With the boat in the water it took almost an hour Sunday morning to rig sails (and determine that I had bought the wrong bulb for the stern light). I was being careful and wanted everything to be in order once the lines were cast off. Motored out into the Richmond Channel to hoist the main. I originally intended to set the reef, but the wind right there was so light I just put it at full hoist. Got the autopilot driving under main, ran the gas out of the engine, pulled and stowed it, hoisted the jib.
At that point I was out of the Angel Island wind shadow so it was time to reef. With the reef in I sailed on staboard tack toward the main bay. I didn't linke to look of the clew of the reefed main so I used the auto pilot to tack the boat (all the intentional tacks and gybes were done with the auto pilot Sunday) and sailed up into Angel's lee to retie the clew
From there I let the current carry me into the Raccoon Straight breeze and sailed a long port tack past the Belvedere buoy. A few more tacks and a badly execute duck took me into the middle of the bay about a half mile east of the Golden Gate Bridge. From there I bore off toward the city front and gybed to pass to lee of Alcatraz. Once past Alcatraz, Sleeping Dragon was flying at 11knots under reefed main and jib in about 23 knots breeze. My brand new KRZR phone was last heard from when it sent this picture.
Back at Richmond I dropped jib, rigged motor, dropped main, motored in and folded sails.
The biggest problems were when the autopilot got jam or the ram came off the tiller. Mostly this was happened when I forgot to stow the tiller extension and it tangled with the ram. I'm told I should tie the reef outhaul directly to the main, rather than through the eye to the boom. The boat is very forgiving, as was the flood I was sailing in.
My other problem was not using the autopilot and reaching for things.
Then the boat would press up or down too much and I'd have to stop what I was doing and get the boat moving the right direction again.
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