First sail in Galveston Bay

What a great sail.  We had friends visit from Dallas and all of us went out sailing.  It was a great time and it was a bit comforting to make that first sail on salt water in our boat with others.

We went from the Marina, through Clear Lake to the Channel that goes under the Kemah Bridge.  We motored past the Kemah Boardwalk and out through the channel and to about channel marker 3.  At that point we turned a bit to port and flew the jib only. (Mains'l is getting repaired and wasn't ready).

It was a bit foggy which turned out to be great because it allowed me to "sail out of sight of land" on our first outing.  We went about 7 miles out toward the Houston Ship Channel.  When we were pretty close and tacked we had a group of 4 to 6 dolphins join us and just keep surfacing all around the boat. 

It was the coolest thing to experience on our first sail here.


As you can imagine, Deb and I were thrilled with one more step in the direction of our ultimate dream.  We had a great time and I think you can see how happy we were just based on the look on our faces.  Deb tried to take this picture at "arms length" several times but with us bouncing around in the chop, we weren't able to get it. 

Thank you Karen for taking the picture to capture the moment.

The boat is in the water !

Bottom job complete, new prop installed (13X11 3 blade), new bronze seacocks, and the mast stepped and tuned.  All good stuff.  I went to the boat to start it and no water through the cooling system.
Darn !
But after a quick inspection, I found that the raw water strainer was cracked while the boat was on the hard and the temperature was freezing.  West Marine could get a new sight glass in a week when special ordered, but here is where being here in Kemah helped us.  I walked over to Texas Boaters Resale Shop and they had a whole new strainer with sight glass for $10.  30 minutes later it was installed in the boat and water pumping through the exhaust.  Yeah !!

We are planning on moving it from the Shipyard to our slip sometime this weekend and we can see how that 3 blade prop does compared to the old tired 2 blade slow poke prop we had before.

Moved to Kemah

This week we packed everything we have in our car, truck and a U-Haul (Thank you to Spencer, Whitney, Randy and Sis for helping load the truck and Mike for packing the things at the Marina).  We left Dallas on Monday night about 6pm.  We arrived about midnight in Clear Lake and fell asleep for the night at a hotel.  The next morning, we got the keys to our new place, unloaded the Marina stuff into our storage building.  We unpacked the truck for a little while until the helpers arrived and moved the rest of the stuff into the apartment.

Fast forward 4 days and we have most of the boxes unpacked and it is starting to feel a little bit like home.  I am looking forward to getting our furniture on Wednesday next week.  I am tired of sitting in a kitchen chair :).

Saturday (today) the boat arrived.  We received a call from the shipyard letting us know that there was a boat on a trailer with no truck sitting there and they were assuming it was ours.  We met the transport company at 9am and had the boat unloaded and blocked on the hard where she will have some work done.  She is getting 2 new bronze thru-hulls, seacocks to replace the gate valves and a new prop.  We hope to have her splashed by the end of the week depending on how long it takes to have the prop made to specs.