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I was up, but hadn’t heard a thing. After a briefing I was in the car and off to Condesa at T minus 30 minutes. Condesa and I have been through four deadly tsunamis in the last six years, and we know the drill: Head for deep water!

Bobbing between Alcatraz and the Golden Gate at 8AM, waiting for a tsunami to blow into the Bay, I noticed the other like-minded mariners were those who make their livings from their boats–the fishermen, the excursion boats, and all the Coast Guard and police boats. Condesa and her next door neighbor, who I woke up and gave my opinion about tsunamis and the better side of caution, were the only two pleasure yachts out there.

As it turned out, the tsunami was a non-event in San Francisco Bay, and while I was bobbing out there I realized why: The narrow Golden Gate would provide a dampening effect.

The Coast Guard’s tsunami warning was from 7AM to 8:48AM, so at 9:30 I went back to the berth. I was too early. A few minutes later one of my neighbors yelled out, and over the next half hour we watched the tide pump up and down two or three feet at a time, making five or six cycles over twenty minutes.

When I got home I saw footage of Santa Cruz, Crescent City, and of course Japan. Many flashbacks to the Southeast Asian tsunami.

A few months ago I was in the middle of repainting Condesa’s decks and superstructure, re-varnishing everything, and getting myself in over my head.

I finished work one night, locked things up, then came back the next day to see that I’d had visitors. There were beer cans, full and empty, all over the place, the stereo was on, and my personal belongings were scattered on deck. Condesa had been robbed and vandalized.

I tend to think in worst case scenarios – it’s a gift – and I’ve often imagined a creative vandal, instead of the idiots they all are, who might do something like pour roofing tar on your car, or hide a dead skunk in your house. The worst of the damage to Condesa was that they kicked over a container of leftover, catalyzed, two-part epoxy primer that I’d left in the cockpit. They tracked this paint all over – inside, outside, on the benches, on the hatches, on the companionway stairs, on the carpets. Everything I’d just re-varnished and repainted now had sneaker prints in dried white epoxy, and of course the carpet and rugs were ruined. This kind of paint, AKA epoxy barrier coat, is one of the hardest, most durable coatings ever invented. You have to sand it off; it can’t be removed with solvents or paint remover.

I went straight to the marina office to ask whether to report it to the local police or the harbor patrol and good news, the guys were caught the night before! Pier 39 security arrested them, photographed them, took all their information, and found two bottles of wine that they’d stolen from Condesa stashed under their sweatshirts. They were spotted jumping the fence to get off the E dock. You don’t need a key to get off E dock; you just turn the knob and open the door. Did I mention these guys were total morons?

Pier 39 Security turned them over to SFPD, who promptly let them go with a warning.

Since I know Condesa like my own body – I could seriously do about anything on that boat, except navigate, blindfolded – I could follow their every moronic move: I could see where they’d stepped up the companionway stairs with their paint-covered sneakers, then slipped and pushed the throttle into full reverse. I could follow their footprints into my head, where they’d used the toilet and didn’t bother to flush! (I guess I should be glad they used the toilet instead of the floor.) I could follow their paint footprints up through my new varnish, where one of them hung on the boom while discharging my fire extinguisher at his cohort on the dock. And on the dock were two clean footprints, surrounded by fire extinguisher powder. And I’ll bet with snorkeling gear and ten minutes I’d find my fire extinguisher on the bottom of the bay nearby.

To cut to the chase, the DA decided not to prosecute due to lack of evidence. To prosecute they’d need something more like the two suspects being spotted leaving a crime scene, caught with stolen property on their person, arrested and photographed etc…that kind of thing. Wait a minute!

It’s that reasonable doubt thing: The perpetrators admitted to trespassing on the dock, but wouldn’t admit to breaking into my boat. They said they found the bottles of wine nearby. So there is the possibility that someone else robbed my boat, then left the bottles of wine somewhere. These guys, who coincidentally had jumped a fence and trespassed on the same dock where a burglary had just taken place, just happened to find two bottles of stolen wine, just lying around. I don’t think a jury would buy it, but the DA thinks this introduces reasonable doubt.

I saw the best and worst of the SFPD. The CSI guy told me that they weren’t interested in fingerprints, that they were more interested in DNA evidence, which they could get from the saliva left on the beer bottles. I asked, “Really, you’d do DNA analysis for a case like this?” He said, “We do DNA analysis on all cases. We’ve got grant money that covers it.” This was a blatant lie. DNA analysis cost $10,000 per sample, and they only do it for rape and murder cases. If he’d actually done his job, some fingerprint evidence might have made the difference between letting it go and getting a conviction. I think my friend just wanted to get home quickly…with the rest of my beer.

The thieves took half my beer; the cops took the rest.

On the brighter side, the inspector who took over my case, whose name I’ll leave out because he probably doesn’t want it published, was very attentive to the cause and followed the whole thing through. He sounded as disappointed as I was that the DA wouldn’t take the case, and said he’d invested many hours in it. He took a personal interest because he’s a graduate of San Jose State, where our perpetrators are students. He’s a very nice guy and made me feel like someone cared.

The fact is it’s only time (lots of time) and money, nobody was hurt, and my emotional recovery was over long ago. People are getting whacked in the Tenderloin every week, and that’s a little more serious than a messed up varnish job.

But I have the perpetrators’ names, addresses, and photographs, with those stupid drunk guilty looks on their faces, and vengeance will be mine someday when they least expect it. I was thinking the next time these guys are my guests on Condesa, we might go out and do a little sailing…y’know, Farallon Islands…foggy day…cold…no witnesses.

This is Lola. Here I am forty, and this is my first dog. There was a time in the not too distant past when I might have said disparaging things about pet dogs like, “They’re just hanging around for the free food. Stop feeding them and see how long they’re man’s best friend.”

I have been attacked by dogs twice. The first time, when I was too young to remember, I needed two stitches in my face for a bite from a family friend’s golden retriever named Happy. The other time, about ten years ago, I needed 35 stitches in my hands and wrists from an encounter with a Costa Rican guard dog named Blackie. So I’ve never been what you’d call a dog person. My family always had cats. I never disliked dogs; I was just a dog realist. Well, Lola changed all that. Actually Alison changed all that, but Lola is the result.

We adopted her from Baja California a few weeks ago, and so far, so good: No pooping on the floor, no barking to piss off the neighbors, just dog fun and companionship…the whole dog experience. I see why people who have dogs live longer. Dogs get you out of the house to walk twice a day, and there is always someone who’s happy to see you when you get home.

But there are a few things I didn’t know about owning a dog. A dog gives anyone, anyone, an excuse to talk to you. No introductions, no talk about the weather, just straight into midstream dogspeak right from the get-go. It’s worse than owning a boat. There is an entire world of dogs, dog owners, dog walkers, and dog parks, which I’ve been completely oblivious to my entire life, and now I’m part of it.

Dogs can’t climb ladders, or at least Lola can’t. I guess I sort of knew that, but it’s really come to a head when I’ve taken her along to work in boatyards.

When it looks like they’re fighting, they’re really just playing. As long as the tails are wagging, it’s all OK. I thought Lola was attacking neighborhood dogs and I regularly yanked her off her feet by her leash, but it’s just spirited play, with lots of teeth.

When it was time to go I went to pull up the anchor and it was fouled. I pulled in all directions with Condesa and tried every trick in the book. After forty-five minutes we had an additional hundred and fifty feet of chain hopelessly fouled and it was getting dark. I dumped all 300-feet of chain and marked it with a buoy.

Apparently I’m the last one to know. Every cruising guide on San Francisco Bay says never to anchor in this spot because it is a notorious anchor-eater. I called the Angel Island rangers and they were quite cool about leaving ground tackle and buoys in their state park on a temporary basis.

We returned two days later, again with a bit of a party for a barbeque, and anchored Condesa nearby. We launched the dinghy and my brother Jim and I set out to recover the anchor. I donned snorkeling gear and my very warm wetsuit for the 48-degree water, while Jim did the heavy lifting from the dinghy.

To be read with a Jacques Cousteau accent:

Following the chain down into the depths, the last of the light disappeared at twelve feet. Below this was only darkness. The murkiness of San Francisco Bay makes the visibility just a few inches. My dive light was useless, and I could only see its light underwater if I pressed it against my mask. Upon reaching the bottom, at a depth of 25-feet, I was in a cold, dark, formless world, where my eyes were useless, but my other senses would become more acute.

I made about twenty dives over two hours, hyperventilating and holding my breath each time. After the first or second dive I came up and said, “It’s wrapped around a mushroom-shaped rock!” Then a few dives later I said, “I think it’s a sunken boat. I can feel the bowsprit, and I think I fell in the hold.” Then after a few more times fumbling around on the bottom the truth was known: “Pilings! Piles of broken pilings!” Indeed, there must have been a large pier extending from the old quarantine station. Now the pier is in ruins, and the mish-mash of broken pilings makes an anchor trap for the unwary. With each dive I got better at orienting myself, but feeling one’s way in total darkness, 25-feet underwater, in a big pile of pilings, is a little disorienting and unnerving. The flashlight was useless in the best of times, but I tried pressing it to my mask to see if it was working and it was half full of dark, muddy water, as was my mask. The chain seemed to be wrapped around one particular piling, and after many dives and over an hour of trying, there didn’t seem to be any hope…and it was getting late.

We got back to Condesa and everyone was happily barbequing away and drinking beers. I felt like I’d been to another planet. My ears were clogged, my eyes were more sensitive to light, and I was generally chilled and disoriented. People kept asking me questions, but I still had my hood on and couldn’t hear a thing. I’d been a blind and deaf man for the last two hours, and recovering my senses was a slow process. Andrew had been manning the barbeque and chumming the water with raw bloody meat the whole time, which is always nice to find out after you’ve been diving.

So there stayed my anchor and chain, floating with it’s little orange buoy. It was about $2000 worth of gear, and not to be left behind lightly. Hiring salvage divers would be expensive, and fraught with complications, like how would we get 800 pounds of recovered gear from their boat into mine?

Act 3: Another week later, we returned again. This time my friend Roger (above with his wife Laura on their boat) was a star in renting scuba gear for me and meeting us at the dock in Tiburon. Once again Jim did the heavy lifting from the dinghy and I went in with the scuba gear, which completed the whole spaceman going into the unknown motif. Roger also got me a brand new dive light, which was totally useless in zero visibility. Once again we made a day of it, and left eight or ten friends partying on Condesa nearby.

The scuba gear allowed me a lot more time on the bottom for assessment and contemplation. The chain was indeed looped around a horizontal piling, and after feeling this piling up and down, it seemed an impossible situation since neither end of the piling was off the seabed. I braced my fins against–whatever is down there–and tried to move the piling. It wouldn’t budge. I thought about it some more, and figured that the piling moving was the only possibility, so once again I grunted to move it. It did move, albeit very slowly because it was stuck in the muck on the bottom of San Francisco Bay. Finally, there I was in total darkness and zero visibility, standing in the muck, holding a 500 pound, 18-inch diameter, barnacle-encrusted piling on my shoulder…which I could easily drop and hopelessly pin myself to the bottom. I got the chain unwrapped and gave the signal to Jim to pull up chain, which was two sharp yanks, or was it many repeated yanks? The yanking got confusing for both of us, and more chain kept falling on my head.

I went to the surface to report the good news and sort out the yanking. Jim pulled in another hundred feet of chain and we got to the original snag. I went down again and could actually see a little before stirring up the silt. The anchor itself, my 45-pound CQR, was wedged under yet another piling and quickly freed. Jim pulled it to the surface and we were now in a very overloaded little 8-foot dinghy with 800 pounds of anchor and chain, scuba gear, and two grown men.

We returned to Condesa like conquering heroes. Once again I felt a veil of distance between me and the earthlings barbequing on Condesa. I was only down for half an hour this time, but it might as well have been a lifetime.

The next day I went to return the scuba gear and the guy at the dive shop had a good laugh and let me know, once again, that I wasn’t the first to lose an anchor at this particular spot. In fact, he said the spot would yield some pretty good hunting for a little amateur salvage operation.

This week we planned to properly get out on the high seas, with harnesses and jacklines, and make a lap around the South Farallon, which lies 28 miles west of San Francisco. It is known for being steep-sided and inhospitable, smelling of guano, and being home to lots of great white sharks.

Earlier in the week we got up at 5AM and it was already blowing 25 knots, so we gave it a miss. Yesterday, however, the forecast was for winds in the low 20s all day. My girlfriend Alison, my little brother Jim, and I set sail on the ebbing tide…which promptly crashed into the North Pacific swell with great violence, making all aboard queasy.

We raised sail, then minutes later triple-reefed in the freshening wind. We pounded seaward, passing a few container ships on their way into port. At about ten miles offshore we were engulfed in a fog bank, making us peg our eyes nervously to the radar, knowing that more big ships were lurking in the fog. With the spray and vomit flying, we called the fight, tacked, and shooshed back into San Francisco Bay to lick our wounds and take a nap anchored behind Angel Island.

Daysailing is so nice in that one can just walk away from such weather and be in a hot bath by nightfall. On a longer voyage we’d just have to make do, meaning be cold, wet, worried, and sleepless. I’m out of practice for such adventures, and I didn’t know that could happen to me. Last year I was charging through conditions like that for weeks on end without a complaint, while yesterday I was drained after just a few hours. Finally, San Francisco sailing is not to be taken lightly. It howls pretty hard inside the Bay sometimes, but outside can be a real trial, even on the good days.

My gigs are Wednesday, April 15th at 6:00PM in Tent C; Friday, April 17th at 3:15 in Tent A; and Sunday, April 19th at 11:45 in Tent E.

I’ll be doing a slide show and regaling the crowd with fascinating anecdotes and invaluable information.

Hope to see you there…

Everything I read these days seems to be either about great hope (Obama as messiah) or apocalyptic despair (the financial crisis). When I read about the former I think about my new life on shore and the good things it may bring once I move beyond underemployment. San Francisco seems a prosperous place, and my girlfriend just bought a house. Let’s call this the optimistic plan.

When I read about the latter I’m glad I’ve still got Condesa.

There’s been a lot of mention of sailboats as liferafts to escape the death spiral, and not just from the lunatic fringe. Or perhaps in light of the crisis the fringy are having their day. I’ve read mention in both The New Yorker and The Economist lately. An often cited work is Dmitry Orlov’s The New Age of Sail, if you’ve got an hour to spend. In The New Yorker he’s quoted,

“We don’t have a long wait before sail-based transport is the only option. In the future, I expect coastal property owners to get downright excited when they see any sailboat, whether it looks fashionable or not, paddle out their leaky canoes, and try to barter jewelry, silver cutlery or pretty seashells for the things they desperately need.”

Mr. Orlov lives on his sailboat. He is Russian and survived the collapse of the Soviet Union by bartering a trunk full of vodka when rubles were worthless, so he might know what he’s talking about.

Let’s call this the pessimistic plan, in which Condesa could be the most utilitarian way to ride out total collapse of petroleum, the monetary system, and the economy. I wonder how many ‘cruisers’ have set sail from Iceland lately?

The great thing is that in either scenario a sailboat is a highly coveted possession. If it’s optimism, nothing like a nice sail on the Bay with friends and colleagues after a hard week’s work once things pick up. If it’s pessimism, nothing like a sailboat to get away from the armies of desperate mutants who roam the earth fighting for the last remaining scraps of food, human flesh, and gasoline (see Cormac McCarthy, The Road) in a land slowly disappearing as the sea levels rise. Can’t sell a boat in this market anyway – not that I’d want to – so Condesa stays in the mix, for better or for worse.

People love wine and people love sailboats, so I think I’m onto something. Stay tuned!

On the writing front, I’ve got a six-page article on Colombia in this month’s issue of Yachting World. They allow limited access to the digital edition online. My article starts on page 94.