Bright sunshine, blue sky, light breeze in Sausalito (San Francisco Bay)
Departure day!
On the hook off the Sausalito waterfront, we'd had a pre-departure dinner last night of some awesome burgers that Ken cooked on the grill. After dinner we had rowed in to Sausalito, crashed the Sausalito yacht club (where we did not fit in!), and ended the evening at funky little No Name Bar, where we sipped brandies, listened to live jazz, and chatted with some locals before rowing home to our little ship.
We weighed anchor this morning at 0830, and by 0905 were passing under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Heading out the "Gate"
Although we had left Sausalito at slack tide, the last remnants of an ebb tide at the Gate met the incoming Pacific waves to produce some steep rollers with deep troughs. As we rode this roller coaster out to sea, we broke out our cell phones to make our farewells. But as we headed for the open ocean, the sea state was getting more boisterous, and we had to stow the pones.
After only a couple of hours of this we were both seasick; I was the first to fall victim, but since all I had had was coffee, I didn't have much to lose. I stuck it out for a while, hoping the fresh air would help, but Ken eventually sent me below to lie down in the part of the boat with the least motion, the cabin sole (floor), where I collapsed in a queasy, soggy, heap.
This was where I spent the remainder of Day One, rising from the floor only twice, to answer the call of mal-de-mer. My intrepid husband stuck it out at the helm, hand-steering much of the time. He managed to be sick only once, but I'm sure he felt practically as miserable as I did. Eventually he came below, too, and joined me on the cabin sole. Although we were both dressed in full foul-weather gear, he had been out there so long that he was shivering from exhaustion and hypothermia.
We pulled our sleeping bag over us and spent the night napping off and on, with Ken rising at intervals to check our course and assess the sea-sate, as our trusty wind-vane, Horatio, steered our sand dollar through the night. Oh, well. We will be dead soon and it will all be over.
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