of the voyage. Also highly visible, is a drawing incorporated as Appendix A that defines sailing terminology and places the terms onboard a modern sloop rigged vessel.

Better To Know Where is all about the history and connections of sailing San Francisco Bay, where the author learned to definitively sail. The writing style was deliberately chosen to weave a description of the philosophy, joy and Zen of sailing, with the historical connections of the local San Francisco Bay waterways. To that end, Better To Know Where is anchored in the maritime history of the San Francisco Bay where the author has spent so much time on the water, as have so many others before him.

Dr. Tom Charron is as much as anyone, responsible for Better To Know Where being written. If you don't like it, write the author and he'll give you Tom's email address so you can complain to him. (Just kidding Tom). The author and his friend were on a holiday cruise to the city of Napa aboard Mi Vida, Dr. Charron's forty two foot Catalina sailing yacht, when Tom pointed to a cluster of run down wooden sheds and asked the author if he knew that the last whaling station in the United States operated at that location. The author had seen the buildings many times before but was completely oblivious to their history. Dr. Charron's offhand comment resulted in the research that the author used to aid in his writing of Better To Know Where. Thanks Tom!

Apologies go out to any Ohio residents who may be offended by the first chapter in Better To Know Where. It was not the author's intent to offend anyone. He is merely trying to inform. It has always been his belief that Ohio remains a great place to be from.

Don't forget to read the quotations at the beginning of every chapter. They all in some way refer to the chapter content or theme of the paragraph that follows.

With only a few exceptions, the pictures introducing the chapters, as well as the cover picture, were taken by the author in and around San Francisco Bay. The exceptions were chapter three, which was snapped in Barillas El Salvador; chapter five, which was taken in County Clare Ireland; chapter six, which was taken just south of Charleston South Carolina; and chapter 30, which was snapped in San Blas Mexico where crocodiles abound.

Map of San Francisco Bay and Vicinity

Table of Illustrations

Cover Photo: View from Oakland Yacht Club berth.

Chap 1: Heading out to an unseen destination.

Chap 2: Sailing near fog enshrouded Golden Gate Bridge.

Chap 3: An early start to the voyage.

Chap 4: Fog over Sonoma County vineyard.

Chap 5: Moon bow over the water.

Chap 6: Traditional Irish burial ground, County Clare.

Chap 7: Storm clouds brewing over the water.

Chap 8: Clipper Cove, circa 2011.

Chap 9: San Francisco Oakland Bridge span at Yerba Buena.

Chap 10: Red Rock Island looking west.

Chap 11: Moon rise over Sonoma.

Chap 12: Hard aground in Sonoma County mud.

Chap 13: Napa Valley vineyard seen from the Napa River.

Chap 14: Heading up river in the Wine Country.

Chap 15: Engine room during the repair process.

Chap 16: Mirrored egret in flight near Point San Pablo.

Chap 17: A hypothetical killer resume.

Chap 18: The wooden sailing ship Alma in San Francisco Bay.

Chap 19: Honker head: profile of a street goose.

Chap 20: Money, money, money (and gold).

Chap 21: Heading down river en-route to San Pablo Bay.

Chap 22: VTA bus, San Jose California.

Chap 23: Coastal fog back-lit by sunrise.

Chap 24: Remains of Richmond-San Rafael Ferry Co. dock.

Chap 25: Summer Wind at the dock awaiting provisions.

Chap 26: The Potomac: FDR's floating white house

Chap 27: View of GG Bridge looking from Raccoon Straight.

Chap 28: Remains of the last whaling station in California.

Chap 29: Spinnaker run: near the end of a long weekend.

Chap 30: The jaws of death: A San Blas MX crocodile.

Better to Know Where

… you are going and not know how, than to know how you are going and not know where.

Sailing San Francisco Bay: An Alternate Perspective

Def: yacht – a vessel used for private cruising, racing, or other non-commercial purpose.

Chapter 1 – Better To Know Where

If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else. - Yogi Berra

It had been a typical day on the water. Sailing was relatively new to us at the time, but we'd had a delightful cruise under a cloudless California sky and now it was time to be looking for a place to spend the night. Unfortunately, the only local marina was reluctant to extend any hospitality – no room at the inn. Noticing several empty slips, I inquired about them. Apologetically, the harbor master explained she was expecting some late arrivals and didn't want to be caught short if they did show up. Noticing the concern on my face and the two barely post diaper toddlers on board, after first turning me down she took pity on us all.

There's a fine anchorage about two miles away. You can tuck in there for the night and have a real good night's sleep.

Being short on any options, I immediately took her up on the suggestion and asked for some more detailed directions. We discussed possible routes for a few minutes over a chart of the local waters. She took the time to point out some extremely shallow areas to avoid and what channel markers I could use to find my way. In the end, we were both satisfied – I had a place for the night and she had solved a problem for a naive mariner.

We still had a couple hours of daylight, so getting to our intended destination was no problem. The winds were light and there was plenty of shore side vegetation that protected us if it should pick up later in the night. I used two anchors to keep us into position; one fore, the other aft. As twilight descended on us, we had an on-board barbecue. After a gratifying dinner, we settled in our bunks for the night. What could possibly go wrong?

It didn't take long to find out. As we were sleeping, the tide had been slowly creeping in, blanketing the mud along the shore. Then shortly after midnight, deep asleep, I started to experience the true impact of a rising tide raising a floating boat. The adjacent vegetation that had been previously sheltering us from the wind, was now providing a mere pittance of its former asylum. The winds meanwhile, had steadily been increasing in velocity, sweeping down on us from some unnamed off-shore high pressure zone to the west. By the time of my awakening, the winds were simply howling.

It was the rocking of the boat that so rudely woke me up. The gusts in the rigging were pushing us this way and that, dragging both anchors an inch at a time with every big blast. By the time I stuck my head out the hatch, the rising tide and subsequent diminished elevation of the shore side growth had left us completely exposed to the unexpected gale. Looking this way and that, the first thing I noticed was that our boat was dragging into the vegetation on the down-wind side of the anchorage. We were getting dangerously close and I didn't have much time to prevent a disaster.

It was about one AM on a moonless night. The winds were howling. My family was below deck and I knew we had to get out of that catastrophe of an anchorage in a hurry. So without even a thought about where we would go, I brought in the anchors and began motoring out of the narrow opening where we had sought shelter for the night. It was dark, cold and harrowing. The only thing that could have made it worse was rain.

My eyes were tearing from the force of the wind and I could barely see the channel, but somehow we managed to make it to the relatively open water outside of our former anchorage. It was then that I realized that by averting one disaster, I had inadvertently placed us in another. With several hours before daylight, we had to find a place to tie up for the night or most certainly we would run aground in the unseen mud of the shoals surrounding us. That's when the rain started.

By now completely miserable, I risked a chance that the marina might have an opening. But first we had to get there. My wife, who by then had been long awake and frightened near to death by this unexpected turn of events, was on deck with a large flashlight, verifying the channel marker identification and generally watching for any lurking danger. Our luck was finally changing however and we managed to get to the marina and find an empty slip without damaging any boats or infrastructure. It was the last time I planned a voyage without having a good back up for an evening’s rest. When sailing, you better know where you are going before you get there.

In the morning, hung over from sleep deprivation and mulling over the evening's 'entertainment', I pondered over sailors and sailing. Why do they do it? More to the point, why was I doing it? After all, it's nothing more than an entertaining anachronism. If I was the ungrateful sort, I could have blamed my brother. He had introduced me to the sport years ago. But I knew it was far more complicated than assigning blame. In the shelter of the marina, I thought a long time about the whys and wherefores of mankind and boats. The thinking took me back to my birthplace in Ohio, all the way back to my first conscious awakenings.

I knew at an early age that I had to get away from the mid-Atlantic region of the country. I never really felt like I belonged there. When I came to that realization, I was young, in my early twenties. I didn't know or have the good sense to care precisely where I was going when I left. But I knew intuitively that I had to get out of Ohio. Or perhaps Yogi Berra's quote notwithstanding, I did know where I was going, and just didn't know that I knew.

Still, I knew with certainty that I wanted out of Ohio, where I spent most of the first twenty years of my life. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with Ohio. It's just that I always felt that I didn't fit in well there, despite it being my birthplace. It was after all my parent's choice and I had no say in the matter. Anyway, it was much too far away from the salt water, and even while surrounded by mountains and cornfields, the oceans had a strangely compelling attraction for me.

Regardless of my being uncomfortable there, those years spent in Ohio were incontestably wonderful times to be alive. They were times of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and plenitude. Maybe we took too much? Subsequent generations seem at times, to have been left with nothing but AIDS, crack cocaine, rap music and chronic shortages.

I was an amateur philosopher then, in an era when unemployed philosophers could successfully get away with labeling themselves a Hippie. I arrived in San Francisco with very little in my pockets except debt but fortunately, very little of that. My timing was bad. The fiasco at Altamont Motor Speedway had already rang the death knell of the Woodstock Generation and the Age of Aquarius. The twin dirges and my financial circumstances when I arrived, forced me to start a new phase in my then relatively brief existence.

Unlike the one I'd been experiencing, the new phase in my life was destined to look a lot more like the life my parents had been living. In prior years, I'd been in harmony with the winds of change blowing through society at large during the magical sixties. My next chapter was destined to begin with closer conformance to society's expectations.

The GI Bill had given me the economic wherewithal to leave the freedom of the California road where I had been living, for a more conventional existence on a California University campus. It was there at the university, while working on a mathematics degree, that I had my first structured taste of high technology.

It was in retrospect, one of the most intellectually stimulating and monetarily challenging periods of my life. In those formative years of my early twenties, I was driven to morph ever deeper into the role of amateur philosopher. It may have just been a brief and temporary flirtation with schizophrenia, but the nature of reality was frequently in my thoughts. Given the elusive nature of reality, I was never quite sure where I was or where I was going. But undeterred by not knowing precisely, I knew then as a young man on his own in the world that life is for learning. And as a student and an unemployed amateur philosopher, the economic challenges of day-to-day living helped to significantly increase the slope of the learning curve.

My philosophical leanings allowed me to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about where humans were headed as a species, as well as where I was going as an individual. Although the questions were impossible to answer specifically with any certainty, I never stopped trying. Like a Buddhist monk memorizing koans, I researched and memorized phrases that held meaning for me. The archetypal everything is relative became quickly relevant to me, because of the inherent intuitive obviousness. But it wasn't too long after, Nietzsche's ... there are no absolute truths sent my head into a tailspin. If true, of what worth is a koan? If false, where were the absolute truths I was seeking?

I came to the conclusion that philosophy was for those who were only interested in better questions. Religion on the other hand, was for those who wanted a belief set without rationality. Where was one to go?

I was only able to restore my equilibrium by stumbling onto an articulation I could believe, regardless of whether or not it held universal meaning. The 'koan' that I was able to hone over time as a young philosopher, is that

'It is better to know where you are going and not know how, than to know how you are going and not know where'.

That simple and profound assertion covered all my bases. It is as much as anything, responsible for the path my life took after leaving Ohio. Strangely, in an indirect way, it also helped cement my interest in sailing after an initial attraction that got a start in my teenage years in landlocked Ohio.

It should be self-apparent even to a casual observer that a sailboat confers upon a sailor certain freedoms and rights. Combined with a little ability and desire, you have everything you need to go damn near anywhere you want to go, assuming accessibility by water. If you do want to go by water and you know where you want to go, a small hand held GPS receiving device that sells for a few hundred dollars at most, will tell you how to get there.

The receiving device is an under-appreciated accessory that is really just the user interface to a space based global satellite navigation system. It also just happens to be one of the most remarkable technological systems that humankind has ever cobbled together, allowing the user to locate their position to within a few feet from anywhere on the surface of the planet.

Several years after my inauspicious arrival in California, with the help of a couple years’ experience as a computer operator and a newly minted mathematics degree, I had established myself in the burgeoning high technology industry that was just getting started in the South San Francisco Bay area. It was then and there that I was able to merge philosophy, sailing and high technology into a practical framework.

About two years after being blown out of the anchorage in the rain, the dark and the howling winds, a long holiday weekend was approaching. That distressing incident by now was nearly forgotten and I had some free time that I wanted to spend on the water. It was another typical warm summer day in the south bay when I decided that Petaluma was where I was going. My thirty foot sloop Summer Wind and a hand held GPS receiver are the voyaging tools I used along the way. I knew where I was going and how to get there...

Chapter 2 – San Francisco Bay Sailing

East is East, and West is San Francisco. - O. Henry

It's with good reason that San Francisco Bay is considered among the sailing cognoscenti to be a world class cruising destination. The reliable winds, the gorgeous scenery and the weather are just a few examples of why so many sailors are proud to have it plastered on their transom as their home port.

Due to its location, perched on the far western edge of the North American plate, the bay area topography exhibits the scars of the epic battle being waged between the North American plate and the huge Pacific plate to the north and west.

The Pacific Ocean opening to the San Francisco Bay is located roughly half way between the northern and southern borders of California. It's in an area that would be described as the southern border of Northern California, if such a political designation existed. An understanding of how its location has attracted generations of sailors comes with an understanding of the relationship between the terrain profile, the prevailing winds and the miles of affiliated waterways.

Due to environmental and topographical influences in the bay area that tend to isolate small communities, it is known for its many micro climates that populate the region. The larger macro climate can be usefully described as a transition zone. It's a zone where the vegetation has adapted to a wide variety of growing conditions.

Capturing this variety in song, poets have whimsically described the area as the region where the palm tree meets the pine (1) There is a lot of overlap, but palm trees and oaks are more prevalent in the warmer and more arid conditions existing to the south. To the north where it gets a little more rainfall and in general it is slightly cooler, the pine trees begin their dominance.

Between the Pacific and North American plates runs the San Andreas Fault. It is approximately eight hundred miles in length, running along the western edge of California and forming the tectonic boundary dividing them. Traveling right through the San Francisco Bay area, the edges of the plates on either side of the fault, proudly display the mountainous disfigurement of the combat being waged by them.

San Francisco Bay lies to the east of the fault line, behind the coastal mountains thrust up as a result of the relentless grinding between the Pacific and North American plates. The Farallon Island chain lies to the west of the opening to the bay. The islands delineate the western-most point of land that defines the city and county of San Francisco. Beyond the Farallons lies the Pacific Ocean, which extends without interruption for about two thousand miles, until it washes ashore on the black and white sand beaches of the Hawaiian Island chain.

Conveniently for local sailors, a gap exists between the coastal mountains north and south of the entrance to San Francisco Bay. The opening to the bay is about a mile in length and it allows the Pacific Ocean to flow freely, back and forth through the narrow passage. The salty Pacific waters flow east and west through the gate, in and out of the bay and delta like a metronome in a piano practice.

The San Francisco Bay area is a region that has always been attractive to humankind. It was once home to about ten thousand indigenous Miwok aboriginals prior to the eighteenth century European influx. It is now home to millions of people and four of the fifteen largest cities in California – San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont. Further to the east, past the delta region lays Sacramento, the capitol of California. Sacramento, as well as many other farming communities, rose up after irrigation and cultivation were brought to the San Joaquin Valley, deep in the California heartland.

In the early years, the growth of what was to become such a vibrant economic community, needed to ride on the back of an equally vibrant transportation system. The bay and delta thoroughfares were more than adequate to the task. Sailing ships and local waterways were the mechanism for the early European arrivals to trade goods between communities dotting the shore. Floating commerce and sailing thus became an integral part of the contemporary bay area's DNA.

In addition to the perfect weather, it is the topographical variety that makes the bay such a beautiful and exciting arena for sailors. The summer sun reliably heats up the San Joaquin Valley in the California interior to desert-like temperatures, causing the air near the ground to rise as it warms up. The rising, in turn sucks in cool, moisture rich air from the Pacific Ocean coastal regions. The incoming air off the salt water follows the path of least resistance through the gap in the coast that doubles as the entrance to San Francisco Bay.

Outside of an occasional winter storm, the winds blow the hardest and the most consistently in the months