We’re back from our trip. The Thursday trip outbound was beautiful, our boat and two others making a fairly easy passage down the ship channel. Weekday commercial traffic is a bit heavier than weekend traffic. At one time we executed a beautiful fleet maneuver, three almost perfectly choreographed 360-degree turns to allow a tanker a little room which he was going to get in spite of us.
There were scattered thundershowers in the area, and we passed under three of them. Our boats were about a hundred yards apart, and I found it interesting to watch the rain progressively cover first one boat then another. The definition of the rainfall was just about sharp enough in these showers so that you could choose which end of the boat you wanted wet. Corey went into the cabin during these showers. I having been the designated helmsman did not have that option, so I stood and took it, getting soaked to the skin in the warm summer rain. After each shower, I’d take off my T-shirt and wring it out and put it back on. Then the next shower would come, and I’d do it again.
We continued our trip down the ship channel uneventfully, the twenty-seven year old engine performing flawlessly. At the south end of the lake, we looped around into a channel past the commercial docks serving the offshore oil industry, past four derelict Russian trawlers being converted to scrap iron, and into the lake. There we anchored and rafted up for supper and a little swim. The quiet was nice, as were having friends around to share it.
The almost full moon lit the lake up, its reflected light on tiny ripples making a boulevard of diamonds. The only sound was the gurgle of water past our hulls as the current from the outgoing tide ran by. And my anchor. A bigger ripple would causethe shank of my stowed anchor to clang against its blades. Gotta fix that.
After dark, we ran into the twin banes of summer in southwest Louisiana: humidity and mosquitoes. I rigged up a couple of army surplus mosquito nets in the cockpit, thinking that they’d stop the mosquitoes, and the cockpit was a lot cooler than the cabin below. And I was right about the mosquitoes, but with the setting sun, the onshore wind from the nearby Gulf died. When the breeze died, the humidity was almost oppressive. Sleep was spotty.
Waking up with the sunrise, I made myself a little pot of coffee (Dad’s drip pot and some coffee I ground myself the day before) and watched the rest of our fleet come alive. Everybody jumped overbaord for a morning swim, and afterward, we broke up the raft, weighed anchor and got underway. Returning to the ship channel from the lake, we met with the rest of our fleet.
We joined the group and proceeded south, down the channel. The gulf was ahead of us. And we had a west(!) wind. My mind was starting to operate. Our intended course was west. The forecast had predicted SOUTH winds. No problem. Let’s sail!
I hoisted the mainsail while Corey handled the helm. So far, so good.
Then I unfurled the big forward sail, the jib. and disaster visited. The forestay, a quarter-inch stainless steel cable, runs fromt he top of the mast to the very front of the boat. It serves two purposes: mast support and the forward edge of the jibsail. Well, it was doing neither, having parted at the fitting at its bottom end. This is disaster, akin to snapping the driveshaft of your car.
Corey maintained the course under power and mainsail while I struggled to at least secure things so I would not risk losing the mast. As we neared the Gulf, swells turned the foredeck into a carnival ride, and I was struggling with a forty-foot snake of stainless steel and aluminum on a deck that was rising and falling three feet every few seconds. During a frantic forty minutes, the fleet passed. I communicated my predicament and the possibility that I might not be completing the trip with them.
After some great struggle, I managed to secure the forestay. This involved screwing a fitting that had become unscrewed and replacing an unmanagable short pin with a screwdriver. Looking at the “repair” I figured that we could proceed, although I had just disabled my boat’s roller-furling system. This meant that to take in the big jobsail, I’d have to go forward and pull it down and stow it instead of just pulling on a control line and having the sail wrap neatly around the forestay.
And Corey spotted a sea turtle. It surfaced briefly while I was working on the forestay. Corey’s gleeful alert caught my attention and I looked up in time to verify that it really was a real live sea turtle and not an errant Wal-Mart bag.
So we entered the Gulf of Mexico. Now, here’s an important part of the story: We’d paid close attention to the weather forecasts for this trip. The forecast was for south winds at 10 knots (11.5 mph) and one to two-foot seas. This would have been almost perfect, bringing the wind very favorably over our port rail for the westward leg of the trip. Two-foot seas turn this boat into a mom’s rocking chair.
What we got was something different. There were thunderstorms in the area. The actual wind was out of the north now, 2-5 knots. The seas were confused between the prevailing summer pattern winds and by the winds from the thunderstorms, and occasional waves were over five feet with no discernable pattern. The wind at 2 knots wasn’t enough to keep the sails filled as the boat was rocked by the confused seas. Our speed was between a knot and a half to three, mostly a knot and a half, and we were looking at a thirty-mile trip.
One good thing, though, was that we had plenty of company. No, the rest of the fleet was ‘way off on the horizon ahead of us, either motoring, or making do with what little wind there was. Our company was a huge pod of dolphins, several dozen. We’d been visited by dolphins since we were well inside the ship channel, but usually it was smaller groups, maybe up to a half dozen. Now, in the gulf, there were dozens, and they were playing around our boat. I guess boats without propellers are a novelty to them, because they were rolling in groups right up to the hull. Their curiousity was apparent as they’d surface in a group and keep their heads up for several seconds observing hte stranger in their midst. They were the high point of our gulf foray.
Finally, we came to the conclusion that today the trip just wasn’t happening. At our present speed, there was no way we’d make one of our goals, a swing-bridge at Sabine Lake that we had to go through by 8:30 in the evening. So, after consulting together, we decided to turn back and head back up the ship channel to Lake Charles.
The trip back was uneventful. Every time I looked at Corey, he was catching up with his lack of sleep from the night before. He slept for an hour on the foredeck, using the stowed jibsail as pillow and mattress. He stretched out below-decks in the cabin, and he slept in the cockpit. I dozed a bit myself, chosing times where the autopilot had us puttering down straight sections of the channel with no traffic in sight.
This was summer heat at its worst, though. The wind was light, almost non-existent and the sun beat down unmercifully. The shade provided by the boat’s bimini (canopy) was small comfort as the sun reflected off of flat water. The six-hour trip back up to the home landing took me a cold drink an hour or better.
And we talked about doing it again. This time, I’ll be a little wiser about what’s going on: The weather, for example: I won’t try this again in July. Maybe May or September or October, when the nightly lows are a bit lower than 75. And where the weather patterns are a little more likely to provide real wind WITHOUT the thunderstorms. But we’ll go again. We made a deal with the dolphins for a return trip.
