Fine Day For SailingHeather Richard is a US Coast Guard licensed (100 ton) captain for hire on San Francisco Bay. Interested in classic schooners or racing catamarans? Teak or carbon fiber? A gentle cruise or a rip-roaring ride? Learn to sail lessons or private coaching? America's Cup spectating, sightseeing, whalewatching, crabbing or sipping wine on the Bay... Captain Heather can find you the right boat and the right experience. Almost every day is a fine day for sailing on San Francisco Bay, so call or email to discuss the possibilities!
Heather grew up on the East Coast and has been sailing since the age of 4. She raced competetively on the Boston University team while earning a BFA in sculpture, and worked on charter boats and in community boating programs in Boston. She also worked for the US Navy in Japan, Sail Carribean Voyages and the Saint Francis Yacht Club coaching young sailors.
She currently lives aboard with her three children in a maritime co-op. In the off season she can be found in her art studio and is active in her community volunteeering with youth programs and bringing waterfront access to underserved populations. She is working with a group of volunteers to start Sausalito's first community boating program at Cass Gidley Marina. Www.cassgidley.org
For the 2013 sailing season Heather was captain of the Schooner "Gas Light", in 2014 she added her own vessel "Carodon" to the charter fleet as well as sailing with the America's Cup Yacht USA 76 and Prosail 40 catamaran "Tomcat". She is able to book your ideal sailing experience on a variety of sailing vessels up to 50 passengers and also offers private coaching.
Most exciting email I’ve received this week reads:
On behalf of Circle 8 Productions, we are excited to showcase your business Sunday, April 22nd, 2018 @ 3:00 PM PST on CBS-KPIX SF for our next episode of This is SF! Additionally, your episode of This Is SF will re-air on Sunday, April 29th, 2018 @ 11:30 AM on KBCW-Cable 12!
Be sure to catch us on tv, unless of course it’s a fine day for sailing and you’re on the water instead!
The birds and seals are growing fat on herring this week and we still have tickets to the annual herring festival on Sunday if you’d like to try some too! This year several restaurants are cooking up new dishes and they all sound scrumptious. If you’ve never tried or even heard of fried milt you have to come check out this buttery delicacy from chef Davey Jones. Tickets available here on eventbrite or possibly at the door of the Bay Model Sausalito if we don’t sell out. We are showing a brilliant film (two showings morning 11am and after lunch at 2pm) called Sonic Sea. And best of all lunch and music by the FISHWIVES are included in your ticket price. All proceeds benefit Sausalito Community Boating Center SCBC at Cass Gidley Marina. Hope to see you there Sunday!
With limited space on board we are careful to consume and accumulate only what we really need, and it’s always a struggle to reduce the waste we produce in our daily lives. I’ve been slowly noticing what we throw away frequently and looking for alternatives. According to the EPA statistics for the year 2013 in the U.S. “On average, we recycled and composted 1.51 pounds of our individual waste generation of 4.4 pounds per person per day.” Aboard Carodon this year we recycled and composted about 75% of our quarter-pound per person per day of waste. What does this look like? We now walk up the dock with approximately one gallon bucket of compost, a gallon to five gallons of recycling (depending on how many bottled drinks are consumed on charters) and only a half of a gallon bucket of landfill-bound waste every other day- for five people living aboard and a busy charter business that’s pretty good!
If you are looking for some gifts that help reduce our impact on the earth, here are a few of the products I like that help us REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE and ROT:
I love a good story told well and there’s one in the making right now on the open ocean. I first met Randall Reeves at the boatyard last spring. He was yelling unkind words at his boat on a hot day under an even hotter clear tarp, struggling with the gooey stinky task of replacing his non-skid deck. I felt for him- it looked like quite a project. But then I heard about the real project- a non-stop mad dash around both poles in one season, alone – the figure 8 voyage. THAT would be a real task! We stayed in touch and when the time came to see him out the gate I managed to clear my charter schedule to take the cameramen and press out to see him off. It was the foggiest, coldest day yet, with lots of shipping traffic everywhere and a decent sloppy swell running – not an easy exit. Several fellow cruisers sailed out with him and after lots of footage was taken and even a sketchy drone flight over open ocean in rolling seas in the fog we turned around and left Randall in peace to continue his voyage.
That night from my warm, cozy and relatively still bunk I thought of Randall out there alone on the open ocean and opened up his really cool tracker to see exactly where he was and what his weather was doing.
He was making good time on the first day and appeared to be pretty far from major shipping traffic too. I was stoked when the daily blog reports started coming in because Randall is a good storyteller and has a sense of humor that made me instantly like the guy. If you want to see how this story continues be sure to follow his blog here!