Gulf passage

I am typing into a text file under way in the Gulf of Mexico. We are having a decent cruise, if not the most comfortable ride, in very pleasant weather. Things got off to a somewhat rocky start, but seas have settled quite a bit. We are a bit more than 2/3 through our planned route, and the display says another 11-12 hours.


Last night's sunset into the clouds over the gulf.

As I wrote in my last post, this is our first time in open water since leaving the Gulf back in June of last year, for the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, between St. Marks and Carabelle, Florida. It's also our first overnight passage since the scramble to St. Marks from St. Pete in anticipation of Tropical Storm Colin. I hadn't really thought about it, but in the interceding year we've made four significant changes that had an impact on passage.

• We upgraded the radar displays to slightly more modern and capable units.
• We installed additional air conditioners in the pilothouse and master stateroom that can run from the inverter under way.
• We eliminated our Spot tracking device and service in favor of already-paid-for time on our Iridium Go satellite device.
• We added AT&T cellular Internet to our portfolio in the form of a ZTE Mobley connected-car device.

In a moment, I will share how each of those factors affected our passage.


Departing South Padre in the pre-dawn hour.

Yesterday morning's post was a little rushed. The last-minute decision for an early departure left me no time Monday night, and yesterday morning we were very busy getting under way and then dogging everything down. As I wrote, we had quite some pitching once we were out the inlet, and with water spraying over the bow we needed to dog all the portlights as well as all the lockers and drawers.


Heading out the Brazos Santiago inlet. The calm between the jetties belies the seas of the gulf.

One thing we learned yesterday is that the new latches we installed on the Portuguese bridge lockers are not up to the challenge; the pitching motion had the locker doors exerting way to much force on the diminutive hasps; we'll need to add some "at sea" latches to the doors. I ended up duct-taping them shut to keep the force on the latches to a minimum.

I've previously written here about what we normally do to prepare the boat for an open water passage. With all the motion yesterday morning we opted to also add the rarely-used aft tie-downs to the dinghy and the scooters. In addition to all the running around securing things on the boat, I managed to snap a few photos as we left the inlet and of South Padre behind us gleaming in the sunrise.


South Padre astern in the morning sun.

Notwithstanding our preparations, we did have one casualty of the pitching. I've been using Navionics charts on our iPad Mini as a backup, with more detailed soundings, to our main plotters. I purchased these charts last year to do the rivers. I don't have a good mount for the iPad and it just sits atop the helm; more than once it's lept off, making a number of dents in our woodwork when it lands. Yesterday it managed to hit a circuit breaker on its way down, breaking the handle off.


Oops. I'll have to disassemble most of this panel to replace this.

It was all I could do to crank out what I posted before we lost our Internet signal for good. Importantly, I wanted to post the URL for our Twitter page so folks could follow the sat phone updates. Our Iridium Go satellite device does have an automated "tracking" feature similar to the one we had with our older Spot tracker, however neither Iridium nor our reseller provides a useful tracking map the way Spot does. The tracking messages can only be sent as SMS or email.


Previous hard landings.

Since the tracking messages, built in to the device, are poorly formatted and reference a map site that no longer exists, I opted to generate my own messages manually and SMS them to Twitter. It does mean I need to remember to do it. I stow the Iridium between sessions, and I also download the latest weather when I set it up. I'm still hunting around for a site that can automate more of the process; this is one of those changes I mentioned from a year ago.

Speaking of Internet access, another of the changes I mentioned is our acquisition of a ZTE Mobley hot spot, meant to be installed in a car, and a truly unlimited 4G data plan to go with it from AT&T. While our Sprint, T-Mobile, and even Verizon devices have had sporadic coverage in SE Texas, the AT&T has kept us solidly on line in some pretty remote places; we were out of coverage for only a few miles of the ICW behind Padre Island. I was similarly impressed that it kept us online nearly 14 miles offshore yesterday, when everything else aboard had quit. I'm hoping that will persist today and we might get online when we are abreast of Freeport.

Update: We've just passed Freeport, about a dozen miles offshore, and we were, indeed, online, albeit briefly. Just long enough to load the weather forecast for the gulf waters and send out a couple of quick updates, including one right here on the blog. So by now you know that we are diverting east to the Calcasieu River, adding about 70 nautical miles to our journey and putting us in tomorrow morning sometime.

I've put a couple of jogs in the route to bring us 11 miles offshore of Galveston, so I am hoping we will again have a few minutes of coverage. Then I can upload this post and maybe squeak a few more emails in and out. I just barely managed to crank out the update to our float plan, emailed ahead of each passage to our emergency contacts listed with the Coast Guard.


Yesterday morning's sunrise. Hard to tell how big these rollers are in the photo.

Consistent with the forecast, the seas did eventually get a bit calmer after I posted yesterday. The cat's been pretty miserable, but the humans have managed OK, so long as we remember to keep "one hand for the boat." It's never been flat calm, but the pitching motion has become much more comfortable. Louise made a nice dinner of stewed skirt steak, which we ate in the pilothouse with the one light beer we allow ourselves in such circumstances. We both managed to sleep pretty comfortably off watch.

Part of the comfort factor is undeniably the new air conditoners. Under way, the main engine alternator can supply enough juice to run both of them, which has kept us comfortable throughout the day in the pilothouse but also greatly increased our sleep comfort belowdecks. In the past, on a passage such as this one, it was not uncommon for us to sleep off-watch on the flybridge, spreading the settee cushions out on the deck.

We were a little surprised by the desolation of this part of the gulf. It's not uncommon on a typical overnight passage for us to see several dozen vessels, from small fishing boats to enormous container ships. Last night I saw but two -- a large trawler that we came within a few miles of, and a tanker headed in to Corpus many miles away that I only saw courtesy of AIS.

That brings me to the final change I mentioned, the new radar set. I was surprised to come within a few miles of the trawler, who was also on AIS, and never see a radar return. I did see returns from some oil platforms we passed closer aboard, and the radar has been working fine in inland waters. Louise reported no targets at all during her watch.

This morning after I came back to the helm I fiddled with the radar some. I had a giant ship on AIS about ten miles out, and a small offshore platform at around five miles, neither of which was giving a good return. It turns out our 48-mile radar has been effective only out to around four miles. It turned out to be a tuning problem, and after rebooting in installation mode and fiddling with the tuning for a bit, it's all working normally now.

This last item is a fairly cautionary tale. We replaced the radar in Chattanooga, in inland waters, and all the setup and testing was normal, with no issues showing. I keyed in all the same user settings from the old units and then more or less forgot about it, other than enjoying the new features such as AIS integration. We simply assumed it would continue working, offshore, as well as our old one.

While we were never in any danger -- it was working fine out to four miles, which is a quarter of an hour for even a fast ship to close -- we're accustomed to having situational awareness and ARPA tracking out to well over a dozen miles (the distance to the horizon from our radar antenna). I'm glad we were able to resolve it at sea, especially now that we are adding another overnight to our trip.

Now that we've made our turn onto our new course, the display is estimating arrival after 9am. Once we're in the river we can decide if we want to anchor at the closest spot, or maybe continue upriver to the casino resort we enjoyed so much in the other direction.

Diverting to LA

Just a very quick update here, as our Internet access is spotty and might drop out at any moment.

Our weather window has extended well into tomorrow. We're seizing it, and even though we have just 40 nautical miles left to Bolivar Roads near Galveston, we are instead turning east and heading for the Calcasieu River in Louisiana.

We would have arrived near Galveston around 9:30pm this evening; instead we will now arrive at an anchorage in the Calcasieu River sometime tomorrow morning between 10am and noon.

I hope to have some sporadic Internet coverage between now and then, but if not I will continue to post our status to Vector's Twitter account. I have a more complete blog post in progress, and if I get enough coverage later today I will try to upload it.

We're in the Gulf of Mexico!

I am typing under way in the Gulf of Mexico, scrambling to get this posted before we run out of cell coverage. This is our first time in the gulf since early June of last year, just a week shy of a year ago. We are pitching up and down over four foot rollers, the best it will get. In some 38 hours, if all goes well, we should reach Galveston Bay.


A lovely view of Vector at anchor in the calm water inside South Padre.

Early yesterday morning, just a few hours after my last post, an enormous thunderstorm blew through our anchorage at 45 mph. We knew it was coming and had dogged everything ahead of time, but we manned the anchor watch when it arrived at 3am. It was quite spectacular and gave the boat a good rinse. Ironically, the storm shifted the winds around to a lower fetch, and we had the calmest water all night for a few hours.

We awoke yesterday to mostly the same conditions in which we had anchored, with 25-knot winds and 2-3' whitecaps on the bay. We got under way early so we could get the stabilizers going. But in a couple of hours the winds had dropped to 15 or so and the waves laid down, and we had a comfortable ride the rest of the day.

Even with the holiday weekend, we did not see another boat all night, and that persisted right up until we crossed the Mansfield Channel, where we passed a couple of small boats heading from the harbor to the gulf.

We've not seen a towboat or any commercial traffic since turning into the ICW at North Padre Island. But about mid-day we passed the Arroyo Colorado, which serves the inland port of Harlingen and passes through Rio Hondo. This is dredged for tow traffic, and our display showed a few boats up the river. Not long after passing the turnoff, we encountered a towboat in the ICW, the Dixie Courage.


A big tow. You can see where I had to go off-channel to dodge him.

The ICW here is narrow, and shallow, and with two jumbo empties breasted, he was using the whole thing, angled to keep the wind from running him aground. We had to go off-channel into some very skinny water to make a safe pass. It took both of us, me hand-steering and Louise reading off depths, so we could not get a picture, but I saved the chart display, with his size shown to scale. It did not help that there were GLO cabins lining both sides of the channel in this spot.

Late in the afternoon we arrived at Port Isabel and passed under the Queen Isabella Causeway Bridge, the official terminus of the ICW. From just south of the bridge we could look across the lagoon and see our anchorage and the skyline of South Padre Island, but our draft meant taking the barge channel and ship channel around Long Island, adding four miles to the trip over what it would be in a boat with a five foot draft.


The end of the ICW. That's a parasail tour visible under the bridge.

That route required us to pass another pontoon bridge, which typically opens only on the hour. Arriving on a federal holiday meant it was operating on demand, and we passed right through. There is a bit of oilfield infrastructure moored along here in Port Isabel.


Approaching Port Isabel. Yellow "barge" is the pontoon bridge, open for us.

As we were steaming down the ship channel towards the gulf, a dolphin tour boat came racing toward us, flipped around, and started pacing us off our port side, everyone aboard gesturing in our direction. I needed to turn to port for the anchorage, so I tried speeding up and slowing down to get around him, to no avail. When he finally answered the radio we learned we had a group of dolphins in our bow wave -- we had not even noticed them -- and he was trying to give his customers their money's worth. It cracked us up.

We turned north out of the ship channel just before the barrier island and headed for a spot we had selected as an anchorage. We quickly ran out of water and had to backtrack, anchoring just east of the range marker in 12' (map). Anchoring in South Padre is complicated by the fact that all the otherwise attractive spots are inside a marked cable area where anchoring is not permitted.


South Padre behind Vector.

Other than a flotilla of dolphin tours and a pack of jet-ski rentals zipping around, it was a great spot with a nice view of South Padre, including the county park where we'd stayed in Odyssey. We splashed the tender, enjoyed a beer on deck, and then headed to the Sea Ranch restaurant ashore for a nice seafood dinner.

After we came home we left the dinghy tied astern, figuring at least two nights here after a long trip down the ICW in rough conditions. The water was flat, and the clearest we've seen in a long time. With the temperature at 84 degrees I was even looking forward to swimming off the aft deck.

Alas, it was not to be. An evening check of the offshore forecast revealed the opening of a rare ~45-hour window of "tolerable" wave height on the gulf. A window which would slam shut tomorrow night and remain shut into the foreseeable future -- at least a week.


Looking across to where we will anchor... but need to go around the long way.

Two or three nights in South Padre would be great, but a week or more is too much, and we really did not relish going back the way we came, on the ICW -- another experience where, once you've done it, there's no need to do it again. Somewhat reluctantly, we decided to seize it while we could, and we made plans to leave this morning pre-dawn. We ended up decking the tender at 10pm last night.

We will have cell coverage for only a short while longer, and then we will be off line until a couple of hours out of Galveston tomorrow night. Between now and then I will send short status texts, which will post to Vector's Twitter account, here.

We do have three bail-out options, all ship channel inlets, in case things get just too uncomfortable out here. If we divert to one of those, I will try to post that update to Twitter as well. Last night I filed a float plan with our emergency contacts. Other than tweets, you'll next here from me sometime Thursday, after we've arrived and gotten some sleep.

The final hundred miles

We are anchored in Redfish Bay, part of Laguna Madre, between Padre Island and the Texas mainland (map). Winds are 25 knots or more out of the southeast, and with five miles of fetch we have three foot seas with whitecaps. Vector is pitching gently, and Louise reports she can only do organic wavy line quilting.

This is the second straight day of winds much higher than forecast. For two days straight we've been running with 25-30 knots, mostly on the beam. The stabilizer fins have been pegged the whole time, and at six knots they've not been able to keep us vertical.

One consequence of this is that Meriwether, the pilothouse air conditioner that we can run under way, has been peeing all over Louise. The condensate pan drains on the port side of the unit, and when we are mostly level it's not a problem. But with a constant starboard list of several degrees, the condensate has been overflowing the starboard side of the pan and dripping out. Here in coastal Texas, with 85% humidity, the amount has been prodigious; we jury-rigged a collection system and have been emptying well over a liter each day.


You can't see the starboard lean in this photo. Ratty microfiber is leading the leaking condensate down to the plastic container. White plastic above Louise's head is a diverter to keep the cold air off her head. Curtain at left is something we made to keep light out of the pilothouse at night; instead we use it more to keep the cool air in when using the air conditioner.

Yesterday's cruise had a similar ending, with us turning off the ICW channel in one of the very few spots deep enough for Vector, a part of Baffin Bay just south of Penascal Rincon and its enormous wind farm (map). At that anchorage the fetch was not nearly so long, and we had a comfortable night, even though we dropped the hook in 30-knot winds. The depths were lower than charted, and we had just six inches under our keel when we set the anchor.

Things calmed down considerably overnight and we weighed anchor in just ten knots or so of wind. The first couple of hours of our cruise we even managed to stay fairly level. This being the heart of Memorial Day weekend, even though we were in the middle of nowhere, we still had a dozen zippy fishing boats fly by us this morning before we weighed anchor. We later learned where, more or less, they were all headed.


We also ran Mr. Roboto in the stateroom under way to try to keep things cool and dry in the coastal Texas heat and humidity.

We first observed the holiday weekend chaos as we passed the iconic Snoopy's Pier and it's neighbor. Doc's, at the very north end of Padre Island just past the bridge yesterday. Even in these winds, it would seem, the small "flats" boats common to this area will venture forth. There was quite a bit of traffic at the north end of the island, but it tapered off very quickly after we passed the end of the developed portion of the island.

After passing under the bridge, the ICW becomes a very long, very straight, very narrow dredged channel through the otherwise very shallow Laguna Madre. Spoil islands line the ditch, mostly toward the barrier island side but some on the landward side as well. On many of the spoil islands are small fishing cabins, some of which have stood for decades.

It turns out the privately built cabins are regulated by the Texas General Land Office (GLO); the cabin holders pay an annual lease based on square footage. Some are little more than shacks and others are quite elaborate. There are no utilities, so the occupants collect rainwater and generate their own electricity when they are there. There is no access except by boat.


It looks like we are passing through a town, but these structures lining both sides of the channel are remote fishing cabins.

After passing the first group of spoil islands south of the developed end of the island, we could see the Bird Island recreation area, part of the National Seashore, well off to port. Lots of campers, windsurfers, and kiteboarders, and the boat ramp was quite busy as well. We remember visiting in Odyssey; the area is just north of the end of the paved road into the park, and long time readers may know we stayed in the campground on the gulf side of the island.

The ICW is so narrow, and the area outside the channel so shallow, that there are few places to anchor. We had to proceed nearly 30 miles to Baffin Bay to even be able to turn off the channel. This morning was more of the same for the first dozen miles after leaving Baffin Bay. After that, the water runs out completely, and the ICW is quite literally a ditch -- a section known as the "land cut" slices through the Saltillo Flats, an occasionally inundated land bridge that connected Padre Island to the mainland.

Even here, the dredge spoils are piled up, forming always-dry islands which are again dotted with cabins. Honestly I had expected to find desolation this far from Corpus, but it seems to be GLO cabins all the way down. The horde of boats that passed us this morning were, no doubt, on their way to these cabins, or else on their way from the cabins to their preferred fishing grounds.


Our anemometer display just after anchoring, showing wind at 34mph with a peak of 37 and average of 33.

The other thing I expected to happen along here was to run out of Internet coverage. I'm been quite pleasantly surprised that we've had AT&T 4G coverage on our ZTE Mobley device for almost the entire trip. We were briefly out of coverage intermittently at the southern end of the land cut, but now that we are only a few miles from Port Mansfield we again have good signal.

Shortly before arriving here, again one of the few places deep enough to even turn out of the ICW channel, we exited the land cut into Redfish Bay. Redfish Bay is part of Lower Laguna Madre, as Baffin Bay is part of Upper Laguna Madre. Even though the Saltillo Flats were at times dry (before the Corps of Engineers cut through it), it is considered one body of water.

All of Laguna Madre is a hypersaline coastal lagoon, with salinity much higher than the gulf itself. This apparently makes for great fishing for certain species, but it also means that Vector is absolutely covered with salt after spending two full days in 30-plus-knot winds driving spray all over the boat. A thunderstorm is forecast for tonight and we're hoping it will wash most of the salt off the boat for us.


Dolphins playing in our bow way under way in Redfish Bay.

Not long after exiting the land cut, a pod of dolphins swam over to us and spent some time playing in our bow wave. Normally the dolphins get bored with us in just a few seconds, but these stayed for quite a while -- not many big boats in this lagoon.

The last few miles here to the anchorage, where the fetch was the greatest, was a bit of a rough ride. While I was doing my routine run-up to 80% load (once every few hours, to mitigate wet-stacking), we took quite a bit of water over the deck. I'm hoping we're done with the 30-knot winds for a while, but the forecast had only called for half that so I don't know what to believe any longer. We're very happy to now have our own anemometer so we can put real numbers to these wind events; a wise investment of just fifty bucks or so plus some time to fasten it to the flybridge top.


Vector pushing through heavy chop in Redfish Bay. Those are three foot waves; the steady ride is courtesy of our stabilizers.

We're just about two thirds of the way down Padre Island, and it's taken us the better part of two days to get here from the northern end of the island. Padre Island is the longest barrier island in the world, at 113 miles long. The middle 80 miles of that is undeveloped, roadless, and protected. Tomorrow we should make it the rest of the way past the island, and end up at the developed southern tip of the island.

Tomorrow will also bring us to the end of the Intracoastal Waterway system. Aside from the 80 statute miles between Mobile Bay and the Rigolets, and another 60 statute miles south of Biscayne Bay, Florida that is too shallow for Vector, we will have done the entire waterway from its beginning, mile marker 0 in Norfolk Virginia, to the very end at mile marker 665 WHL (West of Harvey Lock). (The waterway is not continuous; there are gaps along the gulf coast that must be traversed in open water.)

Tomorrow morning we will pass the Mansfield Channel, an artificial cut through Padre Island dug out in the 60's, and the mostly silted-in harbor of Port Mansfield, too shallow for Vector even to enter. There are no further anchorages for us now until we arrive at the Brownsville Ship Channel in Port Isabel, the end of the waterway. Tomorrow evening we should be anchored off South Padre Island.

Port O'Connor to Corpus Christi

We are under way across Corpus Christi Bay. Winds are 20-25 knots, more or less on the nose, and two foot whitecaps on the bay are making tons of spray across the foredeck and pilothouse. We had originally planned to do this yesterday, but winds were even higher then and we decided to delay a day. Ironically, we've been docked during the calmest days and under way on some of the windiest.


This giant crab sculpture is an oft-photographed feature of Rockport. There was a bare spot in the ground where we stood.

You may remember from last post that we turned off the ICW early to get in the lee of the Matagorda Peninsula, and  when we were ready to leave on Friday morning winds were still too high to want to head back to the ICW. We planned a short day, to the anchorage closest to Port O'Connor, in order to have a more reasonable day on Saturday along a long stretch with no anchorages or marinas. We would have preferred to dock Friday in Port O'Connor itself, but none of the marinas there had enough depth for us.

I planned a route that would take us again along the lee of the peninsula, at least up to the area near the inlet and ship channel. There my charts showed no way to continue, and we'd have to go northwest in following seas to the ICW, then bash our way south down the ship channel to again be in the lee of Matagorda Island. The detour around the shoal was five or six nautical miles, and uncomfortable ones at that.


Sunset over Matagorda Bay from our anchorage last Thursday.

In part this was due to a "spoil pile" -- an area where dredge material is dumped when the dredges come through to maintain the deepwater ship channel. My chart showed a semicircular spoil area right at the corner of the peninsula, where it met the ship channel. No soundings are shown in spoil areas, so it's impossible to know if the water is 20' deep or 2' deep.

As we were heading along the shoreline and preparing to make our turn northwestward around the shoals, we spotted a shrimper heading toward the inlet. He cut right across that spoil pile, and we recorded his track on the ARPA radar display. I tried to raise him on the radio with no success. Shrimpers draw less than Vector, sometimes as little as three feet. But we reasoned that there should be enough water for us if we followed his track.


The blue line was our planned route. Dashed line shows actual. Spoil area is the gray bump, and our anchorage is center, bottom.

That proved correct, and, in fact, we never saw less than 20' along our track through the marked spoil area, which is flanked by charted two-foot shoals. We crossed the ship channel and dropped anchor in the lee of Matagorda Island (map), having just cut a full hour and lots of bouncing around off our cruise.

We had a pleasant night at anchor, and Saturday morning we found ourselves surrounded by small fishing boats, way more than is usual for a weekend morning. Louise noticed through the glasses that most of the occupants were wearing matching beige T-shirts, and we figured we had stumbled into a fishing tournament. Eventually we heard the towboat drivers talking about it, and learned it was the Warrior's Weekend event in Port O'Connor.


Approaching Port O'Connor. OMG, that's a lot of little boats.

In fact, we were seeing just a small number of the hundreds of boats participating; as one of the tows approached Port O'Connor on the ICW we heard the Coast Guard hail them to give them an escort through the melee. We thus had some inkling of what was in store for us. We weighed anchor forthwith, in case there might be a delay.


The radar shows no clear path.

Approaching the official starting point on the ICW we were confronted with dozens of boats completely blocking the ICW; I even took a photo of our radar display which looked a lot like it does in a mooring field. I had made a sécurité call on the radio before we turned on to the ICW, and the Coast Guard met us with their small boat and escorted us through, parting the sea of boats ahead of us. At one point they slowed right in front of us and I had to call on the radio to say we were below steerage speed; that got their attention and we had no further issues.


The USCG escorts us through, with lights and siren.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, a more or less straight shot in "the ditch" until we reached Aransas Bay. The county marina in Rockport was nearly as close as the closest anchorage, and that's where we headed to spend the night (map). At a flat $30, power included, it's a real bargain. We walked across the street to the excellent Latitude 28°02' for dinner.


Vector at the county docks in Rockport.

Sunday we made our way to Mustang Island and the town of Port Aransas, via the ICW alternate route, the Lydia Ann channel. After crossing the ship channel and inlet, we continued past the main Port Aransas Harbor for another few miles and turned down the long channel to the Island Moorings Marina (map). Quieter and cheaper than the municipal marina, and only a little farther from town. We took three nights and put a scooter down for the duration.


These parked offshore drill rigs are a regular feature of the Port A skyline.

We've been through Port A more than once on Odyssey, which disturbingly made the ferry tilt when we drove aboard. We never stayed close enough to town to enjoy it, and I was very much looking forward to it. In hindsight, three nights was overkill, especially with the gulf so rough as to make going to the beaches unattractive.


A pair of Port A ferries cross astern of us. We remember crossing on Odyssey.

We did enjoy a couple of the restaurants and riding around the island, though, and the marina had a nice pool. We also enjoyed meeting our dock neighbors, Melissa and David, who hail from Austin but keep their lovely Hatteras in Rockport. They had come down for the weekend.

Tuesday we dropped lines and headed back out the very skinny marina entrance (we had just 7' at high tide) to the ship channel, which brought us all the way to Corpus Christi. The deepwater channel extends from the inlet at Port Aransas all the way to Corpus Christi and under the Harbor Bridge into the port itself, the eighth largest in the US.


Dolphins playing in this very fun, very splashy bow wave of a smaller gas tanker.

While Vector can run outside the ship channel in parts of Corpus Christi Bay, we were restricted to it for the first half of the trip, and it's the most direct route for the second half. We passed two large ships during our cruise, and both were making bow waves that were loads of fun for the local dolphins. I managed a short video clip of the dolphins playing in the bow wave of the enormous crude oil tanker Eagle Texas.


Dolphins running ahead of Eagle Texas. That bulbous bow is taller than Vector.

Just before the harbor bridge, which marks the boundary of the security zone, we turned south behind the city breakwater to the municipal marina, where we tied up on a dock off the Peoples Street T-head (map). Corpus has done a wonderful job with their waterfront, one of the few cities with a municipal marina right downtown, walking distance to almost everything. It very much reminded us of the similar arrangement in St. Petersburg, Florida.


Approaching the harbor bridge, with the aircraft carrier museum USS Lexington to the right. Downtown Corpus is just off frame to the left.

We again signed up for three nights, and put both scooters on the ground in anticipation of doing some provisioning and perhaps some exploring further afield. Even going to the marina office, on the next T-head over, was best done on the scooter rather than on foot. Our old friend Landry's is prominent here, with a Joe's Crab Shack on one T-head and Landry's on another. We eschewed them in favor of more local choices, including Harrison's Landing right across from the boat.

In addition to the marina itself, the city waterfront includes lots of park space, and eight miradores along the seawall. Right at the foot of our pier was the Selena memorial, made to harmonize with the other miradores, which attracted lots of camera-wielding tourists. The art museum, a visitor center and an arena are near the harbor end of the seawall; ZZ Top played the arena while we were in town.

One evening we treated ourselves to a nice dinner at the Republic of Texas restaurant, atop the nearby Omni hotel. From here one is afforded an excellent view of the bay, the harbor, and the marina. Vector is right near the middle of the photo. The food was quite good, if a bit overpriced. We also availed ourselves of the spa in the hotel for massages, and Louise got her hair cut at the salon.


The marina as seen from atop the Omni.

While the waterfront reminded us very much of St. Pete, sadly, the city itself is not nearly as vibrant. Amid the high-zoot skyscrapers, mostly belonging to banks, are myriad empty lots. That said, we did find some nice restaurants downtown, including sushi and some excellent pizza.

Our very first evening, after walking to dinner and back, a huge storm blew in from the north, moving south at 50mph. We were sitting on our aft deck, which was facing north, watching it arrive, and wondering what all the patrons on the deck at Harrison's Landing were going to do when it did. It hit with a vengeance, sending us scrambling inside and forcing a torrent of rainwater through all the myriad seams in our aft doors. It ripped the roller-furling headsail off a boat across from us and shredded a bimini on our dock. Vector sustained no damage save for the wet door. The restaurant emptied out in the span of three minutes.


Sunset over Corpus Christi, from the flybridge.

This morning we decked the scooters before the wind really started picking up, and headed for the pumpout. By the time we arrived it was a challenge to get the boat up to the dock with the wind on the beam, but we managed. We won't see another pumpout from here to the end of the ICW.

We've now made our turn onto the ICW channel and have passed the small community of North Padre Island. To our port is now all Padre Island National Seashore. The bridge out to the beaches was at a slow crawl for the holiday weekend as we passed underneath. Tonight we'll be anchored someplace just off the ICW channel. I'm not certain if we will have any coverage tonight, or tomorrow for that matter, until we get close to Port Isabel and South Padre Island.

West of the Brazos

We are under way in the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, westbound to Matagorda Bay. This morning found us in the sleepy town of Matagorda, at the Matagorda Harbor (map), operated by the port. Sadly, the lone restaurant in walking distance, right on site, is dark Wednesdays.


Vector at Matagorda Harbor.

Tuesday morning we decked the tender and weighed anchor in Offatts Bayou with a favorable tide to make our escape. Just as we approached the ICW a small towboat was turning in to the channel, light boat. We had a chat with him about depths; he had a 6' boat but allowed that they brought bigger ones through occasionally, which tended to keep the channel cleaned out.

We've had incredibly strong winds for the past few days, about 20 knots out of the south, consistently. The ICW channel runs along the north edge of west Galveston Bay, separated by spoil islands, shoals, and land cuts. Even the relatively narrow and shallow bay was stirred up into a frenzy, and we were glad to have the separation. In the handful of open sections we felt it, rolling and taking spray over the deck.

We are once again in a section of the ICW where there are quite literally no places for Vector to anchor, and so we set our sights on the Freeport area, where our guide shows four marinas. We ended up staying at the Surfside Marina on the barrier island side, in the community of Surfside Beach (map).

We had been warned several times that cruising boats are a rarity along the Texas coast, and this is now the second marina (after Galveston Yacht Basin) where the person answering the phone knew nothing at all about boating or even their own marina. She did not even understand my question when I asked if it would be a port-side or starboard-side tie. After going back and forth with, presumably, one of the dockhands who knew such things, we were finally able to get directions to a slip. The marina apparently has no radio.

We came in to their very small basin with the current running nearly two knots and the wind still blowing 20. No sooner had I turned into the basin and started getting lined up on a slip, than one of the dockhands started waving us off and gesturing to the entirely opposite side of the basin.

Maneuvering a single-screw boat in high winds and heavy current is, of course, exactly why you need to know pretty much where you are going before you get there. It took every bit of skill that I had to power back out of the marina into the current of the channel without hitting anything. Now, of course, all our fenders are on the wrong side of the boat.

Faced with the prospect of station-keeping in these conditions for several minutes while Louise scrambled to reset every line and fender on deck, we opted instead to ask if we could tie to the outside of the outermost finger pier. While that put us mostly in the canal and I had to drive the boat to the dock against the 20kt wind, it was a far safer approach. Once we were tied and secured neither the wind nor the current bothered us much.

We paid one of the dockhands to give the boat a good wash. Afterward the marina gave us a lift in a golf cart to the Dorado Dive Club restaurant a half mile away at a different marina (too shallow for us). The food was good and the place was typical beach-shack atmosphere, but they were out of literally half their menu items. Surfside Beach is a really small town.


Sunset across the ICW from our digs at Surfside Beach.

Yesterday morning we dropped lines early without a good understanding of where we would stop. The chart showed several options at varying distances. But first, we had to navigate through the Freeport ship channel and then the Brazos River Floodgates. The former was a non-issue; while some swell came right up the channel from the gulf, and we had a bit of a current eddy as we entered, it's nothing we haven't done dozens of times before.

The floodgates, on the other hand were a different matter. This was our first time running an active floodgate, and the setup and the experience are difficult to describe even to other mariners. Physically, the gates are a pair of Tainter gates, similar to many lock gates, with the convex end facing the river and the pivot end on the ICW canal. It looks like just one end of a lock chamber.

When the river level is significantly higher than the canal level, the gates are kept closed to keep the water running downriver rather than backing up into the ICW. When traffic needs to pass, the gates are opened, and he current through the gates depends on the delta. It can be wicked, with deltas in excess of a foot; we heard tow skippers chatting about not being able to make it through unless the towboat had a certain amount of horsepower and the front barge had a rake.

The gates are extremely narrow, just 75' wide. That means many towboats need to stop on one end of the system, break apart their tows, move them across one barge at a time, and reassemble them on the other side. This would prove to be a factor for us as well, as I will discuss shortly. We spent a good deal of time Tuesday afternoon researching the mechanics of navigating a pleasure boat through the floodgates.

As it turns out, contractors have been working on the west floodgate during daylight hours. Their work barge has been in the west chamber, blocking off fully half the width. That's meant the gates have been essentially closed to tow traffic during construction hours. We arrived at the top of the hour, the designated time to pass recreational traffic, to find the east gates fully open and nearly slack. The gate operator passed us right through, but warned we'd have current behind us in the west gate with a differential of a full foot. On top of that, we'd need to squeeze through the 30' opening between the chamber wall and the work barge.

As if that was not enough, they asked us for a slow bell (minimum speed) passing the barge in consideration of the workers. Now, 30' sounds plenty wide until you consider that leaves just seven feet on either side of Vector. It doesn't take much "wiggle" in the boat to eat that up in a hurry, and with that much current on the stern, the boat is easily pushed sideways. The normal response is to wick up the throttle and power through, but now I had to give a slow bell. I ended up steering the boat with the bow thruster as we eased past the barge, squirting through like a watermelon seed with two or three knots behind us.

I'm sorry we were not able to get a picture, or better yet, video. We were both way too busy for that. I never took my eyes off the channel or my hands off the controls; Louise had rigged fenders both sides just in case, and was standing on deck with a large ball fender in hand in case things went pear-shaped and we needed to fend off. In the end it was not nearly as bad as we had anticipated and Vector handled it with ease.

I had budgeted extra time for the flood gates, but we zipped right through, past a giant conga line of tows who had to wait until dusk, and through both gates which were wide open. So it was barely lunch time when we reached our first stopping option, a free dock in the small community of Caney Creek, just west of the Caney Creek pontoon bridge, which had to swing out of the way for us.

The dock is at a community park with restrooms and ramadas and a fishing pier out over the gulf, where the waves were running six to eight feet. We wanted to maybe walk the beach and admire the awesome power of the gulf, being thankful not to be out in it. The "dock" is really an old barge landing, with enormous, widely-spaced bollards.

Vector nicely fit between two bollards and we could have gotten secured there, and I was able to come alongside in spite of 20 knots trying to prevent it. But there was a horizontal timber just below the waterline -- I'm going to say 16"x16", secured to the rusty steel bulkhead by enormous steel clips that looked a lot like staples.

We could see no way to get enough fenders in between the bulkhead and Vector to guarantee those "staples" would not contact us under the waterline. The wind likely would have kept us well off the bulkhead for our entire stay, but one good towboat wake could have sent us slamming in. It was not worth the risk, and we reluctantly dropped the one line we had managed to get ashore and let the wind push us back to the channel. I'm sorry I did not get a photo of the dock, or of the dozen fishermen we had as an audience for the entire event.

Our next option, mid-afternoon, was an anchorage shown in our guide as being at least six feet deep, down a short creek from the ICW. We tried to nose in there and promptly ran into mud at a 5.5' depth, and powered back out into the channel. That left pressing on to Matagorda and the harbor where the 20 knots of wind brought us swiftly to the T-head. We had a pleasant night, but we're tired of paying for marinas we don't otherwise need.

This morning we dropped lines to make the top-of-the-hour recreational opening of the Colorado River locks. Still pinned to the dock by 20 knots, it was a mighty challenge coaxing Vector out into the harbor without damage, but we made it courtesy of all 370 horses in the engine room. I think I dredged the harbor by another six inches or so.


Approaching Colorado River Locks. You can see straight through both chambers, across the Colorado to the ICW channel on the other side. Army CoE work boat is to the right.

The Colorado River locks serve the same purpose as the Brazos River floodgates. Because the deltas can be higher here, full-on lock chambers are used with gates on both ends. On our transit, the river was not running high and the locks were open at both ends; we passed right on through. The Colorado River, incidentally, is not the more famous one that starts in the eponymous state and makes its way to the Gulf of California, but rather the one which drains a good deal of Texas, passing through the capital of Austin as well as near our friend in Bastrop. It is not navigable.


Sometimes barges just ... miss. This is the river-side entry guide wall for the west lock.

We had set our sights on an anchorage in Matagorda Bay for tonight, tucked up near the north shore of the Matagorda Peninsula to get some protection from the relentless south wind. After about three hours in the relative protection of "the ditch," we emerged into Matagorda Bay along the dredged ICW channel. There is three to four miles of fetch between the peninsula and the ICW dredge, and as soon as we cleared the last point of land, we were hammered.

With 20 knots on the beam, gusting to 25, the stabilizer fins were pegged, and the bay had square two-footers that made for a rough ride and lots of water over the deck. On the positive side, as soon as we were in the bay, we were surrounded by dolphins. Several came to play in our bow wave and I managed to get a short video.


Dolphins surfing our bow wave in Matagorda Bay. Much darker than the Atlantic Dolphins we're used to.

While I had planned a route that continued down the marked ICW channel well into the bay, turning off a little northeast of the anchorage, conditions were so bad on the bay that, instead, we turned Vector south, into the wind, just as soon as depths permitted. We ran head-on into the wind for a couple of miles until we were more in the lee of the peninsula and then continued west toward the anchorage.

Update: we are now safely anchored in Matagorda Bay tucked in as close as we can to a cove of the Matagorda Peninsula (map). While we are in a lee with so little fetch that the water is fairly calm, we still have 20-25 knots of wind over the deck. I have a steak for the grill and I'm hoping nothing goes overboard while I'm cooking.

My plan runs out here in Matagorda Bay. We are working our way west to Port Aransas and thence Corpus Christi, but I have not really looking into some of the other destinations here on Matagorda Bay or just west of here on Espiritu Santo Bay, such as Palacios, Port Lavaca, Port O'Connor, or Matagorda Island. For now, we're just happy to be stopped and not bashing into seas.

Houston, we've had a problem

I am typing under way in the Houston Ship Channel, en route from our last digs at the Kemah Boardwalk Marina in Kemah (map) back to the familiar comfort of Offatts Bayou where we were when last I posted here. It has been a very busy week, with much to report.


Kemah Boardwalk marina at dusk from our deck. Boardwalk rides in background.

Last Saturday we had a bit of a wait in Offatts Bayou for the water level to come up to where we were comfortable navigating the shallow channel back to the ICW. As long as we had to wait, we took the tender ashore at the boat ramp dock adjacent to 61st street and walked the few blocks to Target for some provisions. A Home Depot is next door, and although we had no need, the two stores make this anchorage very convenient.

We decked the tender and weighed anchor right around 1pm, making it out of the channel with just less than a foot under our keel. After passing back through the causeway railroad bridge, we veered off toward the Pelican Island Bridge and into the Galveston Ship Channel. This being the weekend, two small Carnival cruise liners were in town.


Eastbound in the Galveston ship channel. Two Carnivals are in port. Strand is dead ahead.

After passing the cruise docks, Fisherman's Wharf, and the Strand district we arrived at the Galveston Yacht Basin. Now you may recall that I had called this marina much earlier in the week to inquire about their pumpout, and at the time I asked if they could accommodate our six foot draft. They said no problem.

So imagine my surprise when we called the office to get directions to the pumpout from the ship channel, and the entrance channel shows on my chart as clearly less than six feet. The person who answered the phone, the fuel dock cashier, knew nothing about it and did not seem the least bit interested in finding out. After the second call, she reluctantly agreed to find someone who knew the water and could get back to us.

Eventually I got a call back from the dockmaster, who is not on site on a busy weekend, and he explained how to reach the pumpout dock through some very skinny water. With no other options for pumping out, we reluctantly edged along into the narrow fairway with the fuel dock close aboard, the depth sounder in alarm the whole way. Of course, someone had tied his fish boat up in the pumpout slip and I had to hover in some very skinny water while we got him to move. Eventually we inched in to the pumpout slip and tied ourselves up.

The pumpout is self-service and operated by a token, just like an arcade game. The tokens are $20 each, purchased at the fuel desk. The same cashier who couldn't tell me anything about navigating in the marina also did not know how long the machine would run on one $20 token, nor whether the machine had enough suction to evacuate a tank some four feet below the waterline. I bought the token and went outside to try it.

The hose just barely reached our fitting after I pulled it as tight as I could. But I was happy to find that it did have enough suction for the job. Also, the machine apparently runs as long as you need once started with the token, until you press the shutoff button. Thus emptied of our burden, we made our way back to the ship channel and out of the harbor.


Galveston-Bolivar Ferry just off the dock and headed our way. Odyssey has been on this ferry.

The junction of the Galveston and Houston ship channels is a busy intersection, made even more so by pleasure boats on a nice weekend. We played do-si-do with the Bolivar Ferry and made arrangements with a half dozen other vessels between here and the Port Bolivar alternate channel.

Between the late start out of Offatts Bayou and the extra time spent messing around with the idiots at Galveston Yacht Basin, we did not get very far Saturday afternoon, and we anchored in Galveston Bay about a mile east of the ship channel at R-42 (map). Once again we had to dog everything down, as a giant ship wake would roll us occasionally. We had cocktails and dinner on deck and enjoyed a nice sunset.


Sunset over Galveston Bay.

Sunday we got a fairly early start for Bayland Marina, our designated starting point for our Coast Guard transit permit, in order to arrive on a favorable tide and have plenty of time to make our way in to the marina. We arrived at the entrance a little before noon. As we were approaching the turnoff from the ship channel, we saw another motor yacht exiting the marina, and we held short for them to clear out of the narrow channel.

I called them on the radio to ask what they were seeing for depths. They said they were showing five feet even, and with their draft right around that they were stirring up the silt. They felt there might be more than a foot of silt but were not sure. A spirited discussion ensued about whether we should even attempt the channel under these conditions.


Approaching the Fred Hartman Bridge in the Houston Ship Channel. Turnoff for marina is to the right; we never made it past the bridge.

In the end, reason prevailed and we turned around and headed back for the northern tip of Galveston Bay to regroup. There would still be enough time to make it back to this point in the morning from there to begin our transit. We dropped the hook just south of Morgan's Point to consider our options.

After our narrow escape from Offatts Bayou, a miserable experience trying to get in and out of Galveston Yacht Basin, and having to turn around at Bayland Marina, we were getting quite nervous about just how skinny the water might get in Buffalo Bayou on our way to downtown Houston. All of the research I had done to that point suggested the lowest water we would see would be 7-8' as long as we used traditional river navigation -- stay to the center in the straights and on the outside of the bends. But the chart shows just six feet at low water in places, and we already know the water levels here vary considerably with wind.

I made several phone calls in an effort to gain some more confidence about the depths. There is no one official to talk to about this at all, but I knew there was a local cruising club that ran an annual trip to Allen's Landing, and a bit of hunting on the web led me to the names and phone numbers of a few skippers who had made the trip.


Passing four abreast in the Houston Ship Channel. The ship at left is overtaking us and just about to pass the ship at right, who is overtaking the barge in the center. We all fit easily in the wide channel, but it was a sight to behold.

I did eventually hear back from two of those, and both confirmed it would not have been a problem. Unfortunately, those calls came too late. By the late afternoon Sunday we had concluded that, absent more complete information, tackling Buffalo Bayou would be too risky, and we set our sights instead on the gaggle of marinas in the Clear Lake area, a bit south of where we were anchored. We weighed anchor and headed in that direction.

By this time it was late in an already stressful day, and we preferred to arrive at a dock in the morning instead. Plus, I wanted to give the folks I had called as much chance as I could to get back to me. So we dropped the hook in Galveston Bay, somewhat offshore of the Clear Lake entrance channel (map). On a beautiful weekend afternoon, this part of the bay was chock full of sailboats, and being the give-way vessel we did a lot of dodging and weaving before finally getting the hook down.


Sunset from our anchorage east of Kemah.

When no good news about Buffalo Bayou had arrived by 10am Monday, we finally conceded that we could not make our appointed transit window, and we weighed anchor and continued on to the Kemah Boardwalk Marina, one of the few places with enough depth for Vector, which happens to also have an attractive weekly rate.

The Kemah Boardwalk is a complex of amusement rides and Landry's-owned restaurants with an on-site hotel and a large marina. The marina is walking distance from not only the on-premise restaurants, but also perhaps a dozen other eating establishments. Several stores and more restaurants are a short ride away, including Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and West Marine. It's really a great stop, and a good deal on the weekly rate of $8 per foot, plus $40 for power.


Vector at the Kemah Boardwalk Marina.

After getting settled in, I notified the Coast Guard that we were canceling our transit. We also reached out to the several friends and family we had scheduled to visit us over the week and informed them of the change in venue. It meant about an additional half hour's drive for each of them.

We spent the rest of Monday and part of Tuesday just licking our wounds and recovering. But there was also the matter of getting Vector guest-ready. Cleaning up the boat and getting ready for day visitors normally takes just a couple of hours. But some of our guests would be staying overnight, and that requires converting the "quilt studio" back into a guest stateroom.

To get some sense of what that takes, you should read Louise's excellent write-up on what it took to go the other way on her blog, here. When we need to make room for overnight guests, the sewing machine, floor platform, table, stool, and a good deal of the fabric all need to move out and find other homes on the boat. Other items get condensed and stashed in various corners of the room. The whole process takes something more than a full day.

By mid-day Wednesday we were ready, and our friend Charles arrived in time for cocktails Wednesday afternoon from his home in Bastrop, near Austin. We have known Charles a long time, a motorcycling friend from the San Francisco bay area. It was great catching up over cocktails on deck and dinner in town. Charles stayed through breakfast and to about mid-day Thursday, leaving just enough time to clean up for our next guests.

Thursday evening we hosted fellow boaters and RVers Jeremy and Wanda and their daughter Oceana, who drove down from Dallas to see us. Again we enjoyed a nice dinner, this time at one of the on-site restaurants, and I took in the Rock the Dock live music on the boardwalk with them. They spent the night at the hotel on property and we enjoyed breakfast with them before they headed back north.

Again we had just enough time to clean up before Louise's brother and sister-in-law arrived Friday afternoon. We rode with them to a nice Mexican restaurant on the south end of town, where we were met by their daughter and her beau. The youngsters had to leave after a post-dinner tour of the boat and a short while on deck over cocktails, but my in-laws stayed with us overnight. They were kind enough to run us to Walmart in the morning so I could pick up nine gallons of oil for the main engine, a difficult haul on the scooter, and they left shortly after brunch at the Cadillac Bar.

We spent the rest of the weekend cleaning up and recovering from the series of visits, and getting a few things done around the boat. That included installing a long-needed accumulator on the anchor washdown pump. The pump is under the berth in the guest stateroom, and access is only practical when the sewing machine and table are out of the way, as they were for our guests.

Our week was up this morning, and around mid-day we dropped our lines and headed over to the marina's pumpout dock. By about 1:30 we were on our way out the Clear Lake channel. Unfortunately, we had the current against us the entire afternoon.


Vector anchored in Offat's Bayou, as seen from Moody Gardens.

Update: We are anchored in Offatts Bayou (map), just a short distance from the Moody Gardens docks where we spent several days two weeks ago. We dropped the hook around 5:45, splashed the tender, and went to the hotel's lobby bar for happy hour apps as dinner. Afterward we had a nice walk among the manicured grounds. Tomorrow we will weigh anchor and continue west on the ICW to Freeport.

Houston Bound

We are anchored in Offat's Bayou, basically a lake in the middle of Galveston Island (map). We've been in the Bayou and in Galveston since Monday morning. We had intended to leave today, but it turns out we are trapped here.


Vector anchored in Offat's Bayou. Her first photo at anchor in the new livery.

Sunday afternoon we arrived in Galveston Bay after transiting the busiest commercial terminal, bar none, that we have ever transited. That would be Port Bolivar, at the western end of the Bolivar Peninsula. Bolivar, by the way, rhymes with "Oliver" and is not pronounced like the eponymous Spanish explorer.

We arrived at the Bolivar terminal not long after I posted my last blog entry, and it was good thing I had already posted it because I was busy from the moment we first spotted the terminal until we dropped the hook around the corner in Galveston Bay. "Terminal" probably conjures the wrong image; in reality it is simply an endless line of barges and towboats lining both banks of the ICW canal for a span of several miles.


This picture entering the Bolivar terminal does not do it justice. Those "buildings" the the background are just an endless line of towboats.

Tows are made up and broken apart here (known as "fleeting") and smaller towboats move barges around as the larger boats face up to the long tows and move them in or out of the port. The fairway down the middle is narrow, and a single tow can easily block the whole channel while turning.

In fact we had to stop dead and even back water at one point. As the big tow "topped around" I saw a gap and basically took a hole shot, moving the throttle to ahead full and blasting around. That proved prescient, as that tow then became the front of a conga line, seven tows long, heading west out of the terminal. We're pretty sure the terminal was backed up significantly due to the same wind storm that had pinned us down in Port Arthur the previous day.


Vector docked at the otherwise empty Moody Gardens marina. Paddlewheeler in background.

We had to maintain a listening watch on two separate channels, the bridge-to-bridge channel (VHF 13) and Houston Vessel Traffic (VHF 12) which controls all movement through the ports of Houston, Galveston, Bolivar, and surrounding waters. The radios were literally non-stop from the moment we got in listening range of Bolivar (13 is a low-power channel and does not carry very far). Again due to the backup, there was a bit of colorful language as tow skippers negotiated space in the busy terminal.

The ICW channel empties into the mouth of Galveston Bay just a short distance from the busy Houston Ship Channel, and no sooner had we cleared Bolivar than we were hailed by a giant ship; his AIS showed we would collide in the channel in a short while. We immediately communicated our intentions to turn north into the bay before even reaching the ship channel.


These dolphins are some of the first we've seen since Mobile.

It was a great relief to finally turn out of the busy commercial traffic lanes into the open waters of the bay; we proceeded just a short way into the shallows north of the Bolivar Peninsula and dropped the hook a few hundred yards from some abandoned oil platforms (map). It was a little rolly in the early evening but calmed down overnight and we slept well. Leaving the confines of the ICW, we also encountered our first dolphins in ten months, since we left Mobile Bay. Dolphins followed us all the way to our anchorage and swam around Vector for a short time after we settled in.

The Bolivar Peninsula from our anchorage.

I spent Monday morning on the phone trying to figure out what happened with our request to the Coast Guard for permission to transit the port security zone. I also called a half dozen area marinas to figure out where to stay while we waited for our Houston window.


Sunset over Galveston Bay and the ship channel from our anchorage,as a ship crosses in front of the sun. Structure to the right is an abandoned oilfield facility.

Somewhere around mid-morning we made the decision to go to Galveston for a few days. The marina closest to the Strand, which would have been ideal, could not accommodate a boat of Vector's length. The other marina off the Galveston ship channel, the Galveston Yacht Basin, could get us in and had a pumpout, but the rate was high and the pumpout was not included. We decided it was worth the extra 15 miles, round trip, to the Moody Gardens Hotel here in Offats Bayou (map). The hotel offers dockage with an excellent mid-week rate that includes access to the resort's amenities.


Approaching Moody Gardens.

While the docks had power and water, there is no pumpout, and so we planned to stop off at the Yacht Basin en route, a three-mile detour, until I learned there is a pumpout boat in Offats Bayou. I left them a message and we proceeded directly to the docks at Moody Gardens. That proved to be a mistake; when they finally called back they quoted me $55 to pump out our tanks. The Yacht Basin wanted $20 and I felt that even that much was highway robbery.

We opted to postpone the pumpout until we leave the bayou, making use of the rest rooms in the hotel to stretch the last little bit of tank capacity. Hindsight is 20/20 and we should have made the detour on our way in instead. Speaking of the way in, our depth sounder registered just seven feet of water in one section of the Offats Bayou entrance channel. The water in the bayou itself is plenty deep, at about 18' through most of the bayou.


The Galveston Strand historic district.

After we were secured at the dock the hotel sent a van to collect me to check in. It's quite a long way from the dock to the hotel, but we found it to be a pleasant walk and that was the last use we made of the van. We did offload a scooter onto the dock so we could go into town.

Moody Gardens is an enormous complex. In addition to a four-diamond resort hotel, there is also a convention center, a water park and beach-themed amusement area, a paddlewheel tour boat, an aquarium, a rainforest enclosure, and various educational exhibits. Several of the attractions are housed in three giant pyramids on the property. Sadly, the water park area, immediately adjacent to the marina, has not yet opened for the season.

The hotel has two restaurants, a lobby bar which also serves food, a spa, and a nice pool area with a swim-up bar (the bar, unfortunately was not open during our stay). We had 24 hour access to the spa/fitness locker rooms with showers and towels, and we made good use of those. We also booked massages at the spa, despite it being just over a week since we did the exact same thing in Lake Charles.


Sunset over Texas from the ninth floor bar.

We had originally planned to stay just three nights, based on remaining tank capacity. We had a nice dinner on the strand and another nice dinner on the seawall, and one evening we made a meal of the happy hour apps in the lobby bar, where they also have several excellent brews on draft. We also met up with long-time Red Cross colleague Richard who lives here in Galveston, having a nice breakfast as well as sunset cocktails at the ninth-floor bar.



Richard posing with us in front of the last vestiges of sunset.

The weather forecast for Thursday gave us pause about leaving. It was going to be blowing stink out on the bay, with thunderstorms on and off. It also happened to be our 14th wedding anniversary. A quick check of the tank revealed that our strategy of using the hotel restrooms was working, and we decided to extend a night to a Friday checkout, and we had a nice anniversary dinner in the high-zoot ninth-floor restaurant, Shearn's.

The high winds in fact started Wednesday evening. Furniture started blowing over on deck around 9pm or so as the winds climbed into the 30s. By 1am we were being pinned against the dock so hard the fenders were popping out, and we had a mad scramble to try to get more fenders in place before damage was done to the brand new paint.

This continued unabated all Wednesday night and through most of yesterday; it wasn't until the middle of last night that things finally settled down. When we awoke this morning, we found the water level to be nearly two full feet lower than when we arrived, a consequence of two straight days of heavy north winds. We realized  we could not make it back over the hump we had encountered in the channel on the way in.


I took this photo this morning for comparison to the one above from when we arrived. Notice the port lights which were well above the dock are now below it.

We shoved off right at checkout time and motored the short distance here, dropping the hook in the lee of the north shore. We splashed the tender for the first time in several months, fired it up, and zipped the two miles out to the entrance channel to sound the depths; we might just have squeaked out with a couple of inches under the keel by the time we made our soundings.

Tomorrow the wind is supposed to clock back around to a more southerly direction and the water level should come back up. We'll stay put until we see enough water to make a safe exit. And exit we must, because by Sunday we need to be at Bayland Marina some 30 nautical miles from here.

After not hearing back from the Coast Guard for three more days, I emailed the Captain Of The Port Wednesday to say that the Waterway Management Chief had been sitting on my request for a full week. That got everyone's attention, and in short order we had the formal application in hand; this afternoon we received formal permission to transit the security zone through the Houston Ship Channel on Monday, starting from the aforementioned marina. We are going to Houston!


The hotel conference center had a tortoise exhibit.

Tomorrow we will get as far as we can depending on what time we can finally exit the bayou, and Sunday we will be at Bayland. Monday morning we need to file a sailing plan by radio with Vessel Traffic and by mid-day we will be in the security zone. We have to stay mid-channel, make no stops, and take no photographs until we clear through the zone about two hours later.

We are timing the tide to clear under the 25' railroad bridge at the end of the security zone, which will put us in Buffalo Bayou. That will carry us the rest of the way to downtown Houston. Once there, we'll have to make the best of whatever the docking situation is, because the permit for our return trip through the zone is not valid until Sunday. If silting or other conditions keep Vector from getting up against the quay, we will anchor in the bayou and tender ashore.

We're looking forward to spending a week exploring downtown Houston. In addition to all that downtown has to offer, we also have several visits with friends and family scheduled while we are in town, so it is shaping up to be a busy week. When next you hear from me, we should be in downtown Houston.