In The Beginning:

 

In late 2007 I decided to sail the inaugural Texas 200. 

 

This was mostly predicated by looking at maps and at the wind rose for south Texas in June, and thinking longingly of endless broad reaches at 13 knots, with not a care in the world.  Here's the route:

 

 

And here's the wind rose:

 

 

Woo hoo!

 

We got some of those endless long reaches, too, but first I had to get the boat in shape.

 

"I'm going to sail the Texas 200," I told my wife. 

 

"That's nice, dear."  She was used to me going to sail around on lakes for a day.  The '200' part didn't sink in for a few months.

 

"I'm going to sail the Texas 200," I told my friend Pete.

 

"Yeah you are," he said, in a carefully neutral tone.  It's possible Pete has been exposed to me declaring I was going to go sail another Watertribe race once too often, and has become jaded.  Sad to be so cynical at such a young age.

 

"I'm going to sail the Texas 200," I told my proa sailing partner Laurent.

 

"Excellent!  I can crew for you!" he said, taking me at my word.  It's possible Laurent has not known me as long as Pete has.

 

So I got to work on the boat, and Laurent and I exchanged emails with lists of supplies and I looked at maps and calendars, the one providing inspiration, the other making my stomach feel funny.  He, still taking me at my word, offered to make a new leeboard for the boat, the old one being too small by about half, and he bought a ticket back from his vacation a day early.  Now I was committed!  I had to have the silly thing done and ready to put in the water, he'd finished the board and bought a ticket.

 

It's possible my wife saw rather less of me than either of us would have liked in the weeks leading up to the cruise.  The majority of the work was on the rig; I wanted this:

 

 

to look like this:

 

(photo by Linda Lansdowne)

 

Which is to say, I cut off the luff socks, reduced the luff curve quite a lot, glued a 1/2" pvc tube to the mast to make a mast track and wrapped it with carbon at the critical spots, the top and the reef points, made batten pockets and battens, installed slugs and two reef points on each sail, and did a bunch of other little stuff.  I'm not a sailmaker, at all.  I can get it done, but it takes me a long time and it's a lot of work.  Every time I do sail work it's because I can't bring myself to just pay someone to do it, and every time it's done I swear I'll never do it again, next time I'll just hire it out.

 

So, in the fullness of time it got done.  One exciting moment was cutting the luff curve down; I got the sails as new, unfinished 'blanks' from Bacon Sails, whom I recommend very highly.  They were the right size, there were two of them, and they were brand new, so that was good.  But when I sewed the socks on them and went sailing it was clear they were way too full for the boat.  It's likely that the socks made them more full than they already would have been, but still, they were meant for a dinghy, not a boat that I hoped would exceed ten knots pretty regularly. 

 

The majority of the shaping was in the luff curve.  So I ripped the tape off the luff and measured the curve.  It looked like this:

 

 

The maximum depth of the curve was six inches.  I went up the luff and every foot or so I measured the luff curve, cut that measurement in half, and put a dot there on the sail with a pencil.  Then I tried to make a fair curve of the dots, and I cut.  Gulp.  I really am not a sailmaker.  The result was this:

 

 

Then I got the ol' Pfaff 130 out and went to work.  I didn't take any in-progress pictures of sewing the sails.  I cut corners and reef points and batten pockets out of dacron I got from Sailrite and sewed them on, and hoped it would all hold.

 

Some stuff I had done earlier; I made the goosenecks:

 

  

 

and I made up something for the boom ends:

 

 

 

I turned the plugs to fit the broken aluminum windsurfer mast bits I was using as booms, and then drilled out a hole in the sides of the plugs and sank wingnuts in epoxy, to make something I could thread the eyebolts to on the ends of the booms.

 

I glued the pvc to the masts and wrapped the head of the masts and the reef points in carbon:

 

 

The red sticks are dowels wrapped in duct tape, to force the carbon into the groove.  It worked ok, I ended up having to bog a bit to fill some gaps, but not too bad.

 

The crucial test fit:

 

 

Sails fit!  Custom masthead slug fits!  Slugs go up and down!  Woo hoo!

 

I really was worried.

 

I finally didn't get done so much as run out of time.  I spent the Friday before I left for Port Mansfield rigging in the driveway, making sure the reefing worked and hanging off the booms to see if the masthead slugs would pop out of the mast tracks at the reef points.  I greatly fear the two little girls next door think I'm crazy.

 

Time to head out!

 

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!

 

The Next Morning:

 

We were not off at the crack of dawn.  I'd never rigged the boat on the water before, it took some thinking about.  Laurent and I were busy stowing all the stuff we could in the hatches and trying to make the rest fit somehow on the tramp and on the 'trunk', the little triangular tramp I made to go on the port side, which would be aft for almost the whole trip.  It was to eventually prove to be useful, but not right away.  I tried to stand on the tall piers to see if I could reach the hounds where the little stay between the masts goes, but I was still a foot or so short of it.  We also looked at the fish cleaning station on the other side of the pier, which had a roof that was tall enough, but probably not sturdy enough for me to stand on.  We decided to skip it and rig it as soon as we got in the Land Cut.  I'd sailed the boat a dozen times or so with only the windward stays attached, so it wasn't a new thing, but I'd become fond of the two 'forestays' and the little stay between the masts since seeing how they keep the masts from flexing; they hold the masts in the right place (forward, that is) and improve the sail shape when beating, and keep the masts from flexing too much in a swell.  When I mentioned this, Laurent shrugged.  A very expressive thing, the shrug of a French person.  "Don't worry so much," he expressed.  "It will be fine."  "Also, there's nothing else we can do."  "And we're going downwind, it's really not much stress."  All with a shrug.  Very efficient method of communication, that shrug.

 

Laurent had made me a killer new leeboard, which I had not had the time to test out.  He and I had tried a leeboard that was larger than my usual tiny 3 ft^2 in the water model once before, with less than spectacular results, so I was a  bit worried about controlling the new board in addition to all the other stuff that was new on the boat.  We decided to postpone that particular test, and we managed to foist it off on Tim and Pete, who very kindly agreed to carry it on their CS17, and instead I bolted on my old, small leeboard, which I knew worked and which we could control but which was not really big enough to make us go to windward as well as I might like.  That done, we raised the sails, attached stays, ran the sheets, and tried to get out of the harbor before noon.  I think we actually left around 9 am.  Joy hung around to take a picture of us leaving, and chatted with the old guy who had the big trimaran, Piver or Brown or something similar, down the way from us.  He seemed very forthright and gruff, so I think she believed him when he said, "Ah, they'll be fine."

 

Here we are rigging the boat before we launch:

 

 

Sails up, rudder down, you sit here, I'll sit there, fine, and we're off!  I am informed I did not turn and wave goodbye to my lovely wife, for which omission I'm very sorry.  She really was worried, I think, Pete and Tim had left an hour before and we were the last ones out from the windward side.  We were not, as it turns out, the last ones out of Port M, but she didn't know that. 

 

We headed out, everything fine but one swirly header right at the harbor mouth, then we were out into the bay.  I had a bad moment when we bore off to turn into the ICW and we hit a big swell; I looked up just in time to see the aft mast go 'boinnng!' and flex way back for a minute.  AHHHGH!  But it didn't break, and once we were running in front of the swell we were fine.  In fact, we ran wing and wing for fifteen miles or so until we hit the cut which we could only do because the stay wasn't there, then we pulled over to finally flip the boat over and finish rigging it.  That fore and aft staying really does make me feel better, the masts are pretty good up top, they're windsurfer masts for the top 17', but the bases are just some fiberglass tubes I had in the garage, not really mast material.  They need to be stayed. 

 

We pulled over to rig it, and who should come along but Dan and Brian on the Hobie 18; so we weren't the last ones to leave, then.  We had a chat, fixed a few things that needed sorting out, and took off.  Dan rolled up the jib on the Hobie to reduce the area a bit, and we kept everything up, so we were actually pretty closely matched.  The Hobie would start to pull away from us, then they'd head up in a gust, we'd make up ground, I'd think we were going to catch them, then we'd do it all over again.  We must have chased them for ten miles down the cut, perfectly flat water and mid-20s wind gusting to over 30 we were told later.  Great sail.

 

Camp 1:

 

Remarkably quickly, we saw a bunch of boats on the starboard (island) side.  We'd made the first camp!  Woo hoo!

 

 

 

We headed up, Charlie tried to yell something at us but I couldn't hear him very well.  It might have helped if we'd had our VHF on, I don't think we'd had it on all day.  No big deal anyway, right?  Head up to the bank until the rudder scrapes, then jump over and grab the boat.  Easy.  So Laurent heads the boat up, the rudder scrapes, I jump over into what turns out to be the expected three feet of water, and about another three feet of the stinkiest, most sandal-grabbing oozy black mud I never hope to see again, until next year, at least.  Oy, was that nasty.  Wow.

 

Aside from the mud, though, Camp 1 was a nice place.  There was a tiny fishing cabin with, miracle of miracles, a dozen or so good sized pine trees out in front, and a picnic table.  Pine trees!  We pulled the boat out of the wet mud and onto the dry mud and I grabbed the two little folding chairs we'd brought and headed for the shade.  I wore long sleeved SPF 30 shirt and pants and a hat and sunscreen all week long, but I was still not too enthusiastic about standing around in the sun when I didn't have to, and it was quite a bit hotter on the shore than on the water.  So we sat around in the shade, tried to remember names, chatted, ate trail mix, read books, and relaxed until the sun went down.  Good camp.

 

Day 2:

 

Nice sailing day, about the 15 knots we expected in the morning.  Only one exciting bit, we were sailing along, like this, in fact:

 

 

 

when I, knucklehead that I am, knocked the bilge pump overboard.  It seemed to float, so we dropped the jib and shunted around to look for it.  No good, we either missed it or it sank.  So we shunted again and went on, and as a bonus we got to see the CS20 and Caprice again:

 

 

We also saw one of the little blue sail PDRacers and Kellan's inflatable tri that day:

 

 

And John Wright's lug sailed PDR:

 

 

And had a tiny bit of excitement with a barge:

 

 

and passed a tug rather close by:

 

 

Day two appears to have been a good day for videos.  Not too much wind, I think, it was rather busy feeling the first day out.  The rest of the day was good, easy fast sailing, and Chris Tomsett gave us a tow in to PIYC, which allowed us to again avoid the short shunting up the channel thing.

 

 

Camp 2: 

 

Camp 2 was the PIYC, they let us all park at their guest pier and come in to take showers, which were much appreciated.  PIYC is here:

 

 

 

We left the boat on the beach opposite the club and went in to take a shower, then hung around on the patios drinking beers and cokes and watching people sail or motor or get towed in.  John W in the lugsailed puddleduck had a fine entry, tacking up the channel most adroitly and coming about each time about a foot from the wall or the mud bank.  Very impressive.  After we finished playing dock committee we were happy to take a local PIYC member up on his offer to shuttle us to Snoopy's, a local seafood place, for a nice dinner.  Snoopy's is a tourist spot and as such prone to looking-down-upon, but I had a nice grilled sea bass, I thought it was a very good dinner.  One of the puddleduck guys had sailed there instead of trying to beat into the club and had, I think, met his wife there for dinner.  We saw his boat tied up at the dock.

 

 

Day 3:

 

Day 3 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:

 

 

 

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.  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 Hawai'ian shirts.  Aren't you glad, too?  I'm sure you are.

 

 

Day 5:

 

Day 5 was easy.  Out the ICW, then almost dead downwind to the beach.  We had to shunt a couple of times, so we didn't put up the jib.  Shunting as a cat schooner is very fast and easy, but raising and lowering the jib is still not well worked out.  Part of that is the jib halyard cleats being on the wrong side of the masts for this trip, part of it is just that I don't have even the routing of the lines sorted out yet, so we get stuff all twisted when raising and lowering the jibs.  At any rate, we still made good time.  Southern Skimmer passed us in the bay, and Dan's Hobie passed us when we were sailing by the houses in the ICW:

 

 

but we arrived ahead of everyone else.  Here's Pete and Tim in the CS 17 coming into the ICW:

 

 

I don't know why I don't have any video of this, I think I lost the camera for a while.

 

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)

 

(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.  Still, you can get some idea of how long it takes to shunt it without the jib up, anyway:

 

 

 

Then we parked the boat and chatted with people. 

 

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 hung around the messabout and messed about, 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!

 

 

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