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!