Summer Sailing on San Francisco Bay Starts With a Smile
This first weekend of summer 2026 couldn’t have started out better. If you remember Thursday, it featured thick gray clouds and heavy fog, which means you’re using your windshield wipers instead of applying sunscreen. That ended on Friday afternoon when the clouds pulled back and the breeze filled in for a spectacular Friday night beer can race. We rarely have solid wind all the way around the Knox course, but we did this past Friday.
Just because there were no boats ahead of us in the photo above as we headed toward the finish line, does that mean we were getting ready for the bullet? The truth is all the other boats had finished and we were the stragglers making our way home. That might upset some folks, but not us. We’re the last fleet to start in this series, and for some reason, our non-spin class was given the longest course of all the fleets. In the end we figured it was a bonus. It was the solstice weekend, meaning a very late sunset, and with a great breeze we got more sailing than all the other boats that paid the same entry fee we did. On a mile-per-dollar basis, we were way ahead of all those early finishers.
Saturday kicked off Summer Sailstice weekend with one of those idyllic sailing days that remind you of all the good reasons to get your boat out and sail. Half Moon Bay racers had taken off in the morning, and all returned with stories of great sailing and frequent sightings of breaching whales. We sailed with our friend Jim Baldwin on a tour of the Bay to see who else was out there. We could see the St. Francis Yacht Club youth Heavy Weather Regatta in the distance, which started the “guaranteed-windy” weekend without much wind. It came in on Sunday.
Despite light air, we sailed with one reef to keep doublehanding comfortable, and indeed, it remained so even with our big 150 genny. We toured the Bay with a 12-knot breeze and a flat-water flood that meant always-flat catamarans like the HH66 Flash looked even flatter than normal and just as fast as always. We probably looked just about as flat ourselves.
We returned to the Corinthian alongside many wooden boats that were arriving all day on Saturday to get ready for Sunday’s Master Mariners Wooden Boat Show. The weekend sailing weather was so ideal it would be hard to keep the commitment of sailing into a slip to share your wooden boat with the public, but the 40-plus-boat show showed up anyway to share their pride and joy.
The Sunday wooden-boat show is another annual summer weekend event that continues to remind countless sailors of the good fortune they have to sail and connect with the community of sailors that surrounds it. The smiles on the docks and the boats were as bright as the weekend’s sunshine. A trend that we’ve seen growing among the mature fleet of boats and their owners is some fresh faces in the crowd. The beautiful wooden Bird Boat, Grey Goose, below, was headed for the crusher before it was rescued just weeks ago when it was purchased for $1 by Marie, Miles and Josh.
They’re knowledgeable sailors who purchased her despite knowing that insurance companies, marinas, “grownups” and common sense say you should never buy a boat for less than $100k. Somehow, love, passion and vision once again overcame common sense. Some people think it might be easier to get to Mars than to save a wooden boat, but the world is full of dreamers and it would be hard to imagine how many people are enlivened and energized by the thought of seeing Grey Goose rejoining her remaining sisterships on the Bay. This is true of all the boats on display at the show. (Though a very different boat, this $2 catamaran, should remind folks that dreams do come true and common sense can be boring and overrated.)
Sometimes the rewards for all the hard work on wooden boats arrive in the form of a trophy at a wooden-boat show. That was true for David Schwartz and David Hevarg, who won the Corinthian Cup at the Master Mariners show this past weekend.
With a Bay full of sailboats and a marina full of classics with decades of sailing stories, there is far more to tell about the Summer Sailstice weekend, but we’ll have to add some more in the days ahead. The short lesson — from a Friday night beer can race to a Saturday sail on the Bay through a sunny stroll on docks filled with classic boats — is that there’s plenty of reason to smile if you can find your way to the Bay on a sailboat.
The only tough part is that Monday is looking as if it will turn out to be as good as the weekend on the Bay, and we won’t be on it!
South Beach Yacht Club Hosts Summer Camps in McCovey Cove
Every week from June 8 to August 14, the South Beach Yacht Club is holding summer sailing camps for kids ages 8–16 at McCovey Cove, a wonderfully unique location for dinghy racing to be enjoyed.
Each week begins with a morning of instruction in safety practices, boat handling, teamwork, wind awareness, terminology and knot tying, followed by afternoons out on the Bay. Each day exposes the students to different wind/water combinations, which they must learn to understand in order for their boat to go where they want it to go. After four days of skill acquisition, the young sailors have friendly competitions on a race course set up with one RIB and offset buoy serving as the starting line, and two other RIBs providing on-water instruction and crew-change management.
Under the direction of new program director Stacy Cronin, summer camp instructors are charged with the mission of imparting a sense of responsibility for each young sailor’s decisions to enable them to trust their judgment on the water, whether sailing alone or with crew. The resulting confidence gained carries over into all aspects of their lives both at home and at school.
Established in 1990, the SBYC youth sailing program employs a fleet of RS Teras for use by one or two sailors with mainsail only and RS Tevas that can sail with two or three sailors using both a main and jib. For more advanced students, several Lasers are also available. Storing and rigging the boats to sail takes place on floating docks adjoining Pier 40 at the north end of the South Beach Marina basin. Once rigged, boats are either sailed or towed out into the Bay, where windy conditions routinely cause capsizes that sailors are trained to recover from wearing wetsuits, PFDs, helmets, and lightweight shoes. As part of this training, each sailor is required to swim 100 feet while wearing a USCG-approved PFD.
On Fridays, after a morning of racing, sailors are treated to a special lunch at SBYC featuring a variety of healthy foods to choose from, a departure from the hot dogs and burgers that were originally served by the club. A sample plate is created by chef Anita Cole for the sailors to use as a guide for what their own lunch might look like.
After lunch, a graduation ceremony is held by the instructors, who hand out paper-plate awards to each sailor recognizing their unique contribution to the week’s activities. Perhaps the most heartwarming “plate” went this week to a third-grade girl who had capsized nine times, but stuck it out to finish the week with skills much improved!
Openings remain for the weeks of July 6 and 20, at a cost of $700 for the week. Participants do not need to be members of South Beach Yacht Club.
For details and inquiries see here.
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Oakland and Affiliated Agencies Continue To Fail Public Access to the Bay
After spending a glorious weekend on the Bay, we hate to have to write another story on Oakland’s dereliction of duty to its citizens. It remains distressingly difficult to wake up to emails and the photos from members of the East Bay Rowing Club, highlighting the abject failure of the City of Oakland and numerous related agencies’ inability to manage a dock measuring about 20 feet by 100 feet.
With their youth rowing camp scheduled to start at the Jack London Aquatic Park docks at 8 a.m. today, Heather Krakora, executive director of the East Bay Rowing Club (EBRC), wrote a desperate plea to the City and other agencies to help. This may feel like too little too late, though; as Latitude 38 readers know, numerous citizen advocates and organizations have been lobbying for years without result. Our own efforts to understand the problem leave us mostly bewildered that there simply appears to be no agency with clear jurisdiction and authority to manage this tiny dock and cove on Oakland’s miles-long waterfront. On one end of the Estuary, the Coast Guard ships on Coast Guard Island look well-cared-for and -managed. At the other end of the Estuary the massive Oakland shipping terminal sits gleaming in the sun with an annual budget of something like $700 million. In between is the public shoreline managed by the City and the Port.
Around the Bay, private and public marinas and yacht clubs manage miles of docks and coves, giving kids and adults access to the Bay. It would be hard to overstate the hours of time volunteers have invested in trying to find out how to solve the problem, and likely also hard to overestimate the hours of time various agencies have met to discuss the problems over the past decade. Yes, we mean decade. We do know it’s harder than it looks, but we also know the City, the Port and numerous related agencies should and can get this done.
We share EBRC executive director Heather Krakora’s email to a long list of agencies and media: “I am writing to alert the City and Port of Oakland, given the severity of what we have experienced at Jack London Aquatic Center in the past 48 hours.
“In that time, we have three large boats that are moored to the public dock for well over 48 hours, since the evening of Friday, June 19. They are blocking access to the water and have emptied the contents of their boats onto the dock. One of the occupants of the vessels has threatened staff and athletes.”
“We are set to launch our summer Learn to Row Camps for Oakland youth ages 12–18, including Oakland Unified School District students, on Monday morning — tomorrow, June 22. Senior citizens and youth access this dock daily for programming. We cannot operate safely while these vessels remain in place.
“The occupants of these vessels are agitated and their behavior has become threatening. It is not safe for our participants to be at this facility right now.
“If these vessels are not removed before Monday morning, we will be forced to cancel programming for the Oakland youth and seniors who depend on this facility. If we cannot consistently operate from this dock, East Bay Rowing Club cannot continue as a functioning organization. This community loses its only public-access rowing program. And the City of Oakland loses an anchor tenant who has been helping to keep this facility running and safe.
“We provide over $20,000 in scholarships to Oakland youth, pathways to college, and have been paying rent on time, every month to the City of Oakland for over 15 years. We have offered solutions and have been reporting these issues for over two years.
“We are asking for emergency removal of the vessels currently blocking the JLAC dock before 8:00 a.m. Monday, June 22.
“We need someone to take responsibility and act.”
Mark Yolton, Board president of the East Bay Rowing Club, added in part, “Drug dealing and prostitution take place in the parking lot day and night. An unlocked gate to the parking lot allows drinking, drug use, trash, refuse and all manner of illegal activity in the middle of the night, which we encounter when we arrive to use the facility at 5:20 a.m. each [day] (the JLAC park is supposed to be closed overnight but the gate allows unfettered access). Note: This will be a site of illegal fireworks, drinking, drug use and other overnight activity on the 4th of July; last year on the 4th the dock was severely damaged when someone drove a vehicle onto it — it took months and thousands of dollars to repair.”
“We are asking for help from our city leaders, the Port of Oakland, the Coast Guard, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, Oakland Police Department, Oakland Parks and Rec, and anyone else with the power to assist in addressing these issues. We are willing and committed to help and to partner with you but we can’t do this alone without proper support from more powerful authorities.”
Public access to the waterfront is a national problem on both coasts. The small scraps of land still available to connect people to the maritime heritage and simple, recreational fun in and on the water has become increasingly hard to preserve. As Mark Yolton noted above, there is a long list of agencies with large bureaucracies and budgets that are supposedly working on behalf of “the people,” but the results appear almost nonexistent. We know the housing problem is an enormous challenge, but it appears to be impervious to the many well-intentioned people who go to work every day to resolve the issue.
Separately, we understand there are glimmers of hope that the removal of some of the many derelict vessels on the shoreline will begin soon. However, summer camp for kids at the East Bay Rowing Club was supposed to start at 8 a.m. today. The Bay, the volunteers and the parents are all looking forward to welcoming more kids to the incredible beauty and adventure of the Bay. The East Bay Rowing Club and all the Estuary advocates are waiting and wondering who the responsible adults are that will step up to make all their efforts and commitments to the Bay and youth possible.
‘She-Wolves’ Prepare for NYYC’s Women’s International Championship
Nicole Breault and an all-star team of Bay Area women sailors will head to Newport, Rhode Island, this September to compete in the inaugural New York Yacht Club (NYYC) Women’s International Championship. Representing the St. Francis Yacht Club (StFYC), Nicole and her self-styled She-Wolves team will be up against 19 other teams from 14 countries racing the IC37 sailboats supplied by the host club.
The stakes are high, and the competition includes Olympic champions, world titleholders and ocean-racing veterans. From the moment she heard it announced, Breault knew that she wanted to participate. “They’re going to showcase what women can do by putting us on the same platform as the New York Yacht Club Rolex Invitational,” Breault tells Latitude. “I saw it as a great concert that I wanted my band to rock in!”
To launch a world-class campaign, you need world-class backing. Enter Bruce Smith, the “Big Wolf” of the operation. Smith is a proven benefactor who previously led StFYC to victory in two Morgan Cups and four Masters regattas. Recognizing their potential to podium and being dedicated champions of women in sailing, Smith and his wife Debby have stepped up as the primary financial supporters of the She-Wolves, putting them on a track to excellence. Given the scope of the campaign, Smith pulled in Sydney 2000 Olympian Russ Silvestri to serve as the team’s general manager and advocate. “Russ has been an incredible asset to us,” Breault tells Latitude. “He has a lot of experience in management, and in competing and winning. He is especially skilled at asking for help from club members who love the sport and want us to do our best.”
With solid financial backing behind the effort, Breault built a powerhouse roster. Molly Carapiet (tactician), Molly Vandemoer (upwind strategy/spin trim), and Katie Pettibone (coach) formed the initial core of the team. Together they recruited McKenzie Wilson (jib trimmer), Claire Dennis (main trimmer), Collette Zaro (bow), Kate Shiber (mast), Dana Riley Hayes (pit) and Lucy Wilmot (runners). Breault describes this crew as women with “the strength, experience, and proven competitive drive to handle the physical demands of the IC37 platform while playing the game at the highest level.”
Breault designed a multi-phase training program for the team, maximizing local resources while seeking out boat-specific experience. So far, the She-Wolves have relied on San Francisco Bay’s competitive J/105 fleet aboard Arbitrage, the boat on which Breault won the 2025 Rolex Big Boat Series.
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