Escape from San Francisco 2022

On April 3, 2022, 15 of us went on an adventure, paddling from San Francisco to Alameda. We chose a day and time with conditions that would work best for the members in the club with all different SUP skill levels so we could focus on trip planning and tuning our navigation skills. This was not going to be a downwinder! With all our trips with the Ohana Paddle Club, we take safety seriously and review the plan with all participating members a few days before to answer any questions and facilitate any potential changes to our plans if conditions change. When paddling a large body of water like the bay, we need to take into consideration weather, current, and traffic since these will impact our direction and speed of travel. Oh, of course, we also want to ensure we also paddle in locations where we can get great photos of our expeditions!

Route

Our goal is to go from San Francisco to Alameda, so we chose to leave from Pier 52 in San Francisco and travel east to Alameda. Here is a nautical map showing our chosen route with a red line.

Our route from SF to Alameda | Ohana Paddle Club, map courtesy of DeepZoom

Our route from SF to Alameda | Ohana Paddle Club, map courtesy of DeepZoom

I find looking at maps fun and if you spend a little time looking at this one, you can see there are some noticeable differences in the water depth. On the San Francisco side the depth is from 20-60 feet whereas on the Alameda side it is 3-20ft.  In addition, you can see all kinds of things on the map that you may not notice IRL like buoys, day markers, cables, anchor points and a host of other obstructions. These markers can help you predict changes in water conditions, avoid ferry traffic, and help you find your way.

Forecast

We look for weather and water conditions (current, tides, and temperature) when determining our forecast. In addition, since we are crossing a body of water with some key differences like traffic and depth of water, we try to find measurements that are closest to the locations we will be. In our forecast, we took readings from NOAA in the bay, and the current reading from 3 locations and tides readings from 2 as shown below:

Weather forecast

NOAA 8am 10am 12noon 2pm
Temperature 53℉ 54℉ 55℉ 56℉
Wind W 9 mph (7.8 kts) W 9 mph (7.8 kts) W 11 mph (9.6 kts) W 16 mph (13.9 kts)
Cloudy Cloudy Partially Cloudy Partially Cloudy
Water ~60°


Current forecast

Mission Rock, 0.6 mile east of (PCT0411) Mission Rock, 1.3 mile east of (PCT0416) Mission Rock, 2.0 miles east of (PCT0421)
06:06 AM Ebb -3.70 kts 06:14 AM Ebb -3.18 kts 05:40 AM Ebb -3.70 kts
09:45 AM Slack 09:55 AM Slack 09:05 AM Slack
12:21 PM Flood 2.75 kts 12:11 PM Flood 2.45 kts 11:51 AM Flood 1.83 kts


Tides forecast

The variances with each of the locations is useful to understand how the conditions will change or stay the same as we make our way across.

Reading the water and ferry angles

One fun exercise that we did near the entrance of the bay at Pier 52 was asking our members which way the water was flowing. They remarked that visually, the water looked to be going North. When we asked them to stop and observe which way their board was moving, they realized that the current was actually pushing them south toward San Jose! At this point, we were past the forecasted Slack and moving into the forecasted Flood. 

Knowing that the water was carrying us down towards San Jose was helpful in determining our direction of paddle. Our route suggested that we head east, but knowing that the current was pushing us south meant that by doing so, we would end up a little south of our final destination. I will write another blog going into more detail on this topic later.

Ranges to help us get there

As stated earlier, our route we chose had us start at Pier 52 in San Francisco and essentially paddle east towards Balena Island in Alameda. Once we are outside of the harbor,  we can take a Visual Range, identifying an object (building or landmark) to help us navigate to our ending point. Seems easy enough, right? Just look across the bay and go! 

Not so easy when you are out in a large body of water. If you can see across the bay (remember, this is San Francisco, notorious for Karl the fog) are you certain that you can actually distinguish between the landmarks? If you can, you may realize that some of the landmarks look exactly the same (buildings, cranes, etc) or you can’t see the landmark that you expect to see. We knew this would be the case, so in our planning we looked at the map to find landmarks that we could see at different points on our journey. For example, the first buoy we chose to paddle towards was not visible from land, but using our navigation tools (maps, compass, etc) we could take a bearing and use this information to inform our direction of paddle. Once we had the first buoy in sight, we could then take a look at it in relation to a landmark behind it where we were on our planned route. 

In another instance, when we saw the first pair of day markers, which are aligned to indicate a channel, we could tell by the size differences where we were in relation to the markers. It takes a bit of practice to understand how to use these markers when navigating and so we try to practice this on our longer paddles. In fact, we did this a few times (as depicted by the dots on the red line) until we got to our final destination. It isn’t a straight line, but it helped us get home ok!

If you are interested in learning more about navigating on your SUP, join us on one of our paddles which are listed on our events page. Or, just come hang out with us on a social paddle. We’d love to paddle with you!

Mahalo!

--chris churilo

Ohana Paddle Club Escape from SF paddle
9414317 PIER 22 1/2 9414750 Alameda, CA
08:03 AM Low 0.05 ft 08:18 AM Low 0.04 ft
2:45 PM High 5.01 ft 2:48 PM High 5.26 ft