December 7, 2012

We learned 3 things this week:

1. Never wish you had seen a particular sight on your way out of town - oh, too bad we didn't get to see the Johnson Space Center in Houston while we were here...
2. Never bad-mouth the ICW - we keep wishing we had enough time to just sail
3. Always wear your bra - I mean, we were going 60 miles without stopping. Who's gonna see??

Needless to say, "Murphy" brought his "law" to play this weekend. Oh, we had grand plans. Industrious, they were. We planned to leave our cozy little Offats Bayou on Thursday afternoon and get ourselves out closer to the ICW take-off point, about a 2 hour cruise. Then motor up the ICW for 60 miles to an anchorage for Friday night, another 50 miles on Saturday and another 35 on Sunday so that we arrived at a pretty secure spot to spend the workweek. You've never seen such organization. We got all the shopping done, all systems ready, we left at 4:20, truly a record, and motored our way out of the bay over to our most curious Galveston Railroad Bridge (you remember from last week's blog, the one that lifts horizontally out of the way). Upon calling the bridge operator for permission to pass, we were told that the bridge was closed until further notice due to the fact that someone had just jumped off the bridge and would we please keep a lookout for anyone floating by. Yikes! We dutifully kept a lookout for half an hour while we waited, but after hearing barges turned away as well, and with nightfall coming on, we decided to retreat back to Offats Bayou. We anchored for the night, set our alarm for 5:30 to try to make up that 2 hours we lost yesterday and were up-anchor by 6:25 (a record for us). The bridge was open, but we had to wait for 2 barges to go through, no problem, then we were through congratulating ourselves that there were no more bridges for many days. Just as we entered the main shipping channel between the ocean, Galveston and Houston, the engine overheated and water stopped spewing from the outtake. We anchored out just off the shipping channel (only had to be told to move by a super tanker once) and John checked the intake strainer. Sure enough, it was full of grass and mud, probably from all the shallow water we've been motoring through lately. John cleaned it out and replaced it and I went down to change into cooler clothing (and aforementioned undergarment) as the sun was now well up and warming. While in the aft cabin, I heard sounds coming from the engine that I hadn't heard before, told John about it, he went to listen and agreed that perhaps we should have it checked. Our plans meant that we were not going to be near any repair facilities until we reached New Orleans in 2 weeks, so we'd better check it out here. Off we went into Galveston Harbor and found a marina with a "lift". Up Mariah went out of the water again, had her bottom washed (oh, so much mud from going aground a couple of weeks ago) and had several guys come to check out the problem. Well, turns out the guy who really knows about engines and propellers won't be in until Monday. MURPHY'S LAW at work. We're in Galveston for another week...sigh...

It's now Tuesday and the engine guy just arrived. So, while we've been sitting here all weekend, we THINK we have decided to make a straight ocean passage to Key West over Christmas week. With John working during the week, there just doesn't seem to be time to make our way to New Orleans as there is just a whole lot of nothing (just marshes & mosquitos) between Galveston and New Orleans. This stretch needs at least 5 days of ocean sailing and we really need to use John's time off over Christmas to get ourselves to Key West. I don't think we could have foreseen the difficulty in getting anywhere along this coastline over 2-day weekends because our reference is the West Coast which is full of harbors and marinas. Also, you can't just go out into the ocean and sail in a straight line because there are oil rigs EVERYWHERE (See picture in the email attachments. In fact, if you plan to sail at night, you SHOULD sail along in these "Safety Fairways" that are guaranteed to be free of both oil rig and shallow water. And they are quite far out to sea as they are the shipping channels for cargo ships as well. All this adds time which is what we don't have in our current circumstances. Decisions, decisions.

On to more interesting things...they have two prevailing winds on this coastline. The Southerly which can be SE or SW is nice and warm and comes from climates we want to be in. The Northerly (NE or NW) comes straight off the plains and is the winter/storm wind. Last weekend, we had a thunderstorm come through that was quite a sight to see. It came with a southerly wind and while it was wet and noisy, it was quite fun to watch. But, yesterday, the northerly came in, cleared up the rain, but brought chilly 35 mph winds . For example, the outside temperature at 3am on Monday morning was 70 degrees and at 5 am, it was 45 degrees. Tomorrow morning is expected to be in the 30's. But by Friday, the southerly will be back in force and we'll be back in the 70's again. In addition, the spot that we had planned to be anchored by Sunday night ( along the ICW) before engine trouble, had tornado warnings yesterday morning. Yikes! I'll take engine trouble over tornadoes anyday!

The tides here in the Gulf vary by only one foot but when the northerly wind blew through, it blew so hard that it pushed the water (surge) to someplace else (??) so that we dropped about 4 feet lower in our slip. Fortunately, our neighbor in the marina warned us about it, so we were able to tie Mariah up to compensate for it. But where did all that water go? Crazy, eh?

Our friend, John Gilbert, sent some instructions on making a collage of pictures to get more than one picture up. Here it is:
Top left: Docked at Boudreaux's in Offats Bayou
Mid-left: Sunrise in Offats Bayou as we left
Bottom left: Flock of birds overhead
Top right: Dock at Boudreaux's
Middle right: Mud on the keel left from when we grounded
Bottom right: Railroad Bridge horizontal lift