(August 2013) Of all the places to cruise in Galveston Bay this one intrigued me the most. Off the beaten path, tricky to get to, the promise of cheap but quality dockage. Sort of the Shangri-La of the swamp? So for our second real outing in Word Play we pointed her bow east, trimmed for a close reach and made wake for the metropolis of Oak Island.
Word Play sleeps at Watergate Marina in Clear Lake so taking a trip to Oak Island and the Double Bayou required a sail across a wide swath of the Galveston / Trinity Bay basin including crossing the Ship Channel. Past dredging of the Houston Ship Channel has produced a spoil bank along its east side. The depth of this seems to vary considerably due to underwater erosion and the likes and I have seen sailboats sailing over it seeming unaffected. Still, given that my depth sounder gives me about .0001 seconds of advance notice of shoaling ahead, at any sort of reasonable speed, and given that I worry like an old lady, I always chose to stay in the marked cuts through the spoil bank. You have a few choices for cutting across the Houston Ship Channel in this regard. The two most useful, if you are coming out of the clear lake channel, are the "north" and "south" boaters cuts. These are marked and maintained channels north and south of the spoil island that is being slowly created in the middle of the bay. The wind and your course generally dictates one cut over the other. Because of an east wind, the south cut made sense this day because it put us at a better angle for the longer leg of the trip. See NOAA chart 11327 for these cuts.
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| Both cuts are shown here along with the insane number of hazards and navaids that exist in this area. |
So having set a course, the kids, the first officer and the dog all settled in for a slow boat to the swamp. After just exiting the south boaters cut we found ourselves in the middle of a regatta. Not being familiar with any local racing I thought all the boats off to my starboard were just sailing around. Then they all began to gybe around a power boat and headed straight for us, lol. So I ended up having to turn on the engine and motor sail to get out of their way. We flew by the photography boat under sail and motor while they were shooting pictures of us! I felt like that scene in Marry Poppins when she, the kids and Dick Van Dyke all get on those merry go round horses and accidentally end up in a derby and win it, haha. I was mortified that I screwed up something in the race but since we don't have the boat's name painted on it yet I guess no one will really know who we were. After that little bit of excitement we continued on to the outer markers for the Double Bayou channel.
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| Google Earth has an aerial view where you actually can see the channel. You can see how it dog legs to the left; that's at marker 12 which is to small to see in this picture. If you stay between the marker behind you and the boat house on the north side of the bayou in your front, you should be lined up in the channel. |
Unquestionably the hardest part of a Double Bayou trip is the sketchy channel. I believe that the last time it was dredged approximately coincided with when my wife last cooked dinner. It's actually pretty well defined right up to the last official marker, Red 12, then you are on your own. Even so, once I got to two or three markers out from 12 I furled the sails and motored the boat at about 2 knots. My thinking was that I probably
was going to go aground trying to hunt and peck my way in, and if/when I did, I wanted it to be carrying as little energy as possible so I could back my way off. I had Jessica, my wife, in the bow trying to scout the bottom which is an exercise in futility in Galveston Bay at the best of times. The water seemed to be darker where I thought the channel was and more muddy where it was shallow, or so I thought. Right after marker 12 I had Jessica telling me to go straight ahead because it looked like clear water there. So at about a knot and a half I proceeded as directed and watched as the depth sounder blipped 7.2ft then 6.9ft and then 2ft as I grounded the boat for the first time. The bottom is thick mud so the keel just plopped right in. I immediately backed us out and tried a slightly different route and proceeded to ground for the second time. Because I was only going about a knot it was easy to back off again. Then the five functioning neurons that survived my college days got with the program and I realized that the areas that were brown and looked like shallow water were actually the channel! There is a lot of power boat and barge traffic that use this area and when they come in and out of the channel, they agitate up silt from the bottom. The clear areas that look dark and deep are actually the areas that don't get boat traffic because they are shallow! So having figured that out we made a left turn and pointed our nose to the boat house in the distance and headed in, again at about one and a half knots, with my heart at about 200 bpm and my butt cheeks clenched so hard that, had there been coal in there, it would have turned to diamonds. As it turns out, making a left from marker Red 12 and pointing towards the boat house was perfect and we had over 7' of water under the hull the whole time. Now I should say that before I went in to the channel out in Trinity Bay that I turned on the tracking function in my chart plotter. This proved very useful because once I got in all I had to do was follow the same track (minus all the shenanigans that got me grounded) to get back out.
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| Oak Island community docks. Don't forget your fenders! |
Once you get into the bayou itself there is plenty of depth. For this trip we intended to stay at the
town marina. Another option that is popular is to take the right fork in the bayou and motor back into the scrub land and tie off to the shore and relax in solitude. So having found the town docks I attempted to bring the boat in stern first like how we dock at our home marina. This provided immeasurable entertainment to a number of people nearby fishing since a) I am terrible at this and b) the water was too shallow to get my rudders back more than about half way to the bulkhead. In fact in the process of her trying to fend us off the dock at a weird angle Jessica lost her balance and barely hung onto the dock as I floated away. This event alone, I believe, has guaranteed that I will spend my golden years in a nursing home rather than being lovingly taken care of by my wife. After taking a moment to hide all the accessible items on the boat that could be used as a weapon against me, I docked bow first and Jessica re-boarded.
After tying off you pay the overnight fee (a bargain at $35) to the little market east of the docks. I did that while Jessica took the kids to play at the playground in the adjacent park. Later we all went to eat at The Hurricane Club, a little greasy spoon type of joint near the aforementioned market. They had a good selection of local sea food and for someone who loves anything fried, I was in heaven. It was a fun little spot and everyone was nice as can be, even though we had two tired kids going nuts in there.
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| You're darn right! |
All in all we found Oak Island and Double Bayou a charming little spot to spend an evening. The next day I used the the reverse route from coming in with no incident. 7' of water the whole time. Then an easy sail across the bay and more marriage testing docking maneuvers and we were home!
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| Homeward bound. |
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Once you get into the bayou itself there is plenty of depth. For this trip we intended to stay at the town marina. Another option that is popular is to take the right fork in the bayou and motor back into the scrub land and tie off to the shore and relax in solitude. So having found the town docks I attempted to bring the boat in stern first like how we dock at our home marina. This provided immeasurable entertainment to a number of people nearby fishing since a) I am terrible at this and b) the water was too shallow to get my rudders back more than about half way to the bulkhead. In fact in the process of her trying to fend us off the dock at a weird angle Jessica lost her balance and barely hung onto the dock as I floated away. This event alone, I believe, has guaranteed that I will spend my golden years in a nursing home rather than being lovingly taken care of by my wife. After taking a moment to hide all the accessible items on the boat that could be used as a weapon against me, I docked bow first and Jessica re-boarded.
