Previous:  T200 2008 Day 2

Day 3:

We started off in the cut, sailing with some Potters:

and just having a nice relaxed sail:

But the middle of the day was The Big Moment; Laura, our secret weapon when we had the wit to listen to her, advised us not to take the ICW and the west entry to Aransas Bay, since the SE winds would have been piling up waves there for days:

Our route is in yellow.

Months before when I had looked at this the middle route looked good to me, but pulling the masts and re-rigging on the other side seemed now like a mongo hassle.  So, the CC ship channel it was, then.  Gulp. 

The wind looked more or less dead SE, which made the CC ship channel a close reach or a hard beat, depending.  Windward.  We had to sail to windward, and messing about shunting the thing in the middle of the channel with barges and ferries and whatnot didn't seem good, either.  It was time.  We got the big leeboard from Pete and Tim and put it on the boat.

I was full of anxiety about this.  I have one rule with this boat; I don't try anything new anywhere where, if it doesn't work, it would cause trouble.  I try new stuff on lakes.  Empty lakes, on Wednesdays.  I don't try new six foot long leeboards out on ship channels where huge damn rigs are being towed around and so on.  But that's where we were, so we sailed to the spit at the entry of the ship channel, stopped the boat, rigged the leeboard lines and looked at the whole thing again, it seemed fine.  I had fixed the leeboard mount in the middle of the boat instead of letting it slide, it seemed like it should work.  I hoped.  Off we go!

Eh, nothing to it.  Laurent drove, since one has the sneaking feeling he actually takes the boat to windward better than I do.  We were following a bunch of other T200 boats.  There was a huge rig just starting down when we entered the channel, and we had to watch the ferries, but it wasn't a big deal.  I was worried at first, the leeboard mounts and so on weren't really built with something this big in mind, but it was fine.

So we sailed to the mouth, turned up the Lydia Ann channel, and we were home free!  The rest of the day was a nice easy broad reach.  Aransas Bay is big, though.  We were well out of sight of land for quite a bit of time.  Fun, fast sailing, that was the endless long broad reach I was dreaming of when I signed up for this thing!  Then out of nowhere a spit of land appeared, and we were at Paul's Mott.  Man, those GPS things are cool.

Camp 3:

Camp 3 was supposed to be Deadman's Island, but while still at PIYC Charlie Jones raised the possibility that due to the winds blowing the water about for the last week or so it might not be there, which would reduce its usefulness.  So we altered plans and headed for Paul's Mott, about which no one seemed to know much but that it would be there, we thought.  Well, it was lovely.  It's here:

Maybe my favorite camp of the whole trip.  Really nice white oyster shell spit, a long lee side to pull the boats up on, and, as usual, enough wind to keep the bugs off.  I slept on the tramp.  Heavenly!  Don't I look like I've had a great night's sleep?:

(Photo by Chuck Leinweber)

I really did, it's like sleeping on a hammock.  We got a bit of rain, but I just pulled the tarp over me and hardly woke up at all.

I did a bit of a walkaround, looking at boats.  You can't hear much of the audio, but I'm not saying much anyway:

And we broke out the stoves and cooked!

(photo by Rich Green)

Some of the Puddleducks took a while to get in, and it turned out they'd had a Great Adventure, which I'll let them tell you about themselves. It was late when this guy finally got in, and I'm sorry I don't know which one of them it is:

Fourteen hours in an eight foot boat. Man.

This is an overview from earlier in the day:

Great camp.

Next:  T200 2008 Day 4