Winter is coming! I can feel it in the air. For San Francisco Bay sailors, Mother Nature provides a number of indicators. Some are very clear and obvious while others are more subtle, but all point to the fact that the seasonal cycle continues, and winter is in the offing.
By CaptaIn Ray
Published: December, 2013
Winter is coming! I can feel it in the air. For San Francisco Bay sailors, Mother Nature provides a number of indicators. Some are very clear and obvious while others are more subtle, but all point to the fact that the seasonal cycle continues, and winter is in the offing.
The first of these affects us all, sailor or not. That is the switch from Daylight Savings Time to Pacific Standard Time. I know it’s only an hour, but with the sun setting sooner, the days seem quite a bit shorter: it’s cooler (and darker) as the day winds down about 5 p.m.
As winter nears, the sun crosses the sky a little farther south each day. As I write this in early November, sunset has moved from behind Mt. Tamalpais south to the Golden Gate. Each day the sun’s zenith is a little lower and each day the sunset is a little earlier. And remember, the winter solstice is not until December 21 when the sun reaches its southernmost latitude and all this begins to reverse.
This low sun creates a different color palate for the sky, too. The grays of summer fog are gone. I, for one, don’t miss them. Replacing the gray is a soft, almost milky, blue. This particular blue seems to appear only at this time of the year and may be due to the lower sun providing a sort of sidelight. I don’t really know what brings about this particular blue, but it’s a sure sign of winter for me.
We are also beginning to see the breakdown of the consistent west-southwest wind that blows in the Golden Gate all summer. The combination of the Pacific high offshore and a thermal low in the Central Valley (caused by the hot air in the valley rising) has been drawing wind in the Golden Gate since last spring. The Central Valley is not as hot now, though, and the Pacific High is beginning to weaken. Both of these changes ease the flow of air in the Golden Gate. In addition, the weakening Pacific high allows storm fronts to approach the Bay Area. So far, only one of these passing fronts has been strong enough to bring us rain, but it is only a matter of time before we see more.
Even so, the fronts have caused some changes. First, the winds are now coming from other directions—from the south as the fronts approach and from the north as they depart. Secondly, the clouds have changed. The summer overcast (or as a friend once called it, the "stratus quo") is gone. Now we get to see the clouds associated with frontal passage—from the beautiful, wispy cirrus (often called "mare’s tails") that indicate an approaching warm front to the cumulonimbus clouds of a cold front that give us the rain. All of these say that winter is coming.
For more than a few years, two loons have spent their winter in and around the Berkeley Marina. They spent their summers in the northern U.S. and Canada, breeding and feeding on fish. To escape the effects of low winter temperatures and frozen lakes, loons migrate south. Because loons can live for 30 years in the wild and are thought to mate for life, it is probably the same pair returning to Berkeley each year. Sadly, last year, only one returned. Because the plumage of both sexes is the same, I couldn’t tell if it was the male or the female. A week ago, I spotted him (or her) for the first time this year. The loon’s arrival is yet another sign that winter is coming.
I suggest you take time to look around. The signs of the season are all about us. Get ready to enjoy the coming winter, with its own beauty and life lessons.
Ray Wichmann is a US SAILING-certified Ocean Passagemaking Instructor, a US SAILING Master Instructor Trainer, and a member of US SAILING’s National Faculty. He holds a 100-Ton Master’s License, was a charter skipper in Hawai’i for 15 years, and has sailed on both coasts of the United States, in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Greece. He is presently employed as the Master Instructor at OCSC Sailing in the Berkeley Marina.
