There is never lack of exercise in small-boat sailing, and the hard work is not only part of the fun of it, but it beats the doctors.  San Francisco Bay is no mill pond.  It is a large and draughty and variegated piece of water.  I remember, one winter evening, trying to enter the mouth of the Sacramento.  There was a freshet on the river, the flood tide from the bay had been beaten back into a strong ebb, and the lusty west wind died down with the sun.  It was just sunset, and with a fair to middling breeze, dead aft, we stood still in the rapid current.  We were squarely in the mouth of the river; but there was no anchorage and we drifted backward, faster and faster, and dropped anchor outside as the last breath of wind left us.  The night came on, beautiful and warm and starry.  My one companion cooked supper, while on deck I put everything in shape Bristol fashion.  When we turned in at nine o’clock the weather-promise was excellent. (If I had carried a barometer I’d have known better.) By two in the morning our shrouds were thrumming in a piping breeze, and I got up and gave her more scope on her hawser.  Inside another hour there was no doubt that we were in for a southeaster.

It is not nice to leave a warm bed and get out of a bad anchorage in a black blowy night, but we arose to the occasion, put in two reefs, and started to heave up.  The winch was old, and the strain of the jumping head sea was too much for it.  With the winch out of commission, it was impossible to heave up by hand.  We knew, because we tried it and slaughtered our hands.  Now a sailor hates to lose an anchor.  It is a matter of pride.  Of course, we could have buoyed ours and slipped it.  Instead, however, I gave her still more hawser, veered her, and dropped the second anchor.

There was little sleep after that, for first one and then the other of us would be rolled out of our bunks.  The increasing size of the seas told us we were dragging, and when we struck the scoured channel we could tell by the feel of it that our two anchors were fairly skating across.  It was a deep channel, the farther edge of it rising steeply like the wall of a canyon, and when our anchors started up that wall they hit in and held.

Yet, when we fetched up, through the darkness we could hear the seas breaking on the solid shore astern, and so near was it that we shortened the skiff’s painter.

Daylight showed us that between the stern of the skiff and destruction was no more than a score of feet.  And how it did blow!  There were times, in the gusts, when the wind must have approached a velocity of seventy or eighty miles an hour.  But the anchors held, and so nobly that our final anxiety was that the for’ard bitts would be jerked clean out of the boat.  All day the sloop alternately ducked her nose under and sat down on her stern; and it was not till late afternoon that the storm broke in one last and worst mad gust.  For a full five