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Its dramatic coastline of sharp ravines and plunging, cave-ridden cliffs contrasted with the many picturesque anchorages, turquoise seas and vibrant oasis towns set against the towering Taurus Mountains hold endless appeal. Not only an idyllic cruising region that now boasts many yachting facilities, it is also an inspiring cultural center with an absorbing past and plethora of Roman, Greek, and Lycian ruins right by the boat to be climbed and explored. The marvelous markets and bazaars overflow with intriguing Eastern goods as well as abundant produce from the fertile valleys. Here religious practices are relaxed and the prices are affordable, and best of all is the wonderful welcome of its hard-working, fun-loving, extroverted people. “Hos gedilniz: Welcome, what can we do for you?”

Story and Photos by Bill Kinney and Monica Alicia Bland

The excitement of sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge brings out the kid in every sailor. Bill patiently explains what he learned from a ten-year-old: There is an elephant in the trees on Pt. Diablo! “See that patch of trees to the right? That’s the head. That dead white tree is the tusk.” Yep, I can see that. He, in turn, humors my firm decision that the bright green algae on the hill is really scales left by the twin dragons, “Tooh” and “Fruhm,” as they drag themselves into their caves. “Oh, dragons. That explains the fog.”

Not that there is any need to create imaginary creatures. We are surrounded by intriguing animals. Our most constant companions are pelicans, gulls, cormorants, and common murres. We cause a frantic bird conversation when we almost sail between what I assume is a mother murre and her chick. Bill snaps a shot of the chattering pair, and tells me that it is usually the murre male who takes the chick out to sea when it is half-grown.

For many glorious minutes we sail on a beam reach to Pt. Reyes! The sun encourages us to de-layer down to our OCSC t-shirts. We sigh and enjoy it while it lasts. Then out of the clear, we sail into the fog. A flock of pelicans transforms from floating dorkiness to breathtaking gracefulness in flight, skimming the glassy surface in front of the bow. I snap a picture and giggle at what the weather announcer calls “gusts to four.” We motorsail through the glass. When wind is light, it is time to tend to the tedious tidying. We roll up the sail-ties tightly, so they will curl out like streamers when it is time to hang them over the boom and under the sail. We reach into the project box and fix an emergency horn with a ziplock bag. We make a boat wish list (cockpit camera holders, a winch handle pocket for the mast, new sailcovers…), a cruising wish list (Hawaii, Mexico, the BVI…), and ginger green tea. We make conversation and comfortable silences until we arrive at Drake’s Bay.

The truth: Drakes’s Bay is mostly pretty nothingness framed with fog. We have traveled all the way up the coast to get to nowhere and we are fine with that. There is one other boat in the anchorage–a sailboat flying the Canadian flag and all fitted out for family cruising. We can occasionally hear the children being children. The Coast Guard bellies up to their mooring ball for a while, does some Very Official Stuff, then leaves. We row the dinghy out to fish, but mostly catch glimpses– of starfish clinging to each other on the rocks, of a comb jelly just under the surface, of the fog rolling across the top of the hills. There are a couple of bites–the dinghy spins around during an epic high-stakes battle between man and Fish! We eat lamb for dinner.

In the morning, the anchor comes up cleaner than it was when we put it down and we resist the temptation to “just keep going” since “some of us have to go to work tomorrow.” Instead of sailing a straight course for San Francisco, we decide to stop by the Farallone Islands on the way back. I cradle the camera for hours, straining to see a whale and the precise minute I step below to make lunch, a whale breaches. Luckily, it isn’t alone. There are so many spouts on the way to the Farallones, we lose count. Southeast Farallon Island is teeming with birds and a few lounging sea lions trying to out-shout each other while we are hove-to.

Then it really is time to sail home since we don’t want to fight the ebb tide as we go back through the gate. At Pt. Diablo, we wave toward the caves of “Tooh” and “Fruhm.” They do not wave back. From a certain angle, the Golden Gate looks like a harp floating above us in the fog and below us—it is almost too much—there are harbor porpoises playing in the water. The weather is gorgeous and the playground is full. There are sailboats and ferries and kite surfers and sailboarders and wind enough for a few “woo-hoos” on a fast downwind run toward home.

If you are just about due for your own big sailing adventure (so you can escape most people and run smack into yourself), OCSC offers several options to get you out there gathering memories safely and confidently:

• Turkey Flotilla with Anthony Sandberg
• Coastal Passagemaking Course
• Farallones Adventure on the schooner Seaward
• Drake’s Bay Adventure on the schooner Seaward

Give us a call at the club for more info and to sign-up for your next adventure! 510.843.4200

See you on the water soon!

We recently got this great feature in International Lifestyle Magazine. You can click the images below to read it but we recommend checking out their website. It looks beautiful there and they also embed video.

Just click here and we’ll direct you to the right spot.

Have fun!

In 2013, the world will be flocking to our beautiful Bay, when San Francisco hosts the America’s Cup.

By Steven Dinkelspiel, President of sanfranmag.com

I took a stroll across the Golden Gate Bridge the other day. It was an unseasonably glorious winter afternoon (admit it, global warming provides some short-term benefits as we wait for the ocean to flood our streets). For the millionth time, I thought about how lucky we are to live in this breathtakingly beautiful place.

San Francisco Bay is the crown jewel of our city’s soul. Its glory was hidden from early explorers by our notorious fog; Sir Francis Drake is supposed to have sailed by without realizing that one of the largest inlets on earth lay off his bow. Two centuries later, Gaspar de Portolá made the first recorded sighting of the Bay, spotting it from a ridge north of what is now Pacifica. After gold was found at Sutter’s Mill, ships of almost every nation flocked to it—and were left there moored and empty as the voyagers lit out for the mother lode of the Sierra Nevada. And in 2013, the world will be flocking to our Bay again, when we host the America’s Cup.

Not until recently did I fully understand how big an event this is and what a huge impact the races will have our community.The America’s Cup is to yachting what
the World Cup is to soccer. Every self-respecting sailing enthusiast tries to make the scene, and the San Francisco matches are likely to draw the biggest crowds ever—some estimate that over 2 million people will watch the races here, and many of them will be visitors to our beautiful Bay.

They won’t all come on the same weekend, of course. The competition starts in mid-July, with the Louis Vuitton Cup, a series of heats between multiple competitors that will last more than six weeks. Then, between September 7 and 22, the winner of the Vuitton Cup will duke it out in a best-of-nine matchup against the fastest trimaran of the current America’s Cup holder—our very own Oracle Racing team. In the space of two months we could see as many as 70 races, a level of activity and splendor never before experienced on these waters.

Aficionados are thrilled that the America’s Cup will be here. Our breezes are reliable—there’ll be few tedious waits for the wind to blow—and all around the Bay, throngs will line balconies, beaches, and bridges to share in the spectacle of yachts with 150-foot masts cleaving the waves, circumnavigating Alcatraz or whatever mid-Bay point is selected for their high-risk, high-speed turns.

Did I mention money is involved? The entrance fee is a modest $100,000, but the designing, building, staffing, and training involved cost millions more. It takes someone with Larry Ellison’s scratch to consider competing. But although only the superrich can enter, the merely very wealthy do come to watch. That’s what’s in it for the rest of us. Our town will be filled with tourists dripping with cash; supersized yachts will adorn our harbors and they will all need to be serviced and supplied; restaurants and hotels will be crammed with guests with lots of disposable income. Our economy will be well oiled, our beauty will be blazoned on televisions all around the world, there will be a festive spirit throughout the city for the entire summer, and we will be able to stroll across the Golden Gate Bridge and enjoy it all free.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to get San Francisco magazine into the hands of every one of those visitors.

Steven Dinkelspiel, president
sdinkelspiel@sanfranmag.com

Article was originally published in Berkeleyside on July 7, 2011 12:00 pm by Niclas Ericsson.

Wednesday night sail with Berkeley's Olympic Circle Sailing Club (OCSC).

ARTICLE FIRST PUBLISHED IN BERKELEYSIDE JULY 1, 2011
BY TRACEY TAYLOR

Two crews of AileyCamp students head out of the Berkeley Marina on sailboats. Photos: Tracey Taylor

This morning, down at the Berkeley Marina, 56 East Bay middle schoolers were experiencing a host of “firsts”. Many of them were taking to the water for the first time — donning life-jackets and sailing out into the Bay — not without a certain amount of trepidation in many cases. On shore, another group was being led in team-building exercises, letting go and learning to trust each other. The group of students had only met at the beginning of the week, and, although most of the exercises were provoking peels of laughter, some of them triggered frustration and resistance. All the participants, aged 11 to 14, were at Berkeley’s OCSC sailing school at the invitation of its founder, Anthony Sandberg, and all of them are members of the AileyCamp, a tuition-free, six-week dance and life skills camp for underserved middle schoolers entirely funded by Cal Performances. After a week of ballet, modern, jazz and African dance classes, today was field trip day — a chance to get out under the clear blue skies and experience the beauty of the Bay up close. Many of them had never sailed before, and many cannot swim.

Thirteen year old Jaqarah Weathers was nervous about the camp and the sailing, but hopeful that the experience would make her more confident

Thirteen-year old Jaqarah Weathers, who attends Westlake Middle School in Oakland, said she had been apprehensive about attending the camp and the field trip. “It is scary,” she said. But even after a few days with the campers, Weathers was feeling more at ease. “I’m naturally shy and I hope the camp will give me self-confidence.” Yejide Najee-Ullah is a veteran of AileyCamp, having attended for the past 10 years, first as a camper, then a volunteer, and most recently, after her college education at Smith, as a staffer. A graduate of Berkeley High, Najee-Ullah said the camp experience had been transformative for her. “I planned my whole summer around being able to do this,” she said.

A group of AileyCamp students swap stories after coming back from sailing on the Bay

Watching the group of middle schoolers doing a team-building exercise which involved pretending to be trains, she said the first week for the kids was the hardest. “They are testing each other and conquering their fears.” This year marks the 10th anniversary of Ailey Camp, which was conceived by Alvin Ailey, founder of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and is locally produced by Cal Performances under the direction of David McCauley. It is the only such camp on the West Coast and on a major university campus and Cal Performances raises $250,000 annually to fund the initiative. The six-week camp culminates in a performance by all the campers at Zellerbach Hall, complete with professional staging, lights, costumes and live music.

David McCauley, Director of AileyCamp, is a keen sailor himself but appreciates that calmer water will suit nervous first-timers

McCauley was sitting out on some rocks taking photos of the groups that were heading out on the water in five sailboats. He said he had deliberately assigned the most nervous kids to the first sail of the day because the water is calmer in the morning. McCauley interviews students for the camp — they come from Berkeley, Oakland, Albany and Richmond — but he doesn’t audition them. “They don’t need to have any dance training. I’m looking for eagerness and an interest in the arts. Most of these students have no opportunity to experience the arts otherwise.” As well as the four dance techniques that are taught at the camp — ballet, modern, African and jazz — there is also an emphasis on personal development. “We teach creative communication and the discipline of dance is very beneficial,” said McCauley.

OCSC Director Anthony Sandberg is proud to be hosting the AileyCamp students

OCSC Director Anthony Sandberg was also snapping pictures of the kids. He said he has been very proud to host the AileyCamp for the past 10 years. “We’ve all been blessed with someone who paid attention to us and this is our way of giving back,” he said. “It’s not like the arts are getting funded.” Sandberg adds that OCSC’s 85 employees, particularly the younger among them, are keen to be involved in community projects. OCSC divides its community work into environmental projects and initiatives for kids, such as the Ailey Camp.

The AileyCamp field trip includes team building exercises led by Mike Martin

The morning sailors returned to the school at about 11:15 am today. Most were looking cheerful and many swapped stories about piloting the boats. One or two had felt some sea-sickness but they didn’t regret having gone out on the water. Life jackets were handed off to the group who were slated to sail after lunch. Although only just out of college, Najee-Ullah was watching over the students like a mother hen. “I love the transformation they go through,” she said. “When the curtain goes up [on the end of camp performance] they will be a different group of kids.”

Although apprehensive, the majority of students took to the water and were able to wave to photographers on shore

This year the CampAiley show is entitled “Transitions” and it takes place on Thursday, August 4 at 7:00 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall.

This Saturday!
July 9, 6.30-9.00 PM

The country

Its dramatic coastline of sharp ravines and plunging, cave-ridden cliffs contrasted with the many picturesque anchorages, turquoise seas and vibrant oasis towns set against the towering Taurus Mountains hold endless appeal. Not only an idyllic cruising region that now boasts many yachting facilities, it is also an inspiring cultural center with an absorbing past and plethora of Roman, Greek, and Lycian ruins right by the boat to be climbed and explored. The marvelous markets and bazaars overflow with intriguing Eastern goods as well as abundant produce from the fertile valleys. Here religious practices are relaxed and the prices are affordable, and best of all is the wonderful welcome of its hard-working, fun-loving, extroverted people. “Hos gedilniz: Welcome, what can we do for you?”

The Sailing

Tranquil bays, superb unspoiled beaches nestled in hidden inlets and magnificent protected coves dotted with archaeological sites complement the incomparable natural beauty of South-west Turkish coastline. Anthony’s favorite cruising grounds are precisely those natural coves that promise a safe and tranquil sailing holiday in Turkey. The opportunity to combine Greek Dodecanese and Cyclades Island Groups to your itinerary, or just do some island hopping between the equally beautiful Greek islands make it possible to add variety in your Turkey sailing holiday on board a Moorings 4000. Indeed, time you have spared for such a treat is an important factor in shaping up an itinerary with the assistance of OCSC Sailing. Therefore, attached are some sample itineraries you may consider. Surely, the possibilities of different routes are mathematically endless.

Sailing Turkey can be as active as you like; from swimming in the crystal clear turquoise waters, snorkeling and diving to relaxing on deck with a book, savoring the next delicious meal and spending time with your party. Photographers, historians, sailors, sun-worshippers and water babies, the young and old alike, will all find true inspiration in this amazing adventure.

Come join our Planning Party to find out how you can be part of this amazing adventure!

Hi Alicia.

Drakes Bay is always beautiful.  And from the water this weekend, was even more special.  For me, the historical perspective added the romance of Sir Francis Drake and exploration.  One favorite moment was the cup of hot coffee on the deck in the crisp air and early morning light.  But our quick, boat-side dip was totally unforgettable.

Nancy & Alicia

The Seaward, Captain and crew, are so amazing; we sailed the 30 miles up from OCSC so smoothly.  And Rachel cooked up such tasty and simple meals and snacks, and coffee nonstop.

And we saw two whales!  I wasn’t even aware of the northern Farallones group until we sailed right by.  Wow.

It was such an incredible adventure.  Thanks so much for a wonderful time.

Nancy

Story by Monica Alicia Bland
Photos by Bill Kinney

The Annas hummingbird is aware (but not wary) of our presence. The light flints peacock green iridescence from her feathers with each staccato movement of her head. We are staring at her while she is staring at more important things. She ignores the shutter of the camera and our coos of delight, preens, and prepares to fly away. When she does finally go, we look after her contentedly. She has stayed long enough—longer, in fact, than we expected.

©Bill Kinney

A daytrip to Angel Island right now can feel like that—like you stayed longer than expected. This Tuesday we (OCSC Instructor Bill Kinney skippered for the trip) left at noon for a sail to Ayala Cove, docked at 1:30, went on a slow rantum scoot that lead us around the entire island, were back at the boat by 5:30, cooked, ate a leisurely meal, and cast off for a sail to home port. We put the boat away and had a celebratory toast in full daylight.

As you hike away from Ayala Cove, you’ll find nonchalant deer, the Juliet Fish Nichols fog bell, placards with historical facts, empty ruined buildings that are full of character, and baby pine trees lifing up around fire-scarred stumps. You’ll startle Scrub-jays and a few surly teenagers who jetski over from Tiburon. You’ll sigh and smile and point until you’ve had enough—and then you’ll remember you still have a lovely sail home to look forward to.

This is an easy trip (there are some fussy currents in the marina, but you’ll be motoring through them to dock). If you have a state park parking permit, you can dock for FREE. If not, docking is only $15 and you can stay until sunset. Since sunset comes after 8pm during the longest days of summer, now is the perfect time to book a full-day charter and explore Angel Island at your own pace! Be sure to bring a camera, plenty of water (there are several fountains along the trail if you forget), and a several layers of clothing. For more information about Angel Island, visit the official site: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=468 and to book your next charter, give us a call at the club: (510) 843-4200.

See you on the water soon!
Monica

©Bill Kinney

©Bill Kinney

©Bill Kinney

©Bill Kinney

©Bill Kinney

originally published on SailBlast. -covering the AC34 in San Francisco.

The View From Spithill’s Office

Jimmy Spithill’s version of getting up and heading to the office is just a little different to most. He starts in the gym about 7, heads home for a shower and breakfast, then hits the ORACLE Racing HQ at San Francisco’s Pier 80 for an operations meeting which sets the team’s agenda for the day. This week the focus has been on trialing equipment with Race Committee and umpires. A sailing team debrief follows where the team discusses what happened the previous day on the water, analyzing video footage and working with coaches Philippe Presti and Darren Bundock (aka Bundy). Meetings over, it’s time to crank up the pace and get out on the water. “It’s a full day,” says Jimmy. SailBlast editor Michelle Slade chatted to the skipper of America’s Cup defender, ORACLE Racing about his first week sailing the AC45 in San Francisco.

SB: What have you learned this past week in San Francisco?

Spithill: The way the weather works here on the Bay is perfect – from midday on you can be sailing. On these boats you don’t need more than a few hours because it’s so physical for the crew. You get to the point where you start to get diminishing returns because everyone’s starting to get tired. These boats are just physically draining and it takes its toll – you never get a break really. By the time the end of the week comes around you can definitely see everyone needs a couple of days off to recharge.

Another thing we’ve learned here is to split the week up, like we’ll do a Mon/Tues sail, take Wed as a maintenance catch up day, then sail Thurs/Fri. You could sail six days a week but you wouldn’t be any better for it. On the old boats, 2-boat testing was draining but more mentally concentration-wise for the drivers and the trimmers.

SB: There’s a lot of talk about the athleticism required on the 45?

Spithill: It’s definitely a different game – the huge emphasis now is on the athletic side, which I think is good. I have friends who are professional rugby players and they don’t see the athletic side of sailing – they instantly think of guys in a blazer sitting on the side, swanning around the bay. Once people see the 45s, with the cameras and mikes onboard, they see the amount of effort going into it. [Read more →]