Previous:  T200 2008 Day 5

Messabout:

We sailed up to the beach to cheers (no really!  People cheered!   It was very touching.  If you were there and cheered, thank you!), and parked the boat, and sat around for a while; I got a ride to Charlie's house to get my truck and trailer, and the present I had bought for Joy for her birthday, which it was.  Somehow it had in the interim got wrapped and a beautiful card appeared; thank you, Laura.  Joy got there at 2 pm or so, we had some of the lovely HOT shrimp boil Pete made, then she and I went to Port Lavaca, got a hotel room, I took three showers in a row, put on clean clothes and we went to the Chinese buffet, where I nearly put them out of business.

Saturday we messed about with Laurent's kiteboat:

(video by Joy Kennedy-O'Neill)

(video by Joy Kennedy-O'Neill)

(video by Shortypen)

But the wind was a little light and flukey to keep his kite in the air.  We put the kiteboat away and I sailed my boat by myself for a bit; it was good to feel how light and responsive the boat is when empty, I'd almost forgotten, and to see that with the new leeboard it's very easy to shunt and bear off even without the jib up, that makes it a much more reasonable singlehanded boat for zipping around the lake.  With the old leeboard the boat would head up sharply after a shunt, even when I only sheeted the fore sail.  You could make it work, but it took a bit of room around the boat, I wouldn't have wanted to shunt in close company.  With the new leeboard it's very under control and responds to the rudder right away, very easy.

Then Laurent sailed it around for a bit, and I got to see the boat from the shore while it was on the water and sailing for the first time in six years!  Very exciting.  It looked good.  I got some video of Laurent sailing, but sadly the lens appears to have some salt water crusted on it or something:

Then we parked the boat and chatted with people. I leaned on Laurent's boat and lied about it all being my work, mostly:

while Pete and Laurent cooked massive amounts of food:

And we all ate like mad and drank beer and told more lies and caught up on who had been where when and made sure everyone got in ok and drank more beer and told more lies, and then finally it was time to go home.

The week before I left for the trip I found two big grackle feathers in the same spot in front of my favorite Chinese resturant on two days in a row.  I went to the hardware store and bought an 1/8" brass rod and some little plastic bushings, and made two identical masttop telltales.  Perhaps surprisingly, they lasted the whole trip and worked great:

Amazing!  They took me about two minutes to make, and they made me happy every time I looked at them.  Very responsive, and they cost about a dollar.

So that's it, we went sailing and came back and a good time was had by all.

I enjoyed meeting all my fellow T200ers, you're a great group.  Thanks in particular to Tim and Pete for lugging my long-ass leeboard on the CS17 while Laurent and I got the rest of the boat sorted out, and again to Pete for loaning us one of his thermorest pads when it turned out we had somehow only come with one cot. 

Also a big thank you very much to my very fine crew Laurent, who built my beautiful new leeboard for me, did all our navigation, told me to calm down and that everything would be fine in the Corpus ship channel, which it was, and was endlessly good-natured with my boat's foibles and quirks. 

And the biggest thanks of all to my lovely and supportive wife Joy, who put up with quite a lot of boat work in the weeks before the cruise, and was cheerful and supportive during the whole thing.  And who actually appears to be happy to have me back, even as sunburned as I am.  Imagine that!