Holy Cow!! We’ve started taking the sailboat out to get some time behind the tiller and start learning the waters around Corpus and man have we learned some lessons. The first one being these waters are full of sandbars from all the dredging to keep the ICW and other channels deep enough, and I think we found every one of them. But the best lesson was that it isn’t the end of the world we could get ourselves off and back in to the channel, well most of the time, and there are some great boaters in the area that are willing to help pull you off.
So here’s the trick, if you have 2 or 3 people on the boat the extras need to get in the water (it’s funner than it sounds actually) and start rocking the boat towards the channel, and the person still in the boat needs to steer towards the channel (keeping an eye out for those in the water when the boat breaks free). Once the boat is back in the channel, cut the propeller and get your crew back on board asap. Depending on the current will depend on how easy it is to get everyone back on board, cuz once you cut the propeller the boat is subject to the current of course. But this worked for us twice in the same day (ya, I wasn’t kidding about the number of sandbars we found).
Lesson #2 … always make sure you have a tow rope on board!! One incident we lost engine power and the current pushed over to the side of the channel before we even knew what was happening, so needless to say our ‘trick’ wasn’t going to work this time. We called for a tow, but at over $800 to tow us less than a 1/2 mile we weren’t to excited about that option. So we waited and found a fellow power boater that was willing to pull us off the sandbar and back to our slip.
What was the problem with the engine that caused all this chaos? That is for another blog post on what happens when water gets in your diesel fuel … uugghhh!!!