II. Down to the Sea
Sacramento: Navigation in the Vineyards
There is a great deal more to the San Francisco Bay area than the Golden Gate Bridge and the waters around Alcatraz Island. Modern shipping favours the eastern side of the bay, with container ports in Oakland and oil products passing in and out of the Richmond Long Wharf and the piers around Benicia. But even beyond these there are two river ports. Both are accessed through the northern reaches of San Francisco Bay to San Pablo Bay, the Carquinez Strait and the Suisun Bay, famous for the rafted military sea lift vessels stored there. A broad flat piece of geography surrounding the northeastern end of these bays, is the delta of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. Eighty miles east of the Golden Gate, ships traveling up the San Joaquin River reach Stockton.
Sacramento maintains a port that is reached through the estuary and a man-made canal running northeast from the Bay through some of the best farmland and vineyards in the state. From Sacramento down to the Golden Gate Bridge is 85 miles. All of this and another 12 miles out to sea of the Golden Gate is required-pilotage waters. The San Francisco Bar Pilots board ships departing Sacramento at the dockside. While there are some 60 pilots in the organization, it is usual to have about 12 of them maintain “recency” for the rivers and their ports at any given time. This requires at least one trip up and down every three months. Of the 12, generally half are active for both rivers while the other half will have one river or the other.
Captain Larry Teague is a San Francisco Bar Pilot who maintains a recency for the Port of Sacramento. On the last day of August 2004 he was assigned to take the 29,152-ton-deadweight ship General Villa from Sacramento down the 22- miles of man-made ship channel and through the delta to a point in the entrance to Suisn Bay. There, he would hand her off to another Bar Pilot who would then take her out to sea. Since the total ninety plus miles would, at slow speeds, take more than 12 hours, two pilots were required for the transit. Unlike some coastal areas in the world, they didn’t have to both ride at the same time. The General Villa was a regular caller at the Port of Sacramento and Teague was familiar with her. He had brought her in several days earlier. She was in port several days longer than scheduled due to some storm damage to a hatch cargo of particleboard from New Zealand. Her master, Captain Dominator Bonifacio of Pampanga in the Philippines, had visited with relatives in Sacramento during the layover but was now anxious to get back on schedule. Capt. Bonifacio’s commanding presence on the bridge combines with his name to indicate that he is, as he confirmed, a descendant of the great nineteenth century Philippine freedom fighter Andres Bonifacio.
The 573-foot ship is equipped with cargo derricks that extend out to the bulwarks at a level just below the sight line of the bridge, so that visibility forward is restricted. As a result the ship is required to clear the Port of Sacramento and move down to Suisun Bay in daylight. On August 31 that meant that the ship should be changing pilots by about 20:00, which meant departing Sacramento by 14:30. With the assistance of a conventional tug and the ship’s 1000 HP bow thruster, Capt. Teague had all lines away and the ship turned in the turning basin by 14:45. Fifteen minutes later she had swung around over 90 degrees and the tug was released. Capt. Teague directed the helmsman to hold the rudder mid-ships, then as the ship steadied up in the channel he began directing the helmsman through the first turn.
As the ship entered the channel, Teague directed the helmsman by compass course “… 256, 255, 252, 250, 249, 247, 246, 245-degree …” each instruction given at three-minute intervals. Then, asking the mate, first for Dead Slow ahead then Slow ahead, he proceeded with further slight course adjustments to maintain a position in the centre of the chip channel. Two degrees at a time he had the helmsman swing gently from 244 to 234 degrees. Once well into the channel, Capt. Teague asked for Full ahead, which still only gave the ship about 7.5 knots of speed in that particular depth. Given the varied depths in the channel, he moved the speeds up and down to minimize the squat effect in the shallower channel sections. Too much RPM could suck the water from under the boat and also starve the propeller of water, resulting in inefficiencies. At one point in the channel, with the engine room telegraph set on half-speed, the ship was making only 5.2 knots. “At this point,” explained Capt. Teague, “going to full speed would only gain one to two tenth of a knot and the ship would go ‘squirrelly’ as there is no place for the water to go ahead of the ship and there would be poor flow over the prop.”
The channel is maintained to a width of 300 feet bank to bank but has only a 200-foot bottom width. While depths over the channel vary slightly up to 32.6 feet in the turning basin, the controlling depth is 28 feet. The relatively shallow channel depth combines with some overhead wires and a lift bridge with a 135-foot clearance to present some particular challenges to a ship like the General Villa. Her air-draft is such that when cargo is discharged in Sacramento she must take on ballast to maintain an air-draft of less than 132 feet without encroaching on the 28-foot controlling depth of the waterway. To add complexity to this, there can be five or six feet of tidal effect in the channel. These are the variables that the pilot and captain discuss in detail before the ship leaves the dock.
Once in the channel it becomes a matter of keeping the ship between the banks. Given the tendency of near banks to push the bow off and suck the stern in, the pilot needs good visibility to make a safe transit. If fog comes in while a ship is halfway through the channel, the pilot can set the anchor and wait for improved conditions. With clear daylight the pilot watches that water is being sucked off both banks equally by the ship’s passage. At the same time it is essential to keep an eye out for swimmers playing in the shallow waters along the bank. At one point on this transit, a truck driver had left a hot dusty construction job to wade up to his knees in the cooling waters along the shore of the channel. Seeing him from some distance, Teague, who had the ship at Full ahead, asked the mate for half-speed and then Slow ahead. But still the man watched incredulously as the General Villa came abeam of him, sucking the water dry, leaving him standing on a mud bank, and then flooded it back around his legs in passing.
Pleasure boats do show up in the channel, but its long straight stretches are not ideal scenery for most of them. Other ships are not permitted to enter up-bound when another ship is down-bound. At one point the levee has been bent out several hundred feet into the fields as part of a plan to create a lay-by for passing ships. But it was never dredged and, with light traffic projections for Sacramento, it is not likely that this will happen. “Most of us are just as glad that it never did materialize,” observed Capt. Teague.
At 16:00 the channel, which had been proceeding in a straight line, made a 20-degree turn to starboard. Capt. Teague had asked the mate to slow down coming into the turn but he added RPM once in the turn to increase the water flow over the rudder. Then he put the bow of the ship closer to the port side bank to create a cushion effect. At the same time he asked for several degrees of turn on the rudder. The ship’s head began her swing and then steadied up on the new course as the bank cushion lessened and the rudder was brought back to amidships. As the ship came up on her new course, the pilot walked from bridge wing to bridge wing in order to see around the ship’s gantries and to check his mid-channel course on a set of ranges astern.
At 18:23 the pilot called ahead to the Rio Vista lift bridge to give the operator advance notice of the required lift. As the ship entered Cache Slough at the end of the ship channel, the vineyards and orchards had given way to cattle operations then to rice paddies and finally to swamp lands. With the ship traveling over this flat farmland the roll meter on the bulkhead hung at the perpendicular. It was hard to imagine the ship in the 35-degree rolls that had caused her cargo damage at sea. It was at this point that significant current could come on the ship’s starboard side from freshet or ebb tidal out flows from the slough. At the same time, a ship must make a swing to port or follow the dredged channel. Capt. Teague asked the mate to go back up to half speed from slow ahead in order to have increased headway to handle the current and the turn. In the late evening California sunlight the landscape took on a warm yellow glow, but the crew on the bridge kept their eyes and minds on the steady course of the ship.
At 19:05, with the tide just past high water, the General Villa passed under the raised Rio Vista Bridge. The bridge clearance is 141 feet and the ships air draft is 138.05 feet. With her topmast folded flat she had an air draft of 130 feet so there were several feet to spare. Minutes later, the contact was made with the pilot boat out of Pittsburgh, California. Still later, Captain Larry Teague greeted his relief who had come out on the pilot boat and climbed to the bridge. He put on his life jacket, shook hands with Capt. Bonifacio and went down to the pilot boat. The General Villa headed on down to San Francisco Bay. Later she would pass out through the Golden Gate, drop her San Francisco Bar Pilot at the station boat and set course for the Columbia River where she would pick up another pilot.
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