As I indicated in a previous post, I took the boat out today and brought the unique Chrissy along for conversation. She’s the lady who runs my office at work and has been my good friend for many years.
After a quick stop at the grocery store for diet-compatible snacks, we made it to the boat at 8:30 AM, cranked up and motored out of the slip and around to the fuel dock. Well, the sign on the door of the little store which sells fuel, beer and other essential boating items says they don’t open until 9 AM. As I was walking back to the boat, the elderly gentleman who manages the marina was walking from his house on the property to the store. I hollered my apologies and he said he had to get over there soon enough anyway.
So I filled up my gas tank, replacing the seven gallons I’d burned on four previous trips, and while I was at it, I went ahead and filled one of my five-gallon gas jugs. These provide me with additional range as well as the ability to bail out the occasional unfortunate soul who runs out of fuel on the water. Twelve gallons. At $2.20+ per gallon. Fuel is expensive on the water. The gas stations I passed on the way to the boat had prices from $1.89.9 to $1.93.9. The price goes up considerably when you can pull your boat up to the pump.
The old guy told me that fifty-plus boats had come in from the Houston and Galveston areas a few weeks ago for our spring festival, and many of them had to refuel before going back home. He said there were a lot of them with four and five-hundred dollar fuel bills. Big power boats eat fuel. Galveston Bay is a hundred and forty miles from here by water. For my boat, IF (big if…) I had to motor the whole way, it’d take right at 30 gallons. These floating palaces take two and three hundred. Of course, they go considerably faster’n my blazing 5.5 knots (6 MPH) and have a considerably higher level of luxury…
Back to the day’s activities: We left the fuel dock and headed south down the ship channel. We were motoring south into a south wind. Sailing at this time was clearly not an option. I engaged the autopilot so I didn’t have to keep my hands on the wheel, and eating peanuts and motoring along, Chris and I talked about just about everything.
We motored past the construction site which will be southwest Louisiana’s newest riverboat casino, under the 130-foot arch of the I-210 bridge, past the Citgo oil refinery, past the docks of two major petroleum pipelines, each with a huge tanker disgorging its cargo of oil. Continuing on, we passed the docks of a coke (black petroleum product, not dope of drink…)calcining plant, past Moss Lake, a pretty nice expanse of water lined with some nice homes. Unfortunately, Moss Lake is like many bodies of water in Southwest Louisiana, too darned shallow for my boat, so we stayed in the ship channel and kept heading south.
One of the more unusual things we saw was the temporary building apparently put near the shore of the channel as the site for ?hmmm? a wedding? I don’t know. It was a big-bucks thing. A big, air-conditioned tent-like structure with plastic sheeting through which we could see some of the interior preparations. Adjacent was a gazebo, built out over the water, and on the gazebo deck was a fully outfitted bar. Some little rich girl is going to be a princess for sure…
Anyway, we continued south past the Global Industries shipyard. There are some interesting vessels there, ships built in strange configurations to perform various esoteric tasks associated with offshore oil and gas production. You see, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama started drilling for oil and gas before the environmentalist whackos came into power. So even though they can’t drill off the coast of Florida or California, they darned sure do it here…
Global Industries sits on the juncture of the Calcasieu (cowl-ca-shoe) ship channel and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW), locally known as the Intracoastal Canal. This watery cross-roads is known locally as the “Four Corners”.
If we’d headed east, we’d have come to the next intersection, the Industrial Canal, a waterway dredged thirty-five years ago to provide waterway access for more industrial sites. One of my major clients has their site here, and true to function, there was a huge ship at their docks unloading a cargo of liquid natural gas. That’s the result of another of those “not in my back yard” decisions by other cities. Several shiploads of natural gas come in here every month. And it is only a mile from the old family homestead, so it really is in MY back yard. And it provides good jobs for local people and pumps natural gas into a pipeline that feeds energy to a hungry nation.
Well, we didn’t turn that way. We motored on, the 27-year-old engine performing flawlessly, for another several miles, until I figure we’d met the requirements for the day’s trip. With Chrissy watching Bob, the autopilot, I went forward and raised the mainsail while our nose was pointing south, dead into the wind. After I got the mainsail up, we spun the boat around and killed the engine. Blissful silence! Even though the little engine is quiet enough to carry on normal conversation in the cockpit, turning it off always makes me happy. After all, this IS a sailboat!
Motoring into the wind on the trip down, we’d been running four to five knots. Under sail at last. The wind was dead astern, and under mainsail alone, we were doing over six knots. And it was wonderful! Between breaks in the clouds, the sun sets the water to sparkling, and the only sounds were the wind in the rigging and the chuckling wake. Chrissy mumbled something about it sounding like a waterfall and promptly started napping on and off, and I steered north, retracing our path, enjoying my boat under sail.
We had occasional traffic, a few fishermen and a few pleasure boats, and a couple of tugboats pushing strings of barges, and one particularly annoying a**hole with a huge powerboat with enormously loud engines. But mostly what we had was a great day on the water, pleasant conversation, the feel of wind and sun and spray. All things considered, a good day. I feel much better.