CAPRICIOUS SPRING WINDS were working up the Bay this morning. From the long arc of the Richmond Bridge its pattern of whitecaps seemed miniature and delicate, but up close every cresting wave would buffet and drench small boat. It wasn’t a day for easy rowing or kayaking.

The skipper and his wife were waiting at Brickyard Cove at Point Richmond with a thirty-one foot Beneteau sloop. It’s a French boat with a nice turn of speed but not a radical racer, relatively stable. Sleek and plastic in the modern taste on deck, she’s hard edged but roomy below. Since she’s part of a sailing club she carries good gear, regularly checked, and fair electronics (depth sounder, knotmeter, wind-force sensor, &c).

Our fourth crew member never showed, so we dropped dock lines and backed out of the slip. We let the wind spin our bow around and motored out of Brickyard Cove’s very West Coast harbor, completely hemmed in by close-packed, handsome, impossibly high-priced homes stilted over the water with to-die-for views of San Francisco, Berkeley, Angel Island, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge down the Bay.

The skipper’s wife and I took in the fenders, hitching them to the stern pulpit, and I took the wheel. Leaving your fenders dangling in the water unremembered is like returning to the restaurant’s dining room with toilet paper stuck on your shoe. In the outer harbor we reduced power and jogged up into the eye of the wind to make sail.

I like the skipper. More than that, I respect him. He’s a thoughtful man without the faults of many new skippers: he isn’t seeking adventure or daring the elements. He takes weather and water as serious challenges that can overwhelm any manufactured item, even well-found boats. The tide was flooding, current coming up the Bay, and was driven by an unusual southerly wind piping up 20 and 25 knots. So he started our day with two tucks. That means he reefed, or reduced the area of the mainsail, by raising it only to the level of the second reef line, where it was snugged down by a reef grommet at the second reef’s tack (forward lower corner of the triangular sail) and the grommet at the second reef’s clew (the aft lower corner). The jib – the triangular sail in front – is roller furled (wound up like a window shade on a vertical rolling device attached to the forestay). The skipper reefed the jib by drawing only part of it out of its roll.

Automobile drivers seldom understand that most sailboats can’t go faster than a mathematically calculable limit, the hull speed. You can’t step on the gas and go faster. It’s a sure but technically involved fact. Try to push the boat faster and it only makes a bigger bow wave and loses control. With plenty of wind out on the Bay, these smaller sails would be easier to handle, wouldn’t push the boat down at a vicious angle of heel, and would power the boat quite well enough.

Beyond the outer harbor’s breakwaters we took a course for Raccoon Straits, between Angel Island and Tiburon. We took the waves on our port bow and the Beneteau earned some respect from me. She’s a dry boat. This is a prime compliment from any sailor. It means that the three dimensional geometry of a boat’s hull and her motion in the water don’t fling up a curtain of spray that comes hurtling back into the cockpit. Some boats that are just fine in other ways sail wet, drenching their helmsman and passengers consistently. This Beneteau 323 is, in this respect and in most others, mannerly.

Sailor’s wince at landsmen who enthuse, “I love the sea! Let’s go to the beach!” Sailors don’t like the beach. The beach is the enemy. They spend a lot of effort to keep off the beach. Nor do they “love the sea.” You can’t love anything that big and cold. The sea has no warmth or pity, no personality beyond our feeble fantasies. And those flimsy masks will change in minutes or hours when the complexion of the sea changes.

Actually, what we normally call the sea is a misnomer, and if the sea did have a personality it would be as peevish as a native American being called an “Indian.” The sea is the body of water, deep and wide. We look at the sea’s surface as its nature, when it’s really the interface between two moving, interacting, inimical elements. Throughout our tour of the upper Bay we were suspended by buoyancy over varying depths of dark, moving water, between the reach of a boathook and the height of a 16 story building.

The sea’s surface this afternoon had worked itself into an opaque light green flecked with rabid foam, the color of an unhealthy lawn. The wind above the surface – sometimes whipping over the humpback of Angel Island, sometimes hooting directly through the Gate from the Pacific – was cold and insistent, searching out improvident seams in clothing or gaps between collar and neck. A thick winter fleece was welcome on this May day, and occasionally not thick enough. Fingerless sailing gloves were also welcome, though the sun had burned off the early fog and mist so that a Gulf Stream fisherman’s hat and dark, polarized sunglasses were also a comfort.

We sailed with the wind close on our port bow from Point Richmond to the Tiburon Peninsula and then turned through a little more than a right angle to bring the wind close on our starboard bow, angling toward Treasure Island.

The daylight helmsman (I was still at the wheel and would be until we cleared the inner harbor breakwater, returning) divides his attention between surface traffic, the approaching waves, the masthead tell-tale (a wonderfully expressive nautical name that indicates the wind’s direction with a simple wind-pointing arrow), and the depth sounder. He reads the shape of the bottom’s hills and valleys as his boat moves and gets nervous when the readings are less than twenty feet. Far off Berkeley we passed over shoals less than fifteen feet deep that give bigger, deeper ships nightmares. For us they were a kind of breathing space because the water rushing swiftly over the shallow bottom smoothed the surface. We could see the shape of the shoal around it where the whitecaps gave away to smaller waves that didn’t break. If the wind had been coming from its usual northwest quadrant, we might have read the shoal as a patch of rougher water.

This was a long tack and it should have been longer. When we thought we’d made enough southing to return to our first course and clear the rock-studded southern tip of Angel Island, the wind had shifted and the tide worked against us, so that we slanted in four hundred yards North of the point toward its beach. With a metaphorical shrug we tacked back toward Treasure Island for another half an hour before we tacked to weather the point again. Even this was a close-run thing, but the wind changed a point (sailor stuff: there are eight “points” in a quarter circle) and by sailing as close to the wind as we could without losing power we managed it.

We had the Golden Gate on our port bow, then, the sublime bridge (it really is) dark against the Pacific sky, but we also had that hooting squirt-gun compression of the wind through the Gate, and the rough water that goes with it. We were lucky in the flood tide; had the tide been ebbing southwest against the wind, the waves would have been short, chaotic, brutal, and it would have been a miserable passage. Even with this tidal luck it was a fussy patch of water and the wheel required moment by moment attention.

The Beneteau 323 has a fin keel, like an upside-down shark’s fin, to counteract sideways movement. Older hulls had a straight run of keel, a long blade of sideways resistance that tended to hold a course. This fin keel makes the boat more maneuverable, able to turn quickly, but with a nasty chop chewing away at the cheek of her quarter the helm is squirrely and demanding.

We met some traffic out in the big channel. The best was a sea lion swimming higher in the water than normal to peer over the wave tops, it’s beautiful sleek form more apparent.

We also encountered two other sailboats. The rules of the road at sea are more complicated than highway traffic rules but the two applicable rules this afternoon were that a boat on the starboard tack (wind over his starboard bow) has the right of way over a port-tack boat, and of two boats on the same tack the downwind boat has the right of way. In both instances we were the burdened (responsible for getting out of the way) vessel.

Our problematic traffic was a big tour boat, something near the hundred foot size. There were two conflicting rules in this meeting: sailing vessels have the right of way; large commercial vessels, because of their unwieldy handling and enormous momentum, have the right of way. The difficulty was compounded by the dictum that the vessel with right of way should stand on – keep going on its course – so the other vessel will know what to do. But was the tour boat big enough and commercial enough to take precedence? We stood on, debating the question over the rush of the wind, intent on the constant bearing. (A collision course between any two boats is predicted by the relative directions between them; if a boat is two points ahead of your starboard beam now, and still is a minute from now, your boats will collide unless someone does something smart.) Just as I decided that he was much bigger than we were and I was much less interested in right of way than in continuing pleasantly, the tour boat changed course and speed. We never came within 300 yards of each other.

Clear of Angel Island’s southern point we turned north toward Raccoon Strait, bringing the heavy wind and choppy seas farther aft. We trimmed sail for this new direction and swooped, slid, shot across the waves at close to seven and a half knots. I suppose this doesn’t seem very fast to anyone accustomed to 70 mph on the superhighway, but the sense of speed close to the heaving, hissing water and the boat’s strain felt through the wheel and the soles of your deck shoes make seven knots feel mightily swift.

We shot into the wind shadow and calm seas of Raccoon Strait and made a pleasant passage, opening the toney little village of Tiburon on our port with the dramatic height of Angel Island on our starboard. We passed a humble rowboat crossing from Tiburon to Angel, and a kayak. They were notable only because the rest of our voyage had been so hairy that they seemed out of place, though the Strait this afternoon was surely a mild, warm place.

Our French sloop climbed into the wind and wave ring again when we exited Angel Island’s wind shadow but we were bound for the barn, on our homeward leg, and the wind had moderated. It was a duck soup run without traffic, a wholly pleasant leg that, at least in our thoughts, we’d bought with our earlier efforts.

Our little voyage was no saga of the sea, no great adventure. At no time were we in danger or distress. We were never, who should say, uncomfortable. No unusual wonders presented themselves. And yet we returned to our picayune automobiles and to the high speed superhighway with a sense of accomplishment. What did we accomplish?

What the water gives to any sailor depends on the science and mythology a person allows it. For an historian, poet, navigator or traditionalist, it dispenses different gifts. For any attentive sailor, however, it brings the warp and woof of natural forces close and reminds him that life ashore may be personally interesting or difficult but the vast world of limitless powers roll on day and night without reference to his small workings. We’re humbled. And somehow we’re comforted by the largeness of it, acknowledging that the worries that fuzz our brain aren’t really that big, are they?

I’ll sleep well tonight. I always do after sailing. My body needs rest because on the liquid interface of wind and water it was constantly flexing and balancing, nearly every muscle contributing second by second. And maybe this, too, is a comfort, some ancient reckoning of a body that works to survive. Whatever, I’ll sleep after I experience that strange phantom rocking sensation that remains for hours after a voyage, rocking me to a sound, dream-filled sleep.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself waxes poetic if we give him a moment’s opportunity. This is because he’s a dilettante sailor. Real watermen – fishermen and tugboat crew – don’t weigh down their sober workaday connection to the sea with so much metaphorical freight. To them it’s not a mystery or a marvel; it’s their medium. But dilettantes need muses, and as muses go the sea works very well. Ask Joseph Conrad. Himself will probably never make a true bluewater crossing, but he keeps hoping.