Posts from — August 2009

August 29, 2009

See a photo gallery from the race on our photo blog, at woodenboat.posterous.com

Here’s your opportunity to sail on a classic gaff schooner, Gas Light, in an exciting race, the Great San Francisco Schooner Race, Saturday, August 29, on San Francisco Bay.

The Golden Gate Tall Ships Society has made a great offer especially for members of the Spaulding Wooden Boat Center.

The day starts with boarding Gas Light at Schoonmaker Point Marina in Sausalito at 10am. The boat sails promptly at 10:30am to join the 11:00 parade of schooners down Raccoon Strait followed by a pursuit race at noon starting off the Knox buoy. Following the completion of the race, there will be a post-race no-host barbecue with live music on the clubhouse deck of the San Francisco Yacht Club in Belvedere. The beer is free but there is a $20 charge (payable in cash) for the barbecue.

Participants on Gas Light who do not want to stay for the barbeque will need to arrange their own transportation back to Sausalito from Belvedere as Gas Light will be staying through the party before returning to Schoonmaker Cove Marina at approximately 8pm. It’s a full day of some of the most spectacular sailing boats that you will ever see in one place and at one time on San Francisco Bay.

Cost to Spaulding Wooden Boat Center members for the sail is $75, which includes a light lunch and beverages.

Summary
Saturday, August 29
10:00 am – Boarding at Schoonmaker Point Marina in Sausalito
10:30 am – Depart Schoonmaker Marina
8:00 pm – Return to Schoonmaker Marina on Gas Light from Belvedere after the reception (or earlier with your own transportation from SFYC in Belvedere)

To secure your place, please make a payment via PayPal using the link below, or contact Alice Cochran at 415 457-8997 by phone to arrange to pay by check.

Use the following link and select the $75 guest ticket for the Great San Francisco Schooner Race. Buy tickets

Update, August 30: See a photo gallery from the race on our photo blog, at woodenboat.posterous.com

More information:

Gas Light is a 72 foot gaff rigged scow schooner built in 1991, and a replica of the famous San Francisco hay scows that plied the bay during the nineteenth century until the advent of the internal combustion engine.

For a more in-depth history of San Francisco scow schooners, see the following source:

http://www.nps.gov/history/maritime/nhl/alma.htm

View larger player at SFGate Web site

Musicians from the Sausalito boatbuilding and maritime community gather on Thursday nights to make music and enjoy each other’s company.

Source:  Sausalito waterfront pickers and singers, from San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate, Tuesday, August 18, 2009.

Anyone who loves both wooden boats and photography knows that it’s hard to take a bad photo of a wooden boat. We embrace that belief and post many photos of wooden boats of all types that are in our boatyard, on San Francisco Bay and elsewhere.

We post photos on these sites on the Web:

♦  Our main Web site’s Media Gallery, with photo galleries, slide shows and videos, at Spaulding Center Web Media Gallery.

♦  Photos from our Twitter posts can be found on both TwitPic and Posterous.

♦  We have an active photo pool on Flickr, the photo sharing site, of wooden boats on San Francisco Bay, at Wooden Boats on San Francisco Bay. We currently have over 200 photos in the pool and welcome your photo contributions.

♦  Finally, we post photos on our blogs at Brightwork (where we are now) and the Youth Boatbuilding & Sailing Blog.

Here’s a screen capture of our Posterous photo gallery at woodenboat.posterous.com:

Galilee Harbor, a community of house boats and boat houses, held its annual Maritime Day festival yesterday in Sausalito. The Spaulding Wooden Boat Center was on hand to offer rides on our 1906 gaff sloop Polaris. Skipper Martín and his crew Dylan and Jody took 21 guests out sailing during the day.

Most residents of Galilee Harbor are artists drawn by the cooperative nature of the community, and the marina was organized with the goal of preserving a working floating home community matched with land-based marine services.

On Friday the Spaulding Center held its annual volunteer appreciation picnic and barbecue at Ayala Cove on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.  A flotilla of three sailboats—SWBC’s own Polaris and Pegasus wooden sloops and my 36′ sloop—ferried revelers from the Spaulding Wooden Boat Center in Sausalito to Ayala Cove and back to Sausalito at the end of the day.

The weather was perfect. A couple of us had spent the night before the picnic on my sailboat moored in the cove and it was foggy and cold the day and evening before the picnic. Fortuntately Friday dawned with less fog and it cleared up quickly, just in time for our party on the island.

The State Park’s Live Web cam of Ayala Cove