Sailing the San Andreas Fault

Realized I didn't ever finish the posts about our sailing trip in July. It was incredible! I started here with some pictures from Angel Island and then continued here with coming out the Golden Gate and then I quit. Why? In favor of knitting posts.

Anyway, the first day out the gate we made it all the way into Bodega Bay, which we didn't photograph because we just walked around and looked at the hole formerly known as the future nuclear power plant.

An aside: if it's just too darn easy to make a huge hole in a granodiorite mountain, or turn a quartz diorite mountain into road base, you might be on the San Andreas Fault!

We saw some whales from Bodega Head, and also met a guy who goes on whale-hugging tours to the Baja calving grounds. This was, naturally, someone I found strange enough to be interesting and Mr. Thielke found crazy weirdo to be avoided until he said the two magic words, "wooden" and "boat". Funny how the tide turns then! Ha ha tide.

We worked our way in through a very scary unmarked channel. Sila noticed one of the markers was off its spot. Sila can read charts and maps better than I can, as long as they don't involve any roads. I argued with Sila and Sila was right. If I had won the argument, we would have been in the mud on a dropping tide. In the San Andreas Fault. Observe the harbor seals hauled out in the middle of the bay.

Once we got through the treacherous mouth, Tomales Bay was a perfect dream. Couldn't be more beautiful and peaceful and idyllic and all the superlatives I can think of. We anchored at White Gulch, across the water from the little town of Marshall, for a few hours. There were elk in the hills and there are some relatively young coarse arenites there with some seriously cool deformation bands, but I'll spare you that for the moment.

We sailed down toward Inverness at sunset and then went back to White Gulch to spend the night.