Harbor Queen

Started: 2024-07-07 20:11:07

Submitted: 2024-07-08 00:06:56

Visibility: World-readable

Observing the Fourth of July with ice cream and a fireworks cruise

I ended up on my own for the Fourth of July, so I made plans to spend the holiday in San Francisco, culminating in a cruise to see fireworks from a boat in San Francisco Bay. Kiesa departed on the evening of the third to pick up our kids after a week staying with my parents in Walla Walla. (She took a somewhat-circuitous route involving an overnight train to Portland, then renting a car to drive to Walla Walla before driving back to Portland to fly back to San Francisco.) My brother and his family stayed with us in Santa Cruz for a couple of days before departing on the morning of the fourth to drive to our parents' house. (I have complicated feelings about celebrating American nationalism on the week in which the Supreme Court declared that the former president has total immunity for all official acts as president, because I thought that no one was above the law; but I set that aside to observe the holiday anyway.)

I drove the long way up the peninsula, following highway 1 as it hugs the coast, rather than the much-larger interstate 280 on the other side of the mountains. Traffic through the city of Santa Cruz was light, but once the highway exited town I could see more people on the coast than normal. Every pull-out and parking lot for every beach along the highway were crowded with cars, from people escaping the heat inland on the mid-summer holiday. Most of the larger State Park beaches had the entrances to the parking lots blocked with signs saying the lot was full, and a park ranger on hand to divert anyone who tried to enter the crowded lot.

My first stop in San Francisco was Bi-Rite Creamery in the Mission, across the corner from Dolores Park. It was a bright sunny day in the Mission, and I expected that the line would be out the door and around the corner, but when I arrived the line was only half-way from the door to the corner. (By the time I left the shop with my ice cream, the line was all the way around the corner.) I spent a long time in line agonizing over the flavor choices, which took up most of my time in line. By the time I reached the front of the line I had decided on a waffle cup with peach cobbler, coffee toffee, and roasted banana. All of the flavors were delicious; the roasted banana was almost aggressively sweet.

I walked across the street into Dolores Park, which was pleasantly full with people sitting in the grass enjoying the sun. I picked a spot on the upper part of the lawn, with a view of the downtown skyline in the cloudless sky,

After eating my ice cream and lounging in the park, I walked north on Church Street to Verve Coffee, an outpost of my favorite Santa Cruz-based coffee shop which I hadn't previous visited. I got a cold-brew coffee then walked up Market Street into the Castro for an early supper at Super Duper. I decided to eat a burger (and garlic fries) in lieu of a proper Fourth of July cookout.

I caught MUNI inbound to Embarcadero, stopped by the Ferry Building, and headed north on foot towards Fisherman's Wharf. The sidewalk was crowded with people heading to fireworks (and, somewhat confusingly, people headed in the opposite direction, away from fireworks), but the foot traffic was moving much faster than the gridlocked car traffic trying to head the same direction. Vendors tried to sell food and drinks, including dubious-looking hot dogs cooking on griddles on the top of carts. Around Pier 35 northbound car traffic was diverted, while pedestrian traffic continued onward. I stepped into Pier 39 and saw a wall of fog heading eastward from the Golden Gate, blocking my view of the bridge and anything further than the middle of the bay.

I arrived with plenty of time before the 20:20 departure of my cruise. I wandered around the tourist shops, dodged street performers who had set up shop in the middle of the streets closed to vehicle traffic, and lined up to board my ferry at the Red and White Fleet dock at Pier 43 1/2.

My cruise ended up on the ferry Harbor Queen, with two passenger decks and wrap-around open-air seating on the upper deck. The lower level included tables set up with snacks included in the price of the cruise. I headed for the upper deck and sat on the bench facing the port side of the boat. It was still warm, though the air was noticeably cooler at sunset on the water next to the fog rolling in through the Golden Gate than it had been sitting on the lawn at Dolores Park earlier in the day. I kept an eye on the fog bank; the other passenger vessels on the water were mostly staying south of the fog but I watched a Coast Guard cutter cruise back and forth at the edge of the fog, disappearing and reappearing as I watched. While we were docked my view was dominated by the larger ferry at the adjacent dock, the larger plug-in hybrid-electric Enhydra.

We departed at 20:20 and cruised along the Embarcadero, heading south towards the Bay Bridge. The sun set just after we departed, and the lights began to come on in the buildings on both sides of the bay. We passed under the bridge and looped around on a sweeping arc and suddenly I was on the correct side of the boat to see a dramatic view of the San Francisco skyline, backlit by the twilight sky, the buildings barely distinguishable as dark silhouettes, with a flock of pelicans taking flight over the water to my right.

The ferry returned north, passing under the Bay Bridge again, bringing us closer to the city so I could make out individual buildings again, dominated by Salesforce Tower's sweeping lines reaching into the twilight sky, topped by an animated screen that displayed a moving pattern I couldn't quite make out.

I kept snapping pictures as we cruised further north, seeing new views of the city with every moment. A Panamanian-flagged bulk carrier cruised past in the opposite direction, heading towards the commercial docks in Oakland, standing out in the twilight in the middle of a flotilla of vessels carrying people onto the water to see the fireworks.

The sky grew darker as we cruised, as we approached the time the fireworks show would begin at 21:30. I could see informal fireworks all over the Mission (presumably stretching into Excelsior, where I could watch the informal show from my hillside perch at home in Ingleside when I lived in the city). The lights of the city grew brighter as the sky grew darker, and then the lights began to blur, as if I were viewing them through a soft-focus filter. I took this to mean that we had began to enter the edge of the fog bank, and that the lights of the city were beginning to fade behind the fog.

The show started right at 21:30, while we were still cruising to whatever viewing position had been selected for our boat. We were far enough away from the fireworks that I could easily see the whole display in the modest field of view provided by my fixed-focal-length 35mm f/1.8 lens, though I could also see that there were fireworks lower to the water that were difficult to see from our viewing position.

I brought my fastest lens for my Nikon DSLR with the hope that I might get some reasonable pictures of the fireworks. The lens worked well for the twilight portion of the cruise (especially when I remembered to choose aperture-priority to get the most light into the camera), but I had trouble finding the right settings to get a good shot for the fireworks themselves, especially because I was positioned on a moving boat without a tripod. Here the different strengths and weaknesses of my cameras became apparent: I have better optics on my DSLR, but better computational photography on my iPhone. My 10-year-old DSLR has a much larger sensor than my 2-year-old iPhone, but in terms of raw CCD quality I think they're similar.

I have never learned how to manually focus my entry-level Nikon DSLR, because I can't see clearly through the viewfinder with my glasses on to make fine focus adjustments, and the fold-out LCD isn't high enough resolution to see fine details in the field. So I tend to rely on autofocus for everything, which works fine almost all the time, except when I'm trying to take pictures in the sort of marginal conditions where I really want to take advantage of the larger lens and better optics of my DSLR. None of my lenses have focus distances marked on the focusing ring so it's difficult to even guess what's in focus.

After a few minutes of fireworks a new, more pressing problem emerged: We were cruising into the fog bank and the fireworks began to vanish. At first I could still see the outline of the fireworks through the clouds; then I could only see pops and flashes of color. Before long even the flashes of light disappeared, though I could still hear the pops and crackles and booms of the fireworks. "They sound great!" someone near me on the boat quipped, and I tried to imagine what the fireworks would look like based only on what I could hear. At times I thought I could even smell the sulfuric stench of the spent fireworks, a tantalizing thought that we were close enough to be downwind of the fireworks but we still couldn't see anything. I stood on the deck with the other passengers hoping to see something in the fog, but there was nothing to be seen, only the crescendo of the finale and then silence.

As soon as the show was over we began to cruise back to port. Almost immediately we broke out of the fog bank and I could see the lights of the city again, and the other boats heading into harbor after the show. In the dark on the water I could just make out the outline of a barge, attached to a tugboat, where the fireworks had been launched. (I even saw what looked like an open fire burning on the deck of the barge.) Here we were close enough to see the fireworks barge after the show, but we couldn't see the fireworks during the actual show. But the whole experience, cruising out on the water at dusk and seeing the city skyline (and struggling to see anything in the fog) was still memorable, and fog obscures the fireworks in San Francisco as often as not so it was a risk I had been willing to take.

We returned to the ferry dock at Pier 43 1/2 and disembarked onto streets crowded with people after the fireworks. I started walking towards Embarcadero Station, more than a mile away across the crowded streets.

Around Pier 35 I spotted a line of buses waiting in the median, occupying the trackway normally reserved for the F-line streetcars, and crossed the street (stepping between gridlocked traffic, now stuck trying to depart Fisherman's Wharf) to board the next bus. The bus moved slowly down the Embarcadero, but it had its own protected lane and was still faster than walking. I got off the bus at its last stop at the bottom of Market Street and descended into a very crowded BART station to catch the next train westbound to Daly City, then drove the rest of the way home to Santa Cruz, after a memorable Fourth of July on the water.

I took more pictures on the water on the Fourth of July at Photos on 2024-07-04.