Previous:  T200 2008 Boat prep

Then it was time to go.

I went grocery shopping late Friday night, loaded all my crap, loaded all the crap Laurent had given me, loaded more crap, managed to remember to hitch up the boat and pack the sails and the sheets and the various bits of line, then made myself sit in the driveway for five full minutes and think about what I was forgetting.  I couldn't think of anything.  As it turned out, I forgot only one minor boat bit and all the fresh fruit that was in the fridge, both of which my wife was able to pick up and bring with her.  Isn't she great?  I think she's great.  Not just for bringing the stuff I forgot and for driving Laurent from the airport to Port M, but also for not crying when she thought we were going to sail off into the desert and never be heard from again, she held up really well under the shadow of our impending doom, I thought. 

So I headed off for Port Mansfield Saturday morning.  Port Mansfield, in case you're not aware, is way the heck down the Texas coast.  I was about a half hour behind Pete and Tim, who were trailering Tim's Core Sound 17 from Denton.  Pete called me on my way in and told me where the launch ramp was (on the LEE side of the harbor), so I went there.  It looked a bit tough, I would have to launch from a downwind ramp, then beat to windward a bit, shunt, and sail out.  Ugh, not good.  I wasn't at all sure I was sorted out enough to short shunt out of the harbor right off the trailer.  So we sat around and looked at Southern Skimmer and Traveler, they were both set up in the parking lot with the masts up, and chatted a bit.  I had thought there was a beach I could set up on, but the scouting report was that it was all rocks and one couldn't really slide the boat off the trailer and down to the water from there. 

So I was a bit tense about the whole thing; I need to flip my boat on its side to rig it, there's a short stay between the masts.  I couldn't do that on the ramp, or, it would seem, in the rock garden of the park's 'beach'.  I wasn't sure what to do.  Pete, on the other hand, was.  He got us some beers.  Good man, that.

We drank a beer and Chuck showed up with his Caprice in tow, and with Kellan Hatch, who had just come from the airport with his boat in his bags.  This cruise had some intrepid souls, I tell you what.  We talked to Chuck, got the phone list of all the people already there, and called around.  Someone had set up on the other side of the harbor (the WINDWARD side).  Well, that did seem like a good idea.  We all drove over there except for the guys who had already put their masts up.

The windward side was somewhat better.  For one thing, it was to windward.  Much less in the way of tight manuvers called for.  The whole point of this thing, I thought, was to sail two hundred miles without having to come about, and here I was all worried about having to short shunt my way out of a lee ramp.  So the windward side was nice, in that regard.  I still wasn't sure what I'd do about the stay between the masts.

I had reserved a hotel room for Sunday night, since my wife Joy was coming down Sunday with Laurent, my crew, and I had thought she might not want to camp out.   Once there, though, I didn't really want to spend Saturday night on the boat in the parking lot, so Pete and Tim and I got a couple of rooms for Saturday night too, and got something to eat, and looked at charts again, and then walked down to the harbor again to look at the slips in the windward side marina.

There were a bunch of slips we were all more or less sharing before the launch, but I hadn't met any of the guys already tied up there.  So we walked down, and I met Chris in the Potter 19.  Very nice guy, and a fellow multihull sailor, he's built a Farrier 25!   I paced off seven meters behind him and thought I had plenty of room, and he was happy to hold the spot for me, so at least I had a place to go in the morning.  There were also some tall piers there that maybe, just maybe I could stand on and rig the stay between the masts once the boat was tied up.

We got up Sunday, had a little meeting with Chuck in the parking lot of the lee side ramp, and then drove over to launch the boat.  There was nothing else to do, I wasn't going to go home and I didn't have a better place to put it in.  I put the masts up in the parking lot, backwards as it turns out.  Not a big deal, but the jib halyard cleats faced the wrong way all week long.  I backed the trailer up, dropped the boat in and Pete and I paddled it over to the slip.  Easy, right?  It was easy, too, but only if you know how to paddle a proa.  In my callow youth I would have had one person on the main hull and one person on the ama, both paddling.  Then the boat would have turned like hell towards the ama, and it would have been a pig to get into the slip, and words like "unnatural" and "obstreperous" would have been uttered by persons watching, if not by persons on the boat.  Now, though, in my mellow old age, I understand that one person should sit as close to the main hull as he can and steer and the other should paddle from as FAR AFT AS POSSIBLE on the main hull, like sitting right on the damn stern, which I did.  Worked fine, the boat went right where it was supposed to.

I had bought fenders at Walmart to roll the boat down the beach without messing up the bottom.  As it turned out, they also were good to use as fenders.  I tied them at random intervals along the anchor line and strung them up between the boat and the pier.  It was fine, there was no wake at all in the place.  I pulled all the crap out of my truck, dropped bags and bags of it on the boat, got in the truck and drove with the rest of the trailer convoy to Magnolia Beach, while Pete stayed to watch the boats and fish.  On my way out of town I saw Dan St Gean go belting by in his jeep with the Hobie 18 behind him; I had called him a couple of times that morning to see if he was going to try to make the bus at Magnolia Beach.  As it turned out, Dan drives quite a bit faster than Chuck and I were giving him credit for, and he dumped the Hobie on the grass at the park and made it in plenty of time.

Somehow, driving the trailer all the way to Magnolia Beach seemed to take all the stress out of me.  That was it, I was committed.  I was going.  The trailer was gone, now I could forget it and get the boat rigged and ready to sail.  I met more of my fellow T200ers on the bus, caught up with Dan, talked to Joy on the phone, told her to tell Laurent that we were supposed to get 15 knots S-SE all week long.  That somehow became 50 knots and scared him for a minute, I think, but we got it figured out. 

The bus got to Port Mansfield at about the same time as Joy and Laurent got there, we got checked in to the motel, went and had a nice dinner and went to bed.  The next morning we were to be off at the crack of dawn!

Next: T200 2008 Launch and Day 1