With that boat I'd probably skip Berkeley and just do ARW, just avoid when the wind is up and the current is ripping (don't go right in the middle of a 5' tide swing).

If return/upgrade is an option, I would consider getting something out of the Advanced elements AdvancedFrame line, especially if you want to fish saltwater. The basic model is pricey on Amazon but I've gotten one for about $400. It's not as nice as a real boat but it tracks straighter and is a little more agile than other inflatables I've tried. That's saved me a few times from bad conditions.

Hey martianfish! Good to meet you this morning.

Now for the report: On the water at 9, high tide at 11. I was drifting the incoming tide on the far side of the big hole using my usual bucktail/gulp combo. One short (I didn't measure) around 945, two missed strikes shortly after. My group collectively missed another two strikes. I'm not sure what this means, there are definitely fish there. Maybe they're just all small? I suspect the bite was still on but the current turned and my drift died.  I was off the water by 1130.

Hah, I wish. It's closer to 40, just enough to be unwieldy for a single person. It's definitely not the ideal fishing platform, although I did originally build it with fishing in mind. The biggest struggle I have is with keeping a legal sized fine-mesh net secured to the rear deck. That and squeezing a large fish into the cockpit.

Thanks for the article, TLA, this is great stuff. The pattern of wind in the bay can be pretty intimidating for newer paddlers. I'd like to add a few notes of my own on wind and current, mostly a combination of my own experience trying to learn ARW and some excerpts from David Burch's Fundamentals of Kayak Navigation. I think they might help newer paddlers decide whether or not it's too hairy to go out.

One of the first things to remember is that the cruising speed of most kayaks is 3 to 4 knots. This means that on flat water, at a sustainable pace with moderate exertion, you can go somewhere between 3 to 4 miles per hour. This is dependent on your boat and mode of propulsion, mirage drives seem to land somewhere around 3.5 knots. The typical recreational kayak goes around 3 knots, an ocean touring kayak will be around 4. Your sprint speed will be somewhere just upwards of 5 knots.

Depending on your boat, it will take you 15 to 20 minutes in calm water to reach the gap in the rock wall, roughly 1 mile from launch:



It's a good idea to have a rough idea of how far you are from the ramp to decide whether or not you have enough gas in the tank to make it back in safely.

Factoring in Wind
The numbers above are based on perfectly calm conditions. When you add in wind, the calculus becomes trickier.

A 10kt wind will exert about 1 pound of force on a kayaker. The relationship of wind to force is not linear, as a 14kt wind will push with 2 pounds, and a 17kt wind pushes with 3 pounds. This doesn't sound like much, but it turns out that's about the same amount of force required to push you along at a speed of 3.5 knots. Sound familiar?

Actual circumstances vary, but this means a sustained 17 knot headwind can theoretically drop your speed to zero. In empirical observation, the actual drop is to about half your cruising speed but that's nothing to sneeze at. Remember our rock wall gap? That's now a 30 to 40 minute paddle.

Factoring in current
You can take current as a more or less additive force when you are moving directly with or against it. Fighting a 1kt current will drop your speed by one knot. Paddling with a 1kt current will increase your speed by the same.

In many spots in SF bay, including the ARW, the currents are harmonic with the tides. Slack current coincides with the top or bottom of the tide (give or take half an hour). Max current happens about 3 hours later. As far as direction, a high tide means current flows inwards from the ocean (read: the Golden Gate Bridge). Low pushes water out. Either way, it will generally hug the shoreline. Going back to the ARW example, the current should head west->east on a flood tide (low to high) and vice versa.



Checking NOAA predictions, we can see that this more or less tracks with the official Alameda current prediction station:



This means if you are fighting a 17 kt wind and a 1 kt current, your speed has now dropped to 0.5-1 kt. The gap is somewhere between one to two hours away from the ramp.

A Real World Example
I went out July 4th, on the water around 11AM, caught my butt, then tried to paddle back in around 1240PM from the flagpole. That's a little under a third of a mile, or a 6 minute paddle on flat water.



The wind was blowing almost directly from the west at ~10kt. Being so close to shore, I kept having to turn directly into the wind to stay on course. Let's say I lost half a knot to it.



I was on the tail end of a flood tide of 0.7kt. One hour after peak current, the actual current will be 90% of the peak. Two hours after, 50%. At 1230PM, current would have been around ~0.5kt.



Because I'm a dummy and didn't have a plan for bringing in the fish, I dragged it behind me on a stringer. Keeping our estimates round, the spinning flatfish brings me to maybe 1kt of speed loss even, down from 3kt to 2kt. A 6 minute paddle has turned into a 9 minute paddle. In reality, it took me a little over 10 minutes because I kept course correcting, and any time I stopped to catch my breath I just lost progress. I was tired but safe when I landed, but if I was trying to paddle in from Bay Farm? That's a recipe for a bad time.

Post-nap addendum, 2019-07-11
After sleeping on it, one thing that bothered me was that I remember really struggling during the paddle back, but I couldn't justify that with the recorded numbers. However, I do distinctly remember glancing at Navionics when I stopped paddling and seeing a backwards drift of up to 2.2 knots, so what gives? Where did the extra 1.2 come from? At that point, the wind was probably a 4 on the Beaufort and hadn't quite kicked up to 5. (Beaufort is less reliable when wind and current are in line with each other so perhaps that was part of it.)

There's a few possibilities. One is that current hugging the shoreline will be stronger than current further out as the volume of moving water stays roughly the same but the space to move it through decreases as the bottom rises. Another possibility is that the shoreline around Ballena shows a sounding of ~2ft. For reasons I don't quite understand, paddling is harder in shallow water. https://paddlemonster.com/2018/07/is-shallow-water-slower-than-deep-water-a-forum-discussion/. That may have made things worse. Lastly, the current prediction station from the NOAA is a subordinate station, meaning it's not measured but derived from another station located at the mouth of the bay. Not only that, the measurement is predicted further offshore and as I've said before, current is highly localized (how many times have you paddled around a corner just to get to calmer waters?). Perhaps the extra knot came blasting out of a back-eddy from the channel around Ballena. The takeaway here is that you should use these numbers to help establish a baseline for your paddling/pedaling skills, but take the time to study your waters for local phenomenon. Be extra diligent if you're entering water at the top end of what you're comfortable with.

Post-shower addendum, one hour later
I'm still not happy with the above explanation, but I think I have it. The wind was going ~10kt from the west, or pushing with 1 pound of force. Per the chart from the book, this wind would have been pushing me east somewhere just shy of 2kt which puts us back in the correct ballpark range.



Due to the non-linear relationship here, you'd have to be very close to sprinting just to maintain an average speed. If you were just 'pressing hard', you would still be moving slow. SCIENCE!

Using these numbers
The main thing to note here is that you should plan your trip such that you won't be fighting both the wind and current at the same time on your return trip. Since this is a fishing forum and not a math forum, here are some rules of thumb for paddling in the bay:

• Check the current prediction before going out! This might be more important from a safety perspective than just straight tide predictions. It's a little hard to find, but https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/map/index.html can give you current estimates if you select Advanced and choose 'Current Predictions' under 'Data Type'. If you're somehow too lazy to do that, at least remember that the current increases with the tidal coefficient. A delta of 6 feet will give you a strong current, 2 feet will be a weak current. Current is also very much a localized phenomenon and can change from area to area so you should check it in multiple spots. It will almost always be strongest halfway between the tide changes.
• Check the wind before going out, but know how to read the water.  The Beaufort scale gives you a way of estimating current wind speed based on the appearance of the water. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale. A 4 shouldn't be too much of a problem for strong paddlers, but a 5 will probably ruin your day. During the summer, wind in the bay is primarily driven by a persistent offshore high pressure system. As the central valley warms up and drops in pressure, wind sweeps in directly from the west. This predictably happens around noon on most days.
• Verify predicted data. There is a difference on the NOAA site between stations that have actual recorded data vs numbers deduced from tidal harmonics. Know how to tell which is which. Use webcam data where it exists. The Cal Sailing Club has a webcam trained on a windsock in Berkeley's south sailing basin. http://cal-sailing.appspot.com/wind
• Doubling down on TLA's statement, Berkeley is unpredictable nonsense. It's fully open to wind and current from the Golden Gate and it feels like it kinda sucks all day long. The wind seems to pick up earlier there than other places, but then it also seems to die around 1pm before coming back with a vengeance. If someone else can diagnose Berkeley's patterns, I'd be glad to hear it.

No, that's still too complicated, make it simpler
Fine. Get on the water 3 hours before high or low tide. If you're fishing north of where you launch, go out on an ebb (high to low) tide. South, go on a flood tide. Try to get back to launch within two hours after the tide change. Get off the water before noon.

Anyone else on the forum do things the old-fashioned way? I was thinking we could have a running thread of advice for those of us who like to keep things a little traditional. Maybe if folks have tips for identifying bottom structure or even navigational aids sans-GPS (although I admit I probably will not give up my Navionics), it would be cool to share.

The leader was 25 lb test fluoro, I thought it would be beefy enough to handle a dropper loop. But one rig had a teaser tied on with a Palomar and that fell apart.

The ones I brought to the surface were all on the teaser, and one of the rigs I lost, the teaser broke off but the bucktail was fine.

I hear you about the trebles, I just use wide mouth J hooks. It's too much of a hassle if you have to let the fish go.

I mentioned this in another thread, but have you considered switching up your battery to a LiPo (or LiFePo4 if you could find one)? They're smaller and lighter for the same capacity. At 2 pounds for 10AH, you could tack down your battery box with some light Velcro.

I was fishing on the Santa Cruz wharf (non-yak) and there is currently a massive cloud of bait fish surrounding the whole thing. Everyone on the pier was throwing sabikis but the fish couldn't run away fast enough. Even the guy with the cast net was having trouble bringing any up. All morning, it seemed like the only action came from snags.

Around ~230pm things changed a little (halfway from low to high tide). More anchovies were coming up on the sabiki but weirdly enough it was still mostly snags. Still, water clarity was good enough to see thousands of fish straight up ignoring my offerings.

What's the right thing to do here tactically? If you were in a kayak, would you just go somewhere else to find a new bait school? Do you snag and pray? Throw something else in front of the bait?

Presumably there are halibut and stripers hunting around nearby for an easy meal although I didn't see any brought up. What would you do to target them under such a big cloud of bait?