We have now been in the Bay area for two weeks. It has been a good lesson in ‘slowing down’. Our first night after arriving, we tied up at the San Francisco Municipal marina as it was easy and accessible. We all really needed showers. Don had to take off to catch his flight home so he missed the great dinner at Pacific Catch.
Ben took off early the next day to catch a flight home. Liz and I took a leisurely departure to motor over to Alameda to drop off our main sail at the Doyle loft for repairs. We chose to take a guest dock at the Grand Marina which was a great location. We needed to get reorganized for just the two of us and do a bit of shopping. What had been planned as a two night stay turned into three. We walked a lot and took Uber on the way back from the grocery.
We needed to find a couple of Rite in the Rain journals and the obvious place was REI in Berkeley. I called the Berkeley Marina to see if they had a guest dock we could tie to while we went to REI. It turned out that their guest moorage was only $0.50/ft/night. About half of anywhere else, so we decided to just spend a few days there and work on a few projects.
We got in late, made dinner and crashed. Early in the morning we discovered that we had tied right next to the charter fishing boats as well as the small commuter ferrys to San Francisco. So much for sleeping in. We decided to find a place for breakfast on our way to REI. We didn’t realize it but our route took us through a pretty sketchy area of homeless camps. Not real comfortable…
We were headed for another restaurant when we discovered Bette’s Oceanview Diner. It is always a good sign to have a long waiting line on a weekday morning! Really a great spot. http://bettesdiner.com/
So after our shopping tour we Ubered back to the marina. It turns
out that Berkeley was a great place to get some projects done. I was able to ge the dinghy whipped into shape with dinghy wheels (useful for future surf landings), new rub rail and best of all finished the new sail we had started before leaving WA.
We have now moved to our slip at South Beach Marina at Pier 40 where we will be for a month. We have been walking everywhere and exploring this part of the city. We walked about 5 miles yesterday to go to a hardware store for some parts to make a charcoal filter for the holding tank vent.
As usual, we have met a lot of really great, friendly people on the docks.