Inland Passage

Skipper Chris Northcutt and I took a wonderful journey last weekend.

A boat is a departure machine; it takes you generally where you point it, imperfectly, but it perfectly brings you to fresh perception. Probably because it forces you to cut back on world-clutter in favor of prudent navigation and survival (not sinking), and because it takes you off the highway, onto the theoretically geometric plane (locally perturbed) of the wide water, out where the perspective exceeds a few car-lengths, out beyond human scale. On the fretting surface, perpetually finding its energy equilibrium, you're involved in a time-lens through which you can often see familiar topography and territory as you might have seen it two hundred years ago. Though you can notice the minute twinkle and flow of humdrum traffic on Route 101, six miles away, you can also see the tailing scars up by the peak of Mt. Burdell, evidence of a mine worked by pick and shovel and headlamp. You can prudently steer clear of the Vallejo ferry's route – a high-tech catamaran of 130 feet carrying two hundred passengers at 20 knots but leaving a wake less troubled than a Boston Whaler's passing – but the ferry obliges you to sense the hydrography that shapes its course, the same hydrography that shaped the passage of deep draught passenger vessels carrying prospective gold miners up the Sacramento River to the American River digs, the hydrography closely played across the "flats" of the upper Bay when they were navigated by flat-bottomed, practical, cranky scow sloops carrying twenty-foot loads of hay (the captain stood on a ladder and shouted steering directions to the helmsman below him) or roped in cows, sheep, oxen, mules, or bins of produce, or ziggurats of chicken crates. You see the past, if not in color and movement, then in consequence, distant perturbation, like the wake of the ferry as it reaches you, the passing of another voyage rocking your boat.

Weather outside the Gate was daunting: 20k to 40k winds, 11 foot seas every 9 seconds, brutal weather for a small boat. So we nosed past the perpetually swung-open railroad bridge at its mouth to trend up the Petaluma River. The cruising guide mentions that it was once the third busiest waterway in California, after the Sacramento and the American we suppose. We discovered evidence of former and continuing commerce.

This was an easy interior voyage. We were on a comfy Beneteau 36 that draws six feet. This is deep in relation to most of the sport vessels that use the Petaluma so we steered by depth sounder, watching the digital numbers as closely as the course, swinging wide on the outside curves where the river cuts a deeper channel, trending toward the middle in straights, nodding back and forth when the channel wanders and the numbers decrease, throttling back when they approach 5 feet (below the keel) to cast back and forth like a hound, sniffing out the deep numbers again. Concentration and exploration, tight work. But the setting was broad and fragrant. It was like sailing (without sails up; we motored) through bright, flat countryside! Sweet and peaceful.

We started up blue heron, egret, ducks, geese, little green heron. The banks and sometimes ramshackle docks embraced a few forgotten boats being reclaimed by the water and land. More artifacts: unfinished "project" boats from the Whole Earth Catalogue hippy days – ancient wooden relics sketchily refurbished and a few ferro-cement hulls abandoned by builders who finally found a girlfriend with a house. Perched on one prominence of the west bank sat another project boat, a rust-red welded steel enigma with many rectangular windows in banks, a plumb bow over a flat bottom running back to painstakingly (and skillfully) shaped prop ducts for a twin-engined controlled-flow propulsion scheme. Curiously, it had lengths of 2" angle iron projecting horizontally about two feet from the hull around the perimeter. For what? What was the purpose of this odd craft? It reminded me of the thousands of experimental vessels that have been built for one shake-down cruise and then discarded as the valuable trial of an idea that didn't meet promise. But this experiment never reached the water. Its builder's hard on the river bank was as far as it ever voyaged. The hedgehog of its defensive angle irons gave it a pouting, shamed air.

We passed beached seine boats (roller-bowed scows that gather up herring nets), liveaboard trawlers, raffish riverfront cottages with rickety docks that looked unmistakably jolly. We passed kayakers, one industriously casting into the banks. In truth we passed lots of fishermen but the river fishers never told us what was running. They didn't seem to care and were so content that the lack of focus appeared to be salubrious.

We passed odd barge tugs, as high as their length. Their stability must depend on the mating clasp with their barge. And then we passed barges. Big barges. Because Petaluma is a working town, still, unlike the tourist-dead show-towns of Sausalito and Mill Valley. Petaluma has rich gravel pits that supply construction needs across the Bay. We passed three of them, processing and shifting gravel in overhead shuttles with a hum and a hiss. Rumor also has it that Petaluma is the egg capital of California, though we didn't see a single chicken. You'd assume that in the egg capital you'd see at least a few escaped chickens running for cover. Nope.

We went all the way to the head of navigation, to the turning basin right in the center of Petaluma. Yes, directly in the center. One block away from the live-music theater, three blocks from the cineplex, within four blocks of dozens of interesting restaurants, shops, bookstores.

We had dropped our docking lines at Pt. Richmond on Saturday at 0830h and went up-Bay on a flooding tide, arriving in the basin (about 9 miles, crowflight, above the mouth) at 1430h. Once in Petaluma we took it way easy. We napped, I walked around reconnoitering. We had a great time. At 1730h we had a sandwich at Flipper's, looking across the basin at our own boat and the ten or so big damn Carver sportfishermen and motor cruisers that were having some kind of meet, there, and then headed to the cineplex, but for our chosen movie only front row and scattered singles were available. Forget it. So we sleuthed out a bookstore, which happened to be a very fine bookstore, indeed. I found a used copy of Goodbye Mickey Mouse for Chris (he hadn't read any of Len Deighton's excellent WW II stuff) and spent a happy hour browsing, buying a few good books. Then we returned to the boat. The weather had cooled rapidly, it was a great reading and sleeping night, and we were as happy as bugs in a rug.

The trip downriver was just as pleasant, just as interesting as the upriver passage. We avoided a gargantuan barge returning for a gravel refill. We were wary of waterskiers in the broad sections. We put on sunblock, wore our sunhats, and we drank a lot of electrolyte liquid and soda. It was hot. Threading the narrow, dogleg channel from the river mouth to the slightly deeper southern reaches of San Pablo Bay against the wind was dicey under power (wind in our teeth) but uncomplicated. The water around the channel at the very head of the Bay was confused miniature chop over shallow water, less than six feet deep, gray and turbid with silt. About six nautical miles out of the Petaluma's mouth we reached deeper water and set a course for the Richmond narrows between San Pablo Bay (to the north) and San Francisco Bay to the south. Though collectively it's all called The Bay. In another six nautical miles we passed The Brothers. We swung west and avoided any involvement with a docking supertanker at the Chevron docks, and entered Brick Yard Marina around 1600h.

Putting the boat to bed was simple, except for leaving one porthole open when we sluiced down the decks, flooding the cabin somewhat. No biggie. It's a boat, for pity's sake. It expects a little water. As we carted our goods to our cars we began to hear word of folks who had spent the weekend outside the Gate. Horrible times. Scuttled boats, weeping last messages, brutal days-long pounding. Perhaps we should have felt left out of adventure but we're older sailors; we enjoy simplicity and the lack of terror, good food, a nice ramble ashore. It was a successful sailing adventure for us. We never raised jib or main during the entire trip. Did we feel apostate? Unfaithful to our principles? We did not. We were happy, feeling that slightly toasted sun and wind nip, and drove home on 101 smiling.

For a self-indulgent sybarite who loves his comforts he talks about the Good Old Days suspiciously often. He's enough of an historian to know they weren't that good, the old mores more ethically compromised than current attitudes, the quality of life smellier and more tedious than Himself could bear for a week. Getting a scow sloop to market in the City was long drudgery. Perhaps he's not longing for the old ways so much as admiring their immediate cleverness. He doesn't have any grasp of string theory or the mathematical basis of quantum theory but he understands rope and pulleys, and he likes to talk about what he understands. He persistently thinks of himself as "the feathers at the back of the arrow," giving things a spin while slowing the headlong flight a bit, keeping the arc true. So, to place it in the most charitable light, this concern with historical sidelights is his notion of balancing things.

Braxinoso