Things might get hectic for the next few months, so I wanted to squeeze in another sailing excursion before it got too difficult to get out. My wife was originally supposed to come out on this sail, but she fell ill at the last minute and so I managed to get somebody to fill in for her.

Since this was a paying charter, I opted for the “full day” charter. And since I also joined the Bay Area Sailing Association (the sailing school’s sailing club), the “full day” means a full 24-hour charter with no time limit. The lack of time limit is a much more pleasant way to plan for a sail – you can show up later in the morning, and there is no hurry to get the boat back to the marina. The only trick is that if you are not going to head out until after 10AM, you’re gonna want to being food on board because you’ll get damn hungry sailing through the lunch hour.

We had 2 new crew members, Nick and Hiba. Drew came along also, and so since this was his second time out with me he was automatically promoted to First Mate 🙂

We all met at the house, piled into one car and drove down together to the Marina. Since I was signing up to be a member, the crew was taken aboard the boat while I finished up the membership and chartering paperwork. Once all of the formalities were taken care of, and I was shown around the boat, we took a bit of time to familiarize ourselves with this boat. A Beneteau 32, the nice thing about this boat was that the sail cover is designed to neatly stow the mainsail as it is dropped, so no worries about returning the boat with the mainsail all sloppily wrapped around the boom. (That MIGHT have happened on a previous trip)

After we went over the sail plan and what to expect, we fired up the engine and headed out. The seas were very calm at about 10:30 in the morning, with almost no wind to speak of. But we headed out anyway, beyond the Kemah Boardwalk and out into Galveston Bay. Today the Bay was a lot less crowded — partially I’m sure because it was a lot colder than it normally is in Houston, but also because there were no races planned for that day.

At the helm, Nick took us out of the channel and into open water. We raised the mainsail and jib, but the wind was so low that I was concerned we would not move anywhere. In fact we did start to move forward, albeit at a very calm pace (2-3 knots maximum).

We kept at that for awhile, and we practiced a few calm tacks to get the mechanics down with Nick at the helm and Hiba & Drew handling the jib sheets.  After awhile the wind started to pick up ever so slightly, and we began to cruise around 3.5 knots, and eventually making it up to four knots.

After about 1.5 hours, we all got hungry so we broke out the snacks. Cheese, crackers, tomatoes, drinks, and we even cranked up the radio to kick back with some music. We never actually stopped sailing, I think we were at a broad- to close-reached course with me behind the helm for most of the time while we all snacked.

When we finished up with the snacks, we tidied up and then got back to the sailing, because the wind started to pick up a bit more. With Hiba at the helm we got up to 4.5 knots, which was pretty good considering the light wind conditions we were sailing in. But it was a bit too cold out (for Houston), and after awhile Hiba sneaked down into the cabin to warm up as the rest of us continued on sailing.

By this time we were almost up to 5 knots, but we were just about ready to head back in. It took us about an hour to make it back to the channel entrance – we had sailed out much further than I had realized. It will be good practice in the future for me to start estimating how far out we sail based on our time out and average speed, to see if I can start getting good at navigating us on a planned course, schedule and travel plan.

With the sails dropped and the engine started up, I took us back in to the marina under power. The docking this time was a bit of a mess, with two misfires and u-turns. But we eventually managed to get the boat back into the slip after a few tries and without rubbing the boat against the dock, so all was good.

There was not much tidying up to do, just stowing away all of the items which were loose in thee cockpit. I realized later that I should have brought the winch handles into the cabin, but I’ll just remember that for next time.

So even though the wind was very light, we still were able to enjoy a nice calm excursion out in Galveston Bay, with good sailing time. Looking forward to more practice !

Click here to see additional pictures from the excursion. (Contact Joel for the password)