The 2014 Texas 200 in a Tiny Boat

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five - Part Six

The Mystery Boat

As the two still-astonished sailormen perforce accepted their plight-helpless in the twin grasp of furiously speeding water and air as if their craft were frozen to the sea-the Gray Mouser cried out, "O Fafhrd, now I can well believe that metaphysical fancy that the whole universe is water and our world but one wind-haunted bubble in it." (Trapped in the Sea of Stars, Fritz Leiber)

I have mentioned in passing some unknown, headstrong quality of my Puddle Duck. The mystery began as soon as I let go from the solid at Port Mansfield; the fitful winds confused by the tight cove edged by condos added to an initial strangeness as my little boat spun in circles, her annoyingly interesting trait of getting in irons (salty talk for being stuck head to wind), then spinning through and getting in irons again. This will be one of the enduring mysteries of the week, why this boat would sometimes act like a mischievous compass. I don't believe in the supernatural so I know the answer lies in the relationship of a sail's center of effort to the boat's center of lateral resistance, spiced with whatever issues a short, rectangular-planform boat has. But you'd think such a boat would present few problems for going around to the other tack, even if backing the mainsail were necessary. So there I went, or not went, as my companions sailed on ahead, all except for one, who had also started late and was patiently providing basic beginner advice without understanding the cosmic curse of my situation.

This problem did not return until late the next day as we had decided to make it a 45-50 mile day to cut the distance we would have to cover on the third day. We left the non-Duck boats comfortable in the Day 2 camp (Padre Island) and forged ahead-and almost immediately the mystery returned as I cut across the shallows aiming for the "short cut" the others had taken behind the spoil islands (perhaps these short cuts were the greater mystery of the cruise given the trouble they always caused). Then after the usual 5 minutes of almost tearful annoyance the boat seemed to say, "OK, that's good, let's go!" And I got her around and we went. Similar to the first day, the Duck fleet pulled far away, but their (thankfully) bright yellow sails were still visible even in the dusk, and the sailing was pleasant, and I smiled contentedly after the centerboard stopped grounding out and spinning the boat in the 'short cut'.

The additional 10 miles we had allotted ourselves passed well enough in the lovely sunset, and later, the mist that was blowing in from the mainland. Darkness with His muddy fingers arose, clearing his throat and scratching his ass and generally getting to work, just as I caught the last yellow sail turning in to our proposed stop at The Padre Island Yacht Club. The previous few back-cramping miles had been spiced with dreams of a shower at the club, so when the channel became clear in the thickening mist, and the boat again spun in circles, I looked for a sharp heavy object to clarify my desires. I am ashamed that I did not instead meditate about the philosopher David Hume (that rockstar of thinkers) writing about cause and effect in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: "The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it." That's it, exactly. I should have taken the boat's behavior as just one event in a stream of events starting at The Big Bang. But, no, I was infuriated.

It was only another man's misfortune that helped. I feel bad about that. Please understand - I do not consider myself to be a very sharp sailor but have generally made a series of small sailboats do what I want. Now this one was telling me I had not yet learned to sail. Now I glimpsed ahead a most experienced man - "He has forgotten more than I will ever know" - and here he too was pirouetting in his Puddle Duck. Chuck Leinweber, called out, "I can't get this boat to turn up the channel!" and the world was right once again. We poor humans dream big, and often enough the answer is, "No / Not today / Not yet/ Someday / Not ever / Try something else / What?"

I probably would have circled the mouth of that channel until weeping and babbling, but the wiser man solved it with a pragmatic, "Oh, forget it, let's camp on that mud beach over there." There he unloaded a precious cargo of single-malt and insisted I pour myself a healthy dose, which made up for my lost shower. Soon we guided in Mike Jackson, getting lost in the now thick mist, and the Great Mystery of the Rounding-up receded in good company and the several tasks prefatory to turning in for the night. These tasks are so simple at home yet so time intensive on a mud beach-not so bad as mysteries go.

Rough water outside Port Mansfield (of course a wide-angle camera reduces the terror factor a little).

An unexpected visit, approaching Army Hole. “What’s was that? Oh!”

To Paul's Mott with Humility

Assuming the command of the expedition, upon the strength of my being a sailor, I packed the Long Doctor with a paddle in the bow, and then shoving off, leaped into the stern; thus leaving him to do all the work, and reserving to myself the dignified sinecure of steering. All would have gone on well, were it not that my paddler made such clumsy work that the water spattered, and showered down upon us without ceasing. Continuing to ply his tool, however, quite energetically, I thought he would improve after a while, and so let him alone. But by and bye, getting wet through with this little storm we were raising, and seeing no signs of its clearing off, I conjured him, in mercy's name, to stop short, and let me wring myself out. Upon this, he suddenly turned round, when the canoe gave a roll, the outrigger flew overhead, and the next moment came rap on the doctor's skull, and we were both in the water. (Omoo, Herman Melville)

Boats are the supreme teachers of humility; your various English teachers will always come a distant second. A man as intelligent and sea-experienced as Melville (his Omoo is more fiction-flavored autobiography than fiction) is just one of our historical precedents. Before proceeding with this melancholy subject, let's digress again, this time via philology.

For the Northerner the word "mott' is particularly charming. We don't have it. In upper southern English, "motte" is a tuft of human hair standing up on the head. It comes from the Old French "motte," which means a raised mound, often one on which a castle tower is built. On the Laguna Madre a mott is a spit of land with a tuft of bushes growing on it. The word is excellently adapted to this otherwise featureless terrain, where a bush is a major navigation mark. Desperate sailors throughout the history of this area have breathed prayers in different languages for want of a mott sighting. It is a holy place for believer and atheist alike.

The cruise to Paul's Mott had already begun in humility for me with the "mystery" boat phenomenon, but it was just a beginning. We began the cruise glad we had voted to suffer another ten miles the day before. But once again I had not slept well - I was becoming grateful that the Duck was uncomfortable enough to keep me awake. I had tried reclining in the cockpit, which is how the other Duckers spent most of the day, but soon I would be drifting away to sleep. Must not recline. I had never thought of discomfort as a safety feature; I will contact leading naval architects about it. I had by then shifted to the inflatable cushion to ease the agony on my bony ass, yet this turned out to be a rolling cushion of treachery (it needed internal bulkheads to stop the fabric from turning like a bulldozer tread), always ready to slide me off in any direction, though a distraction better than pain.

We were going to try to stay together today, but I had fallen behind as usual with only my two back-of-the-fleet companions, Michael and Kellen, who occasionally passed me and then sometimes appeared behind me hours later as the Laguna Madre's uncharted singularity warped space. As for the rest, they pulled ahead, and I could not add sail area or saw off extra weight from my friend's boat to catch up. I could try to sail better, and I did try to remember to slide my butt forward to keep the transom up in light air, this hampered by a painful cleat that suggested John had not sat there himself, but he is lighter than I am, which may have made all the difference (on a small boat, one man's sweet spot is another's pain in the ass). I had already drilled holes in my friend's boat to accommodate my downhaul and halyard and was slow to modify anything else. What else to do to help me keep up?

We rallied at Point of Mustang at Port Aransas where the wind-angle would require us to go close-hauled through Lydia Ann channel. I asked for advice on speed; three strong friendly men agreed that I needed to flatten my sail, and we used our joint musculature for the job. We tightened the outhaul until the sail developed a few wrinkles in deep, long valleys parallel to the boom. I had doubts - the only 'good' wrinkles I know about are the ones for a properly set lugsail, tack to peak, and these were new to me. You could do an ethnography about sail wrinkles - the regions of the world wherein they dwell leads to a meditation upon their customs and history (for when you look up and study your sail it seems to fill the sky with a majesty and awe that nonsailors can hardly imagine; look up, and your sail joins the cosmos).

I ceded to people who have hundreds and probably thousands of miles of sailing experience over me. Yet once shoved off, the fleet left me behind again; in fact the yellow angles of my comrades were pulling ahead more despairingly than ever. And my GPS, that most brutally honest of our robot friends, told the sad tale of exactly how slow. I was so distressed that no cognitive categories were at hand to process the boat that motored out and paused a moment to let me savor the compelling notes of the bagpipe player-a ruggedly handsome man with eye patch and cowboy hat. WTF? No-I was not prepared and gazed stupidly at him. (If he is reading this, I hope he accepts my apology now for not being more visibly appreciative; he was out applauding the Livestrong cancer fundraiser.)

A radio call brought the senior of the Graham men back to tow me, but by then something about the conditions favored more speed, and on I went threading the maze of Port Aransas ferries. These boats, passing back and forth eternally between the docks, are a friendly version of Odysseus's Scylla and Charybdis. The originals would just crush your ship, whereas these will crush every five minutes and then only after your extreme idiocy and after many warnings. I hear tell they have rarely accommodated a suicide.

The busy port is actually a welcome change from the merely natural scenery of the cruise. All those damned birds, vegetated dunes, annoyingly playful dolphins and sunlight on the waves - ah! - one needs some genuine dirty, dangerous industry - the harsh commercial angles, the tyrannizing cranes and brutish metal bulks of barges and diesel rumbles and triply inconsiderate traffic of powerboats-all of these covert blessings make Nature possible to notice in Western Civilization (here refer back to the mini-lecture on information theory).

Our own version of Scylla and Charybdis were passed. We coursed along Lydia Ann by the sight of other resting monsters (barges) drawn up in quiet might. Then, of course, another 'short-cut' through grassy shallows to Blind Pass. Grounding out in a shallow draft boat is not bad when the ground is solid enough to walk on - a chance to stretch the legs, reef a sail in safety, and for me the only time I was caught up to the Duck fleet and exercised the linguistic part of the body. Gordo and Brian were drawn up at the pass and enjoying a swim; they invited me in but the short-slow-boat clock was still on the job, marking out the diminishing seconds to get the job done, so I must decline. In recompense the afternoon cruise was good in the glittering waters, where Sean Mulligan in his Paradox boat is a thousand feet to my port, in the deeper water this boat requires, a friendly ghostly image in the refracted light.

A couple of hours later and I saw Paul's Mott, a place I like, having been there with John on his Laguna Tres in 2012. I created a brief dream of fellowship, rest, food, sleep. And I forgot how we had driven the boat on the shoaling windward side and dragged it around to the leeward side to avoid being driven away downwind. In hindsight perhaps I was just arrogant, thinking I would make a few shallow tacks and get to the leeward beach. In fact I don't know what I was thinking, but as I turned the corner and tried to tack in, I was losing ground, and going about to the other tack drove me back further.

Except for a brief stint back at Lydia Ann channel, I had not had to sail upwind. This was a bad time to discover the 17 knot wind (someone measured it on the beach) said, "No." Steadily I drifted downwind. The oars! I had some-clunky half-inch thick blunt blades of uselessness, the memory of them is still egregious. There was no rowing thwart, just a pile of gear in dry bags. A minute of frothy splashing (or rather a kind of clubbing of the water) and kneeling on shifting and sometimes painful gear suggested this was no solution as I lost more ground. The anchor is the sailor's friend and its loyalty was not found wanting. Hanging there far (it seemed) from a restful haven, there was time for bitter reproval for forgetting to drive up on the windward side.

Wait, this is Texas, I can wade the boat in! I dipped the oar and found the water over my head. Getting on the radio to ask for help is the dreaded and humilifying last answer. Gordo Barcomb motored out in his 30 footer and kindly brought me in. Not only that, as I stumbled about the beach in shame, he brought me a cold beer, and someone else offered a huge chunk of watermelon, and though this is not fair to all the people who have showed me much kindness in this state, these images became the symbol of Texas hospitality. Time for a group photo, a shot of Bill Moffitt's moonshine, a supper of dehydrated mountain food, from which I had forgotten to remove the dehydration pack (blech!), the evening hygienic rituals, and, with the foreknowledge of the whining, demanding voices of first-light, an attempt at sleep - about 5 solid hours, the most I ever had on this cruise, and it was almost enough. I also relaxed the outhaul and the sail finally worked as designed when close-hauled.

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