Bulls and Pelicans

Just as you finish crossing the Richmond Bridge into Marin County and take the exit north toward San Rafael, you drive past the Marin Sewage Treatment Plant. If the wind is just right, you catch the distinctive smell of, well, effluent, to be precisely polite. You wouldn’t expect that oddly sweet and pungent smell to be evocative of one’s past, but it is to me. It reminds me of learning to sail.

When I was 14, I took a summer boating course offered by the Mill Valley Parks and Rec Department. The classes were held on an inlet of Richardson Bay, near where Shoreline Park is now located. To get there, you had to drive past the Mill Valley Waste Treatment Plant just across from the middle school on Camino Alto. My mother would drop me off and my nostrils would immediately be assaulted by the odor of sewage mixed with the salt air and marsh smells. But that didn’t matter, I was soon out on the bay and the romance of the sea far outweighed any unpleasantness.

I took to it immediately and was soon learning all the parts of the rigging, how to handle our 6-foot El Toros (aka “Bull Boats”), and how to read both the tides and the wind. For once, I was a natural at something, and by the end of the summer I had some real skills. The instructor, Tim Taylor, even asked me if I would return the following year to help him out with the younger students. I accepted readily.

In the beginning of that second summer, I started by riding my bike over from Strawberry to Mill Valley. But then I got the impossibly cool idea that I could actually sail to work. That was because my good friend John Wuoltee owned a 16-foot sloop that we often sailed together with our other friends, Mark Linker and Pat Norton. I proposed the idea to him and he said it would be fine.

It took only a few minutes each morning to ride my bike to John’s house and rig the boat. I set out of Strawberry Harbor, tacking into the wind around Strawberry Point, then a beam reach under the Richardson Bridge, and ending up with a downwind run into Mill Valley. It only took about 45 minutes. I would handle the main sheet with one hand, the jib sheet with the other, and steer with my foot on the tiller. I loved commuting by boat and it gave me a sense of independence that I had never experienced before. Somehow, I managed to stay out of trouble and only once got stuck on a mud bar on the way home, marooned for an hour till the tide had risen enough to float me off.


A Pelican boat.

 Some days, after class, Tim and I would take the “big” boat out for a sail. This mighty vessel was our 12-foot “Pelican,” sort of an El Toro on steroids. It had a flat bow, hard-chined sides and gaff-rigging. That means that it was (a) not particularly fast, (b) very stable, and (c) really cool-looking. I especially liked the gaff-rigged main-sail, which gave it a 19th century feel. But Tim and were focused on (b).

That the Pelican was remarkably stable made it an ideal teaching boat. Students could do practically everything wrong and it would stay upright. That also meant that we simply had to see if we could actually make it flip over. Fortunately, we had the ideal place to conduct our experiments – Richardson Bay. In particular, there is one spot just west of the Richardson Bridge that has to be one of the windiest spots on San Francisco Bay. The wind funnels in from Tennessee Valley and literally screams across the short channel. There are many other places, such as Raccoon Straights, where the combination of strong winds and fast currents make for occasionally dicey sailing, but for sheer predictable velocity, we had it right at our doorstep. It’s probably a good thing that my mother never found out, because I have to report that we did our level best to achieve disaster. But I think that the mast would have broken before the Pelican would capsize. We did have a hell of a lot of fun, though.

Sadly, the Parks and Rec sailing program was shut down a couple of years later because of budget cuts and the unfortunate timing of raw sewage spills that made the harbor unsafe and unsavory. I kept at it though, crewing on a Columbia 29 on the Bay and teaching sailing to several members of my adopted family in France.

But those summers on Richardson Bay had opened up an exciting new world for me. Or, as Ratty tells Mole in The Wind in the Willows, “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." I agree.