In the beginning

The Intracoastal Waterway (sometimes called The Ditch) according to Wikipedia:

The Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) is a 3,000-mile waterway along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States.  It provides a navigable route along its length without many of the hazards of travel on the open sea.


The waterway runs for most of the length of the Eastern Seaboard, from New Jersey, where it connects with the Atlantic Ocean then around the Gulf of Mexico to Brownsville, Texas. The ICW is a significant portion of the Great Loop, a route encircling the eastern half of the North American continent.

The creation of the Intracoastal Waterway was authorized by the United States Congress in 1919.  Federal law provides for the waterway to be maintained at a minimum depth of 12 ft for most of its length.

The Intracoastal Waterway has a good deal of commercial activity; barges haul petroleum, petroleum products, foodstuffs, building materials, and manufactured goods. It is also used extensively by recreational boaters. On the east coast, some of the traffic in fall and spring is by snowbirds who regularly move south in winter and north in summer. The waterway is also used when the ocean is too rough to travel on.

The Great Loop, as mentioned above, usually is bordered on the West by the Mississippi and encircles the Eastern US.  I wanted to start at the Southern tip of Texas. I call it the Great Lasso.

The Idea

I grew up going to the Redneck Riviera, the Northern coast of Florida, specifically Pensacola Beach, every summer for vacation. I learned to love the Gulf Coast then. When I moved to Houston in the 1990s I bought a used boat with my good friend Jack Schubert. It sank. He still blames me for that. We decided to buy a new boat, a 21.5 foot Century, and keep it at his bay house, Casa Rosa, in Galveston. After much time on the ICW, I decided it would be fun to take a trip on it. I chose to take the land cut from Galveston, west to Matagorda Island, about 90 miles. It was an easy, beautiful ride and I was hooked. I thought it would be great to one day travel the Great Loop around the Continental US and back via the Mississippi. Unfortunately, my only experience with the ICW was that of a calm, smooth land cut.  To say the least, it can vary from that dramatically.

The Boat

I had to choose a boat that would let me fish in the incredibly shallow bays of the Gulf Coast and handle the rough waters of those bays in bad weather. After a lot of research I chose a Panga-style boat. A Panga is:

An open "semi-dory" type skiff, with strongly rising sheer and of comparatively narrow beam.  Panga-style boats have become popular fishing and workboats in many parts of the developing world. In the hands of an experienced operator they are considered extremely seaworthy

In fact my first experience with a Panga was when I chartered one for a fishing trip in Cabo San Lucas. My toothless guide took the boat into deep water off shore in semi rough seas. I was impressed with how safe I felt and later shopped for one line.  I found mine in Tampa, Florida, bought it and had it trucked to Brownsville, Texas.

Note the T-top. It made the sun a non issue.

I was obsessed with starting the trip at the tip of Texas. I could have saved the shipping fee if I would have flown to Tampa and started there.  But there is something about the Texas coast that I wanted to experience first. Plus I am a bit anal about symmetry and starting in the middle of the Great Loop didn't seem right.

I named the boat Come Hell Or High Water.

The Prep

I had 30 days from the time the boat arrived at the Marina on South Padre Island just over the causeway from Brownsville until my trip was to start. 

The first order of business was to find a place to keep my boat for those 30 days. I chose Sea Ranch Marina. 

It was the only place in the area with a "stack" to dry dock the boat.

They put the boats in and out of the water with two big forklifts.

It wasn't a bare metal boat...but almost.   I had to add the electronics and I needed someone to install them.  I was referred to Angel Ramirez.  I shipped him a combination GPS/depth finder with doppler weather overlay, VHF ship to shore radio and an AM/FM radio with a CD player.  Angel worked his tail off in blistering heat and charged me a fraction of the total number of hours it took him to make all the stuff work…and it did, all of it with no issues which was good since I had no way to bring it back if there was a problem.

I purchased a SPOT, a GPS device with three buttons.  One that would send my location on a Google map to designated email addresses.  one that would notify a service called TowBoatUSA that would locate me from the GPS and provide a tow if I was adrift or stuck.  And a 911 button, that would notify a 7 X 24 response center with my exact location if I was in real trouble. 

I used two life jackets.  A big orange one that was designated as a Type I, the kind that would turn you face up if unconscious and another one, a type II, that inflated using CO2 cartridges when you hit the water. I wore the orange one in bad weather and the other one the rest of the time.  I still don't trust the inflatable one since, thank goodness, I have never hit the water and seen it work.

I loaded a big yellow floating ditch bag with Vienna Sausages and bottled water.   I also filled a mesh bag that attached to my life jacket with floating GPS and VHF handhelds, flares, a whistle, a flashlight, sun block, mosquito repellent and one bottle of water.

Lastly, I had a flare gun with five cartridges hanging within arms reach to the right of my console.

Oh, and a 38 caliber handgun in case I was attacked by pirates…or land sharks.

I made lots of calls to the various Coast Guard locations looking for safety tips. Henry Quigley, a Corpus Christy Auxiliary Coast Guard member, was especially helpful. Henry travelled the ICW from Corpus Christi to Maryland in a 43 foot trawler (that is cheating) with his wife.

Among Henry's suggestions were:

1) If I am in a thunderstorm and need to anchor to wait it out, anchor on the leeward side of the ICW. That means the side the wind is blowing to so that if your anchor gives you won’t be blown across the ICW and into the path of a barge, the tractor trailer trucks of the ICW. The barges, if they need to stop for the weather, will run their boats aground on the opposite side so they can use the wind to help push them off the sand when the storm passes. You do not want to get run over by a barge.

2) Tie a small rope from the back of the boat to your ankle in case you are thrown overboard. Henry told me that many of the people they rescue say “I couldn’t believe how quickly the boat got away from me”. The boat acts like a sail, catches the wind and moves faster than you do. You also attach the rope to the boat’s “kill switch” so that you won’t be dragged under in the event you go over. Oh, and keep a knife on you in case the “Kill Switch” doesn’t kill the engine.

Two weeks before my trip was to start I drove to Brownsville from Dallas for a weekend to make sure everything worked. Angel finished up the electronics on Sunday but I found that the bilge pump and the water line to the live bait well were both broken. The bilge pump is used to pump out any water that gets in the boat.  My next bit of luck, and you need quite a bit to pull something like this off, showed up in the form of Marcello. Marcello is the mechanic of the marina. He just happened to be there looking at a friend’s boat when Angel called him over. Marcello diagnosed a clogged hose to the live bait well…and unclogged it. He also determined after much hot, sweaty work, that the bilge pump was broken beyond repair. He jumped into his Charger and drove across the causeway to Wal-Mart, bought me a new one, returned and installed it. All this on a Sunday.

One of the constants of the trip was the great people I met on the way.  Angel and Marcello were two of those.  Marcello is on the left.

 

By 5:00 on Sunday I was ready to do a test run. I darted across the bay, bought some live shrimp and went to a spot that a fishing guide told me to “pull the motor up and drift fish over the grass to a deep cut on the other side”. Unfortunately, after about an hour, it was getting dark and I had to put my motor down before I reached the cut…in 18 inches of water…in the middle of South Padre Bay. All was going well until I noticed a bird standing on the water between me and another cut that would get me back to the marina. The next thing I knew I was out of the boat pushing it off sand bars in the middle of the bay. The tide had gone out and what is a shallow bay became much more shallow. After about an hour of touch and go, I returned to the marina just as it was getting dark. It was a good time to test my running lights and they worked too.

One of my favorite things to do after a hot day was to cruise the area in my boat with the tunes cranked while enjoying a cold beer. This is a great restaurant where I had dinner before I drove back to Dallas. The cranes in the background were for bungee jumping. It was fun to sit, watch the sun go down and marvel at why someone would do that.  But then they would probably wonder why someone wold take such a small boat around the coast of the US.

                                   

I left South Padre confident that I was ready for my trip. As I drove off I could see the darkening skies of hurricane Alex as it approached. I was hoping my insurance covered hurricanes. No matter, it hit that week South of Padre Island in Mexico and did very little damage to the area.