Low water, High hopes

The alarm went off at 6:00am and we looked at the weather for 30 minutes and decided it was a "no go."  We were under a low water advisory until 4pm and the water in the marina was very low but not as low as Friday when it was 2.5 feet below normal.  Normal is about 6 feet which isn't much to begin with.  The advisory was lifted at 9am instead of 4pm and we looked at one another and said "let's go, hope we can make it out of the marina."  We didn't want to check the "run aground" box on day 1!!  We did our final checks and off we went.  Didn't even stir up any mud so we felt successful.


Final view of Waterford Harbor Marina, our home port for the last 6 months.

Leaving Kemah beneath the 146 Bridge and along the Kemah Boardwalk. Just after this picture was taken, 4 sailboats ran aground immediately in front of us. It looked like a Chinese firedrill in the channel. Needless to say, we had to dart between the chaos in a narrow channel - sorry, no pics!

Dancing with the tankers in the Houston Ship Channel. The Ship Channel is like I35 full of big rigs and you're driving a SMART Car...

Safely made it to Galveston Yacht Basin and got to see Carnival Cruise Lines' Valor and Freedom set sail. Glad we didn't have to manage their wakes!


Safely in the slip for the night. Early start tomorrow. This morning we woke to 34 degrees in Kemah.

Never too many pelican pictures. These guys came by the boat for docktails.










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fort Myers Beach and Downtown Fort Myers

Image
Fort Myers Beach proved to be yet another popular destination as you can see from the pics.  You would think that the temperature was in the high 80s with all the people on the beach but on this day it was barely over 70 but that didn't seem to hinder the population.  Downtown Fort Myers, which is walkable from the marina, always seems to have something going on. On Friday they had a Music Walk and as we went from one performance to another we weren't sure if the performers just picked their own spot to set up or if it was organized.  They offered a wide variety that ranged from a 10 year old country singer to 65-75 year olds band with horns.  There was something for everyone!   
Read more

Making our lists and checking them twice

Image
As Brent and I pondered retirement, we wanted to be active and do something together.  We considered moving to a smaller house in a smaller city but that didn't spur any ideas of how we would fill our time. (For those of you who know me well, you know that I need to be busy most of the time.) We had always enjoyed being on the water and had owned boats for almost 20 years. So we decided that maybe living on a boat would be different yet, enjoyable.  We spent more than a year looking for the perfect live aboard boat with the idea of spending 6-12 months in one marina and then cruising on to another location. As we searched, we revisited an idea Brent had many years back.  He wanted to do the Great Loop.  In a weak moment, I agreed and then the type of boat we needed for The Loop changed drastically.  We needed something that was economical, had a long range, wasn't too large and wasn't too tall. (Lots of bridges to pass under).  In April 2017 we finally ...
Read more

Get out of our way Bea Sounier!!

Image
Today we left South Shore Harbor Marina in New Orleans after being there 3 days and never set eyes on anything in New Orleans, except Walmart!  Oh well, I don't think we missed much that we would be interested in.  We woke up to winds out of the North at about 15 knots and we had to enter Lake Pontchartrain to get back on the ICW and the waves again just tossed us around like a cork.  We tried to reduce our windage by opening up all our eisenglass windows and then we were freezing.  It was not the  way I wanted to start my Monday morning but we survived and things calmed down once we entered the ICW. Ken told us we should not see much more barge traffic now that we were east of the Mississippi River but we think every tug decided to wait for us to get going and they then all got in line in the narrow channel ahead of us.  It made for an extremely SLOW day since there were about 6-8 of them in a line and it was virtually impossible to pass any of them....
Read more