Our oldest daughter had a three day weekend coming up which is kind of a big deal now. She's in a new kindergarten and apparently it is frowned upon (I hope you can see me rolling my eyes because I'm doing it as hard as I can) if we take her out of school every Friday for sailing, or as I call it, therapy. And those shrewd rapscallions so far haven't bought on my explanation that my daughter has Count Choculitis and requires periodic Fridays to recuperate. For several weeks now we had planned to try to do a two night stay, destination cruise in our boat Word Play. The question was where. Jessica and I had scouted a little restaurant/marina over on the Intracoastal Waterway side of Crystal Beach called Stingaree but the weather forecast for that weekend was a little dodgy and certainly wasn't going to be beach weather so we defaulted to Jessica's choice: "Whatever is the most expensive weekend sail destination, let's do that." I jest of course; we chose a nature conservancy / entertainment venue called Moody Gardens. When making the reservation I was pleasantly surprised to find that the rate of $2.25 per foot of boat length covered two nights. This is essentially buy one get one free.
You had me at free.
So it was off we go. We actually stayed the night on the boat Friday so that we could leave early in the morning and hopefully have some of the day left at our destination after the five hours in transit I was forecasting. When I woke up and went outside, the air seemed thick and heavy. Looking southwest you could already see build ups forming off shore:
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| What's that saying, "red sky in morning, sailor has a good sail"? |
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| Oh wait, that's not it. |
Leaving the Kemah channel it was dead calm on the Bay. Everything was a sort of purple / red out and it was really quiet, which I found eerie. And as soon as I pointed the boat to the heading that would take us to the ship channel and onward to Galveston, this was in our way:
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| Of course it was. |
Shortly thereafter the wind kicked up to about 30 knots right on the nose which continues our unbroken streak of having head winds on our journey. It turned out to be a pretty good little storm cell although we only got a glancing blow since I was able to do a little southing to get around it. Looking down in the cabin all the girls were down there in their shirt sleeves playing games. Meanwhile I've got on my offshore life vest and other accouterments, looking like the fisherman on the Gorton's fish sticks box, getting a complimentary power washing of my face. On the bright side, I counted that as my weekly bath. Fortunately that ended up being the only real build up we had to contend with. A sort of path opened up right where we needed to go and the sun even came out.
Our course took us southwest to merge into the ship channel. The way south, out of the bay, is crowded with oyster reefs, shoals, platforms and gas wells. The only non bowel clenching way to navigate this, if you are in a sailboat of moderate draft or worse, is to take the ship channel. That sort of brings its own set of issues though, given that you're sharing the road with vessels who carry a life boat longer than you are and who probably can't even idle as slow as my max speed. All this culminates at
the confluence of the Intracoastal Waterway, the Houston Ship Channel, the Trinity River Channel and the Texas City Channel. Two out of these are in the top 5 of busiest waterways in the USA. In reality it probably wasn't that bad. The large impression it left on me was likely due to the fact that I was a relative greenhorn at navigating and communicating with a large amount of commercial traffic. I sort of found it akin to a situation where approach control for Houston airspace was handled via unicom, for those of you reading that are aviation inclined.Our route took us up a short section of the Intracoastal Waterway which was relatively straightforward other than figuring out the hard way that barge traffic is much more accommodating on VHF 13 rather than 16. A left turn after the causeway bridge and we were in the Offatts Bayou Channel. Why is it called Offatts? I heard a story that when Galveston first had rail service there was a stop at the bayou so Off At the Bayou became Offatts. I like that better then the one about the guy named Offatt who settled there so I choose not to propagate the latter. Ok, so here is the part where I talk about almost
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| Word Play at the Moody Gardens marina. |
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| I told them not to cut those tags off the mattresses. |
Going home was a beautiful broad reach in light to moderate winds. A great end to a great trip.
