• If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

T200 2008 Day 4

Page history last edited by Kevin 10 years, 6 months ago

Previous:  T200 2008 Day 3

 

Day 4:

 

We were determined.  Every day Pete and Tim on the CS 17 would get out of camp earlier than we did, by an hour or more, and every day we would chase them, and every night Pete would say, "Man, I thought you guys were going to catch us, we just got in ten minutes ago."  Dammit.

 

So on Day 4 we kept an eye on them, and when they left we took off too, maybe twenty minutes after they did.  That's our version of an early start.  And the boat was sorted out, everything had its place, we were set.  We had even cut the sheets to the right length, so we didn't have all that spagetti in the cockpit.

 

We started with a nice sail in the ICW:

 

 

Right after this movie Charlie and Laura, who are locals and to whom one should therefore listen yelled something to us as we passed; "... blah blah REEF blah blah...," and I thought, sure, Panther Reef, it's right there on the chart. We'll try not to hit it, thanks.

 

They weren't talking about Panther Reef, they were telling us to reef when we hit the bay. And we might have, too, but we were chasing Pete and Tim, and we were catching them, so I wasn't inclined to try to slow down.  Here we are with the CS in the middle of the bay:

 

 

Excellent fun, but do you notice how low the bow is in the water?  You do?  Yeah, me too.  We were taking green water over the decks right up to the masts, and the hatches weren't up to it. So the boat was half full of water. So we had to stop and, er, um.  Remember how we lost the pump on Day 2?  Heh, that's funny now, isn't it?  Yeah.  Funny.

 

So we blew the sheets and sat there for a half hour, emptied the front hatch of all the stuff, stacked it all on the tramp and bailed out the front compartment of the hull with a Dinty Moore stew can.  Apparently the hatches weren't quite up to snuff for big waves over the bow.

 

We more or less did this for the rest of the day; sail some, stop and bail some.  Our plan was to go through Steamboat Pass, rather than South Pass to get into Espiritu Santo Bay, even though Laura laughed when I told her that.  When the local guru laughs at your route, maybe it's time to reconsider the route, eh?  But no, not me.  So we went here:

 

 

Our route is in yellow.  As soon as we got through the pass we got hammered by big waves, of course.  We decided, in a fit of good sense, to shunt there and take one short leg against the waves and then a long leg in the lee of the islands, rather than a long leg in the waves and then have to shunt anyway.  So we did, we actually landed on some little islands and sorted out the boat, bailed again, then had a nice sail in pretty flat water to Army Hole.

 

Camp 4:

 

Camp 4 was at Army Hole, still in Espiritu Santo Bay but just short of Matagorda Bay.  Another great campground, Chuck and his advisors really picked out some good places for us to go.  Army Hole is here:

 

 

I put the boat on the 'beach' side, which is here:

 

 

It was a very fine, very wild camp, since the only way to get there is by boat.  Much evidence of wildlife, lots of birds, still (!!) no mosquitos, I got one horsefly bite.  One bug bite for the whole trip.  Unreal.

 

Included in the birds we saw what I think was a burrowing owl, which I hope to have pictures of soon.  He was really cool, quite big, and quite sure that once he was burrowed into the grass on the shore that we couldn't see him, even if we were five feet away looking right at him.  We wouldn't have seen him, either, had we not seen him fly in there and hunker down.

 

Our last camp.  Sigh.  We had just got everything organized and set up correctly on the boat, all the food in the food bag, the tools we would need near at hand, the VHF and the GPS and the binoculars and the sunscreen and a few bottles of water all easy to get to, then the last night we just shoved everything into whatever bag it would fit in for the last day.  Too bad.  I had some clothes in a black plastic garbage bag to keep them dry; inevitably, they got mixed up with the garbage and got thrown away at Magnolia Beach.  I got them back Saturday.  Sadly for me, some nice ripe shrimp guts and heads had been added to them before they got thrown away.  One feels one might wash that particular load about six times before it seems clean.  Still, I'm glad I didn't lose my favorite Hawaiian shirts.  Aren't you glad, too?  I'm sure you are.

 

Next:  T200 2008 Day 5

 

website
statistics

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.