Author: Kristen

This was James and Paul’s first trip to San Francisco and they arrived by sailboat under the Golden Gate Bridge with family waving to them from shore. In keeping with the non-traditional entrance, we did not see the typical tourist sights. We didn’t visit Alcatraz, Coit Tower, or Paul McCartney’s photography exhibit at the de Young Museum. We did spend an hour using the public exercise equipment in the Panhandle.

After two weeks of sunny Bay Area Fall, some of us were ready to just stay put for the rest of the year. We loved it all, but mostly the warmth of the welcome we received.

So, here are our top ten non-tourist attractions in the Bay Area:

1. Lea the Dog

With apologies to the human relatives who made our arrival feel like a homecoming, Lea the dog was the highlight of our time in the Bay Area. Lea is a certified therapy dog and enthusiastic pool lifeguard, and we all felt better after being with her.

2. Waymo

Robot taxis you control with your phone! James was in heaven.

We found any excuse to ride in a Waymo, including searching for the oldest Geocache in San Francisco County under a big lemon tree in the Fort Mason Community Garden where a clutch of birdwatchers were discussing a hummingbird in hushed voices.

3. Youth Sailing at the Sausalito Yacht Club

Paul’s loud voice and gearhead tendencies have served him well over the years, and maybe never more so than at the Sausalito Yacht Club. After hauling us onto their dock in a gale, the youth sailing coaches heard Paul drooling over their fleet of Fevas and invited him to go out sailing. These kids are not afraid to capsize halfway to Angel Island and neither was Paul.

4. Cruising Club of America

Steve recently joined the Cruising Club of America and his first meeting was a lunch with the ‘San Francisco Station’ in Sausalito. There he received anchorage and mechanic recommendations, copious support for this questionable adventure we’ve embarked upon, and even met my personal safety-at-sea idol, Chuck Hawley.

5. Maya, Jay, Izzy and Talia

I remember when friend’s parents came to visit in college and took us out to dinner at the nice restaurant across the bridge in Vermont. In San Francisco, some of my oldest college friends, Jay and Maya, became the parents. Maya picked us up from the boat in Sausalito — cheerfully hopping into the dingy in her nice work clothes — and drove us to their house in Berkeley where we met their kids for the first time, ate cannolis, and climbed Indian Rock at sunset. Maya dug out 30-year-old photos, our kids laughed at how young we looked, and I felt — despite cold, hard evidence to the contrary — that no time had passed at all.

6. Keoni

Steve’s cousin, Keoni, a genuine good time, met us at Bolinas Beach with a surfboard and spent a morning pushing everyone onto waves. Paul, who had been preparing for this moment since October 2016, was PSYCHED.

7. Cousin Andrew and Soon-to-Be-Cousin Benie

My ridiculously interesting nephew, Andrew, is an engineer at Astranis and gave us an “office” tour that included a fancy espresso, a control room of people communicating with geostationary satellites in high orbit, a vacuum chamber the size of our boat, a giant block of titanium, a Pier 30 real estate history, and fun facts like: goods exported to Space receive refunds on tariffs paid on Earth.

Andrew and his fiancée, Benie, also joined us for a sail around the Bay and have been kind enough to organize a wedding in Berkeley so we have a reason to come back.

8. The Internet Archive Tour

Every Friday at 1pm, there is a free tour of the Internet Archive’s HQ in a former Christian Science church not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. The tour starts on the main floor with a summary of the non-profit’s work archiving websites and other digital material (including video games from your childhood that you might be invited to play in front of the whole tour group), proceeds upstairs to the former sanctuary where humming servers sing to an audience of sculptures modeled after the organization’s employees, and ends in the basement where one of those employees serves you ice cream. Worth a visit even if you barely understand the questions your 13-year-old is asking the tour guide!

9. Apple Park

Every September, James watches a live stream of the Apple Event and gives us a summary the newest iPhone features. This year, according to Apple Maps, we were only 52 miles away from Apple Park on the day of the Event, but — being mere mortals and not tech YouTubers — we were not invited. Also, it was the kids’ third day of online school. We rented a car and drove down to Cupertino that afternoon anyway. The closest we got to the ring building was an AR tour in the Apple Store just outside the company gates, but it was pretty fun to be part of the of the buzz there that day. Like all pilgrims, we bought some merch.

On the way back, we stopped at Stanford to visit LMN’s recently completed Computing and Data Science Building and to give the kids the first in a series of extemporaneous lectures on college campus design. Next up, UC Berkeley and LMN’s Undergraduate and Academic Building.

10. Berkeley Bowl

One of the best parts of traveling is visiting foreign grocery stores and Berkeley Bowl is the Notre Dame of produce. If our boat refrigerator were bigger than a carry-on bag, I would have bought the whole section of Washington apples.

Time feels a little more elastic on the boat, especially during overnight passages when we sleep in our clothes and eat a breakfast of peanut M&Ms at 3am. We keep an eye on the clock because of the watch system and our hourly log entries, but I’m constantly surprised when an hour has passed and I’ve spent the entirely of it watching a curious tern try to navigate around our wind instruments to land on the mast.

We record the dry stuff in a basic three-ring-binder and printer paper logbook: latitude, longitude, course over ground, boat speed, wind speed, wind direction, engine hours, sky conditions, etc. If you’ve wondered how Steve remembers every detail for his technical blog posts, here it is:

What we don’t log is how magical some of these passage hours are. Moderate sleep deprivation has something to do with it, but being surrounded by water as far as the eye can see has a strange effect too. Our screens show massive container ships miles to the west, but our eyes say: you’re the only human awake on the only boat in the ocean. When, just after sunrise, a whale breaches a few hundred yards away, heaving its massive self into the air and crashing back down over and over and over, we might get to thinking that we’re more part of the ocean than whatever is happening in the news.

We’ve now seen hundreds of whales spouting, hordes of cormorants running goofily on the water to get up and away as we approach, and packs of sea lions swimming past us like porpoises. But, by, far, the most surreal and wonderful offshore experience was the midnight watch change when Steve and I caught a pair of dolphins racing Flyer through bioluminescence, trailing blue light as they swam out and back. Another sailor we met calls these Cosmic Dolphins and watching them from a boat in the middle of the night feels like a dream.

Afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the children’s book, Amos & Boris by William Steig, about a romantic mouse who goes to sea. I read this page out loud at least twenty times in 2018 during one of Paul’s boat phases and still love it.

“One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water; and later, lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense, starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.”

And that brings us to the #1 priority of this trip, higher even than finding a cosmic sense of oneness with the natural world: SAFETY.

Our primary goal while offshore is to keep everyone on the boat. At night and in any daytime swell, we wear inflatable PFDs that clip into jack lines running the length of the boat. (Even Pelle has a life jacket!) If we need to leave the cockpit while underway, we let someone else know. We put a reef in the mainsail in the daylight before it gets dark, or one more than we’d normally have if already reefed. If we ever have to try out our life raft, we have procedures laminated and posted near the VHF.

We are fortunate that Flyer is designed for heavy-weather offshore sailing. She’s got a snug cockpit, a manageable sail plan, simple systems, and a doghouse that keeps us comfortable even in the worst conditions. When things get ugly, or we just want to take it easy, sitting in the doghouse is the place to be. We can keep watch with an almost 360 degree view, monitor all the sails and steer the boat using the autopilot from there.

In general, we avoid adventure in favor of hours of quiet offshore reflection. (Ha! Just kidding, the kids still want to spend their quiet hours playing Minecraft.)

We stopped in Friday Harbor for a few days to get the boat ready for a week offshore and watch for a good weather window for the trip south to San Francisco. It felt great to be in a place we know so well with time to wander.

Friday Harbor has it all: a brewery with cute fox merch, a small bookstore with an impressive kids’s section, a hardware store with free popcorn, a grocery store with a chocolate bar aisle, a farmers’ market with fresh eggs, a classy marina laundry facility with tap-to-pay machines.

On Saturday, our dear friend and frequent lifesaver, Brittnie, arrived with her girls for the day. It was a total joy to just stroll around the town holding hands with them one more time, looking for Chocolate Frogs, and impressing the locals with Esme’s old-school rock and roll aura. It also gave Steve time to knock off some to-do list items like installing straps in the galley to help with food prep in big seas.

At the end of the day, we all waited in the long Labor Day weekend ferry line until it was time to board, then the four of us ran back to the dock to wave and wave until we couldn’t see Minha’s pink dress anymore.

On Sunday evening, Steve’s coworker and friend, Cameron, will arrive by seaplane to join for the trip south. So far, we’ve been retracing familiar routes. Now it’s time to head out the Strait of Juan de Fuca and see something new.

We’ve been camping at Spencer Spit with this crew since 2016. Every year, these kids build beach forts and bike jumps, paint rocks, make up songs, and get really, really dirty. And every year, we mark the passing of time with some new milestone. 2025 was the first year every single kid pedaled themself into Lopez Village for ice cream, and the first time a 15-year-old had to use our boat’s Starlink to take online driver’s ed classes.

Among this group are friends who took our kids swimming at Greenlake all summer so we could focus on our to-do list, who prescribed us scopolamine patches for seasickness, who looked everywhere and found James’ forgotten AirPods under a knitting project. They carried us, as the kids would say.

Of the many hard goodbyes we’ve said this summer, this was the hardest. It was easy to pretend it was just another Spencer Spit departure while lugging gear up the hill from the beach to the cars, tripping on the same tree roots we’ve tripped on for years. It got a lot harder when we were hugging and crying in the parking lot. When our family headed alone back down the hill to our dinghy and rode quietly out to our boat, the leaving part of this adventure was feeling very, very real. 

We think a lot about our community in Seattle — friends, neighbors, schools, offices, dance classes and grocery stores that we love — but, boy, will leaving on a slow boat really give you time to consider just how much you’ll miss it.

Since April 2023 — when our sailboat, Flyer, arrived in Seattle on a ship from Chichester, UK — our family has been planning to spend James’ 8th and Paul’s 5th grade school year sailing around the Pacific. We finally pushed off the dock at Elliott Bay Marina on August 17. (Actually, we were pushed by our neighbors and fellow Boréal-owners, Randy and Diana.)

In the past two years, our to-do list exploded from a vague, shared Note on our phones (figure out school, spares) to a color-coded, multi-tab spreadsheet (install check valve at starboard bilge pump, add chain to drogue, order 19mm vinyl for cockpit cover side panels).

Thirty minutes into the first leg of the trip, we were still texting friends for help (Could you go to our house and look under the couch cushions for James’ AirPods??). Around Kingston, we finally looked up from our phones, took a breath, and enjoyed our last views of the Olympic mountains for a while. 

We’ve been so busy with the details of leaving our life in Seattle and getting our boat ready for a year of sailing that we really haven’t thought much about where we’re headed — after our annual camping trip at Spencer Spit, provisioning at Friday Harbor, and shakedown cruise to San Francisco.

Check this tracker to see where we end up. It’s guaranteed to be more up-to-date than this blog!