Bay Station's Love the Bay 2019 Recap

Bay Station Love the Bay 2019: Episode Two featuring Yours Truly, Michele

Bay Station welcomes chanteuse and drummer Yours Truly, Michele aka Michele Kappel to the sailboat Espresso, for an afternoon conversation and concert on the Oakland Estuary of San Francisco Bay.

Bay Station - "Trickster Moon" (Super Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse)

ay Station Love the Bay Full Moon Sail -January 2019. Filmed on the Alameda-Oakland estuary during the Super Full Moon Lunar Eclipse 1/20/19

Postcard: Bay Station's Love the Bay Day 1

Bay Station spent a long Memorial Day weekend, sailing around the San Francisco Bay, playing music with a bunch of area songwriters. Check out highlights from Day 1 when they say from Alameda to San Francisco and meet up with SF songwriters Nina Jo Smith and Peter Whitehead.

Bay Station Loves the Bay: Music & Sailing Adventure

Wow, what a ride the past weekend has been. Bay Station completed its mission on Memorial Day, sailing from Richmond to Alameda after a music-filled few days with some of our favorite friends in music. Below is just a sampling of some of the tiny boat concerts staged on Espresso. Check out the Bay Station Facebook page for full videos! Thanks to all those who participated!

A post shared by Bay Station (@baystationband) on May 29, 2018 at 7:10am PDT

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Love the Bay v.2

Bay Station has sail from Alameda on our second Love the Bay multi-day sailing trip/tour of the San Francisco Bay.  Follow along on Facebook and/ Instagram this  Memorial Day Weekend for live broadcasts from our various ports of call.

Memorial Day Weekend  May 25-28 Bay Station Loves the Bay Aboard Espresso, San Francisco Bay SF x Sausalito x Richmond x Alameda

Summer Sailstice is This Weekend June 18-19

Ahoy! Bay Station is playing 2pm -3:30pm 'poolside' at the Encinal Yacht Club as part of this weekend's Sailstice in San Francisco (Sailstice is a national happening!). 

It's a free event with all sorts of boat stuff happening. Be there, there being Alameda, CA, this Saturday, June 18 11am-6pm

Encinal Yacht Club
1251 Pacific Marina
Alameda, CA 94501

Boat Building Contest I New EYC Lifejacket Pool Plunge l Visit Historic Schooner 'Alma' I Historic Classic Sailing Vessels I Plein Aire Paint Out l  Small Boat Racing l Exhbitors l Entertainment All Day l Sailboat Rides l Seminars l

KCDC Love the Bay Recap

KCDC completed our inaugural sail and play around the San Francisco Bay/Love the Bay tour experiment with bright sun, warm skies and just enough wind to get us back to Alameda. Thanks to Treasure Island Bar & Grill for hosting us Thursday, our pals Christie & Martin for taking care of us so well in Sausalito, and to those who tuned into our Concert Window broadcasts from Espresso. We learned much about taking gear on a boat, live-streaming and what works and what doesn't for such an expedition, plus had some magic moments around our beautiful Bay (Harbor porpoises! Seals! Osprey! Sunsets!) We hope to do this again in 2016. Stay tuned. In the meantime, we're taking the full band back to High Street Station in Alameda on Saturday, Sept. 26. Real inputs, mics and amplification! Woo-hoo! Please join us.

A photo posted by Deborah Crooks (@deborahrcrooks) on Sep 19, 2015 at 1:22pm PDT

Love the Bay Postcard: Treasure Island

Day 1: Alameda to Treasure Island. Close to home but a world away! The weather turned beautiful, the tide turned our way, and the wind picked up, making for a quick jaunt. We had plenty of time to clean up, load in and set up at TI Bar & Grill to play for a friendly, local crew. Amazing we could fit our gear on board! Amazing sunrise and nice to find a great cafe, Aracely, a twenty-minute walk from the Marina (espresso drinks and fresh kale smoothies). Next stop

Richmond Marina Bay....

KCDC Love the Bay Tour Sept 17-20

Just to keep things interesting, we're going to sail to our next gig! We're often playing instruments while sailing on board our boat Espresso, so we thought we'd make it more formal. September 17-20 we'll be both sailing around the San Francisco Bay, and playing gigs on board and off. Plus we'll be doing Concert Window broadcasts from our various ports.
 More information and schedule via kcdcmusic.tumblr.com and ConcertWindow.com/DeborahCrooks

Read.Eat.Listen: Iterations

I grew up on a wooded hill so I'm always jonesing a little for a nature hike. Getting outside is generally the most reliable head clearer. These days, living in Alameda, the San Francisco Bay is both the backyard and the nature escape. And with no hills to climb, that means heading for either the beach or on the water.  On Friday, we took off for a long-planned overnight sail to Paradise Bay, a lovely anchorage on the east side of Tiburon. We'd sailed there more than a year ago and I had memories of a smooth sail, warm air and gentle anchorage, suitable for a little yoga on the deck and napping in the sun. Anticipating a similarly idyllic two days, I dressed in shorts, brought my iPad writing set-up, and we added the mandolin to the on board instrument inventory. However, though the weather was warm and clear when we set out on Friday, the water soon became choppy and rough. Out came the long pants and foulies.

It should be noted here that while I'm a pretty experienced outdoors person,  I'm really a fair weather sailor. Suddenly, I was feeling nauseous.  Fortunately my captain is more than capable, and ably navigated the rough patch while I worked on steadying myself. 
I was reminded how easily the mind gets attached to an idea of how things should be like they were before. Hah! Paradise, it turns out, like everything, is changeable.  The upside of the strong wind and current was arriving at Paradise Bay in record time, albeit amid high winds, cool air and a half-hidden sun.
Once I got over partially cloudy and cool weather, I embraced our actual circumstance. There's something so soothing about sleeping on water. And waking to coyotes howling through the morning fog and loons paddling on the calm morning water isn't bad either.
Read: The Folded Clock, by Heidi Julavits, is a diary, but it's nonlinear. Comprised of two years of highly literate entries, each started with "Today, I..." Julavits mines insights about her everyday motivations and encounters with bracing candor, about herself, her strength and shortcomings, creating a new order of experience.

Eat: A friend handed me some scissors and directed me into her garden recently to harvest some of the many fava beans she'd grown. I shelled them for salad and for pasta and proceeded to see fava's everywhere, on menus and grocery bins. Fava beans,  are something I would have hated as a kid and now find beautiful. Large and green and kidney shaped, I like them as much for their aesthetic as their flavor. This Fava Bean and Pecorino dish is simple and pretty.
Listen: I've been fortunate to hear a lot of great live music lately a while reviewing shows for No Depression. Someone I'm looking forward to seeing play there next month is Steve Poltz. I'm not sure any video can capture how mind-blowing Poltz is live — he's as much performance artist, comedian,  faith healer and spirit channeler as songwriter/guitarist — but this will have to do until you see him. Poltz tours a lot. (Bay Area heads up: He's in Berkeley in May and in SF in July.) Check him out.

Sailstice for the Solstice

Saturday afternoon, we're returning to the big sailing/summer solstice party at Encinal Yacht Club, Sailstice. There's a whole day of  activities planned, including plein air artists, boat building, sailing lessons, and a music stage —which we take to at 3 — at the Encinal Yacht Club.

Saturday, June 21st, 2014

 Summer Sailstice - 10am-6pm

Encinal Yacht Club  

1251 Pacific Marina,  Alameda, CA

About Summer Sailstice
 The Summer Sailstice San Francisco Festival is part of the global holiday of Summer Sailstice. Guided by an organizing committee of sailing organizations and businesses, the Festival intends to be Northern California's largest on-the-water celebration for everyone who loves harnessing wind, water, sun and sails to power their fun. See the feature story on Summer Sailstice SF Festival in Bay Crossings Summer Sailstice was founded in February 2001 by John Arndt, as the global, annual celebration of sailing held on the summer solstice. The annual Summer Sailstice sailing event is free to all participants and has grown from 200 boats signed up in 2001 to well over 4,600 boats today. Since many sailors join in the fun on boats signed up at http://www.summersailstice.com//, the actual number of Summer Sailstice sailors participating is estimated at almost 17,000 annually. 
 "The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them." – Paul Hawken - See more at: http://www.summersailstice.com/sf

On The Water

Somewhere west of The Farallon Islands

Despite living near large bodies of water for most of my life, I don't know I've spent as much time on it as I have during the past few years. Growing up in Santa Cruz, my parents were landlubbers. After several slightly harrowing attempts, I stayed away from surfboards. And save for a semester in college, when a friend and I rowed a zipper out of the Santa Cruz Harbor three days a week, and a couple of serene kayak trips on Hawaiian vacations, for most of my adult life, I've been content on the water's edge. That's changed a bit lately. Having married a sailor, and now living on an island (albeit a little one) with an active sailing community, time spent on boats has become, perhaps inevitably, a regular event. For the past few weeks, when I haven't been doing a show, I've been heading out on the water.
As with most activities, I'm not so concerned with gear (in this case, boat types) or adrenaline (speed, competition, frequency), but I greatly enjoy the chance to experience another side of nature: how the wind shows its change on the surface of the bay before you feel it, the way seals bob in calm repose when the wind and current are low, diving Least and Caspian terns, low-soaring pelicans, the occasional flash of a sea porpoise. Plus there's something just downright soothing about rocking on water for hours at a time. It provides a reset button I've come to appreciate all the more.
Saturday, we went out on the Bay on a friend's boat for an afternoon of sailing. On Memorial Day, we boarded a whale-watching boat run by San Francisco Whale Tours in a bid to see some of the gray, blue and humpback whales that forage in the deep Pacific.  I've seen hundreds of migrating whales from shore when living on the California coast, gone whale-watching in New Zealand and deep-sea fishing off of Monterey, but I'd yet to whale-watch out of San Francisco.
Memorial Day was threatening rain. A low fog hung over the water, inhibiting visibility out of the Golden Gate and to the Farallon Islands. Nonetheless, I was as excited to see what I could see of the Farallones, even if the jagged rock outcroppings 30 miles out of the gate were slightly obscured.
We could smell the birds who roost there before we reached a safe viewing distance, where could make out thousands upon thousands of nesting Murres, a bird not unlike a penguin. Our on-board naturalist told us how in the early days of San Francisco, locals came out to the islands to forage the Murre eggs (one egg equaled a decent sized omelet) and fur seals. When the effects of all that pillaging became evident, President Roosevelt created the Farallon Reservation to protect the islands and its wildlife. In 1969, it was expanded to become a National Wildlife Refuge. Now the Farallon Islands are an integral part of the Gulf of the Farallones National Wildlife Refuge, the birds and seals have recovered and access is limited. There weren't any other boats at the islands when we pulled up a few hundred yards from its craggy shore. A few seals swam out to check out our boat and a tufted puffin flew overhead as gulls, guillemots and murres wheeled overhead and swam in the inky sea. It was slightly spooky...and magical. I felt we'd gone very far away.
After idling a bit to scan sky and sea, we motored on West, in search of yet deeper waters and the thus far elusive whales....
Entering this part of the Pacific felt like driving across a (cold) desert: there's so much out there, but you have to really look and be in it to get just how much. A vast expanse of water and foggy horizon greeted us. The fog lifted a bit, the water was calm: our captain reported these were optimal conditions for whale viewing. We huddled in our storm coats and chewed on ginger gum, looking at the horizon for signs of spouting. We saw an albatross and another puffin, porpoises and auklets, more murres, seagulls floating on large seaweed 'rafts'...but  the whales, seen only a day previous according to our guides, where foraging elsewhere. Evidently, a small percentage of whale-watching trips turn out this way (SF Whale-Watching graciously offers the next trip on them if you don't see whales). Eventually we headed back across the water, toward the Golden Gate and shallower waters. Though whale-less,  I felt energized rather than disappointed...and happy I have a make-up trip ahead of me.

Seal mind

 

"When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink. " — Louise Gluck, 'The Untrustworthy Speaker'

I haven't been sleeping well. We're looking at buying a place, I'm in the middle of a new project and the 'whee!' of starting something new, and the 'woo-hoo' of finishing something are distant shores. I've had a near constant feeling of being lost couple with a chattering monkey mind of worry...and I'm not sure where the shores are anymore.
So Sunday morning I got on K's boat. Unlike the rest life, I kind of prefer 'dull' sailing. Conditions were perfect for me: flat, chop-free and light wind. The bay was like a big bathtub (though not a warm one). We headed south where there weren't any boats and drifted a bit. Calm. Ahh. A certain point we came across several harbor seals in an easy repose. Heads up, looking south, spaced at a distance from one another, they sort of bobbed open-eyed in the water, as if meditating. It was a slightly surreal scene, at once magical and ordinary. They looked at us with only mild surprise and swam a little further away, unhurriedly, to resume their float. Ah-ha. A clue.

Boats Old & New

It's difficult to ignore anything combining speed, size and daring. So despite my fairly passing interest in competitive sailing and its players, I was among those captivated by the America's Cup which took place in the San Francisco Bay this weekend. On the third day of the four-day event we rode the ferry over to Pier 41 and walked to Hyde St Pier for a somewhat immersive day in old and new boat culture, with some old-and-new music thrown in for good measure. Playing tourist in our own town, the added bonus of the day was appreciating San Francisco anew.

To add to the festivities, Hyde St Pier played host to a Sea Music Festival on Saturday and a wide array of chantey singers, balladeers, fiddlers, Maori, French and Chinese dance troupes and piratical bands could be heard amid (and on) the historic ships. As a small group of song catchers traded tunes in the middle of the deck of Balclutha, the 19th Century ship moored at the Pier, we huddled with a small bunch of race viewers on the old steel-hulled ship's bridge. Balclutha turned out to be a slightly secret but great place to view the Cup racers duking it out on the Bay. While larger crowds of fans had either gathered at Marina Green (site of the official 'race village') or sailed their own boat out on the water to watch the race from the front lines, our small crew listened to a live radio broadcast of the action as the ultra-modern wing-sailed AC45s zipped between the race gates beyond Aquatic Park. The Bay was buzzing with helicopters, Coast Guard Boats, and hundreds of more ordinary sailboats. In contrast, the AC45s looked more aeronautical than nautical with their ultra-aerodynamic sails. Surrounded as we were by such old ships, the AC45s seemed almost alien. The racing itself — strategic, athletic and subject to wind and weather — was that much more impressive.
All of this is of course a warm-up for 2013 when the teams will race even bigger boats (72 ft, is that possible?).