Thirty-five knots apparent wind under the bridge, the dial steady while I worked the boat through it and my wife braced against the cockpit coaming. It was August, the month the fog runs hardest through the Gate and across the slot. Still, we wanted to "check the box" by briefly sailing out of the Gate for a bit of adventure.
We'd taken the boat out from Sausalito, no one else aboard, just the two of us again with a whole day open in front of us. Getting out to the bridge meant sailing straight into the wind the whole way, tacking continuously, no rest in it at all. After our pass under the bridge, we turned east to run across the San Francisco waterfront; the wind came around behind us, which sounds like the easier half but wasn't, not with that much chop, more time on the helm than the sails, just keeping the boat settled as it ran down the back of the waves. However, it was the leg north toward Angel Island where we finally gave up. Still a strong 20 to 25, nothing like the bridge, but enough that neither of us had it in us anymore to keep working for a sail that wasn't giving us a break.
So we called it. I put the boat on autopilot, let it hold its own course, and we both ducked under the dodger to get out of the wind. I always enjoy how quickly it turns cozy under there. The dodger blocks enough that twenty-five knots turns into something you can barely feel, and for about twenty minutes we sat almost completely oblivious to what was still going on a few feet away, just casually chatting away about our son or work or whatever, with the sail loaded up, the water working past the hull. Off to the north the sky had already gone blue, which we could see plainly from under there with no particular urgency about reaching it. That might be the neat part of a boat like this, how much weather can ben around you while you sit inside your own small pocket of not caring.
She had the Bridgeway on the whole time, in Mainsail, low over her sunglasses, "mainsail" off-white cotton with the small navy woven patch that says where we're from. Named for the street that runs along the water in town, the same one we've written about before. The Bridgeway cap felt at home on her, in the moment, on the boat, under fog, like few other caps could.
North of Angel Island, we finally caught up to the blue sky we'd been watching from under the dodger. The wind let go almost as suddenly as it had arrived, the dodger stopped being necessary, and for a stretch it turned into an entirely different sail, warm and open, almost Mediterranean, the boat finding temporay stillness on the lee side of the island until we passed back into the wind.
We came back the usual way, a slow but pleasantly rewarding beat through Raccoon Strait with four or five tacks, and that's when we saw what Sausalito had been doing without us watching. The same fog we'd fought through hours earlier was still at it, pouring itself over the headlands and down into town like water finding the low ground, the whole hillside going under it while we sat in full sun and watched from the water. We were headed straight back in. We wanted to wear that fog like a blanket.
We tied up back in the marina that had stayed sunny and breezy the whole time we were out, and instead of walking anywhere, we ducked back under the dodger for snacks and a few drinks before calling it a day. The same spot that had kept the wind off us on the way up kept the breeze off us at the dock, and for a while it felt like the middle of summer under there.
Kevin