June 14, 2004
hemingway sunday
my body is sore. my face and arms are hot with too much wind, salt, and sun. and yet, i feel remarkably alive right now. today was one of those rare days where you feel like, in eight or so hours, you have lived through a couple of hemingway short stories, or maybe an epic homerian poem and at least one of the plagues foretold in the book of revelations. kin and phil and i set our course for point orient, and fell into the doldrums around the chevron docks. suddenly, we were beset by a plague of horseflies. this is not a joke, there were about fifty flies that suddenly descended on the boate from nowhere. kin actually sought shelter under one of the deck cushions. phil went below. i fired up the motor, and we all started wishing for some serious wind to blow the little beasts away. poseidon must have heard us, because not more than twenty minutes later, out of a clear blue sky, we were suddenly hit with thirty mile an hour winds. the next hour and a half were the most adrenaline-pumping, life-jacket wearing, coast-guard-helicopter-circling-over-head minutes i have yet spent on the bay. we averaged something like 7.5 knots running with the wind south, and it was an utter bitch maintaining control over the boate, as she kept trying to weathervane back into the hard gusts behind us.
soon however, we were enjoying a lesson in the microclimates of the bay area, eating a late lunch in the shelter of angel island, basking on the grass in the eighty degree heat with deer all around. kin and phil hiked up to the top of the island while i repaired one of the stays that had become loose during our adventure north.
we pulled out of angel island promptly at seven, steered our way just shy of the golden gate, and back to berkeley marina. photos from the weekend are here.
