How do you prioritize your repairs and upgrades?

Something is always broken. Our list of repairs and improvements for Gimme Shelter is about two pages long.

Of course, some things jump to the front of list -- like a ripped sail or dead batteries -- while others never seem to get resolved.

I've got a propane oven I'm planning to install, but I need to spent about $100 on a shut-off solenoid, and I just haven't brought myself to order the part since it's 99 degrees outside and the thought of making the boat any hotter by turning on an oven seems ridiculous. However, I walked into West Marine and dropped almost $75 on a portable 12 v fan. 

Could we have lived without that fan purchase? Yes, but it just seemed to make more sense than the propane valve.

We also have a missing hot water heater. It would take $250 and maybe an hour to get a new one fitted, and we'd once again have warm showers. But who wants a warm shower when you're already sweating in a boat. So that project has also hit the back burner.

We had been conveniently ignoring the cracked deck hatch since we bought the boat six months ago. Then we finally had some Texas style rain.

I awoke to the feeling of water sprinkling on my leg, and I immediately jumped up thinking one of the dogs had decided to pee on me.

I don't know why I thought this since neither dog has ever peed on the boat. The dogs obviously didn't know why I thought this either since they both groggily raised their heads as they tried to figure out why I had jumped out of bed.

Then I saw it.

 The rain was coming right through the crack in the hatch and dripping right onto the bed where my leg had been.

I grabbed a trash can and managed to lodge it between the bed and the table where it would catch the drip and went back to sleep. In the morning I had collected almost three inches of water in the can.

Looks like putting new plexiglass in the leaky hatch just got to the top of the list.

Destination Review: Harborwalk, Hitchcock, Texas

After passing beneath the Galveston Causeway, if you head west along the ICW you'll find Harborwalk Marina in Hitchcock, Texas. www.harborwalk.com

The marina suffered major damage from Hurricane Ike and just re-opened with newly renovated facilities in 2013. 

We were able to reserve a slip two weeks in advance with no problem, but there were quite a few transient boaters staying the weekend. 

Slip fees were $75 a night with electric and water hook-ups. The marina boasts a pool, an outdoor bar, a restaurant, a ship store with sandwich shop, a bait shop, gas docks and supposedly pump out facilities although I never got a clear answer on where they were and if we could use them, so don't count on being able to pump out there.

On paper and in the photos, it seems great. Unfortunately, Harborwalk really let us down.

We had a rough sail with strong headwinds, so we didn't arrive until near 5 p.m. on a Saturday. The pool bar stayed open to make us one strawberry daiquiri, but then closed up for the night. At that point Floyd's restaurant was the only thing left open, and with 30 or so boaters waiting for tables as well as a steady stream of locals, there was an hour wait to be seated.

Some of our friends opted to place an order for carry out, so they could eat back on the boat, but they were greatly disappointed with quality of food -- think Chilis quality but at $25 an entree.

Although very willing to pay Harborwalk prices for drinks, we were left without a bar, so we spent the evening sitting in the pavilion drinking the beer we brought, playing guitars and getting eat alive by some of the biggest mosquitoes I've ever seen. 

Harborwalk is built in a swamp with standing water everywhere. Our Deep Woods Off and citronella candles didn't even seem to phase the swarms of mosquitoes.

Normally, this would have been a great evening despite all the mosquitoes, but there was a tension in the air over the fact that we had brought our own coolers. Was it allowed? Was it not allowed? As I said, we were perfectly willing to buy our drinks from Harborwalk, but weren't given the opportunity.

All evening there were also locals pulling up in small motorboats that would just tie up to the dock and then stand beside their boats drinking beer and smoking cigarettes with their stereos cranked up as loud as they could get them to play while shouting to one another over the music -- incredibly annoying. 

Sunday morning we went over to the ship store to pay for our slip rental and then went to the pool to enjoy the water for an hour or two before heading back to Kemah. Unfortunately, a security guard promptly showed up to tell us that we couldn't swim in the pool unless we were members. We calmly explained that we had paid for slips and those were our boats tied up right in front of the pool. He then said we need wrist bands to be in the pool and once again insisted we get out. You know, it would have been nice of the guy in the ship store who took our slip rental money to give us wrist bands or even mention wrist bands in any way. 

At this point I was just fed up with the attitude of the staff and with whole place in general, so instead of walking back to the ship store to get wrist bands we decided to start the trip back to Kemah.

Harborwalk
Hours: 9-5, Mon-Sat, 10-5 Sunday
1445 Harborwalk Blvd, Hitchcock, Texas 77563
Toll free 866-435-8777 or local 409-935-3737

Harborwalk gets a big thumbs down. I've never felt more unwelcome for $75 a night.

Under the weather

We didn't get much of anything done on the boat last weekend. Friday it was pouring rain, so I made a trip to the vet with Dixie and Tex for their annual exams and vaccinations. I can rest easy for another year without worrying one of them will go rabid and rip my neck open while I'm sleeping -- probably.

Friday night we decided to try an art class with some of Mary's friends.

The subject matter of the painting was a little dull, but thankfully the class was BYOW and after a few glasses I really hit my stride and added Tex to the painting. I would have added Dixie as well, but I was out of brown paint.

It was still pouring rain when we went to bed Friday night, and the forecast claimed it was going to continue into Saturday, which was why Mary got stuck sitting through two-hour meeting of the Texas Photographic Collectors Association (TPCA) with me. One of the guys did a presentation on the history of Kodak Bantam cameras and 828 film. I could tell she was bored out of her mind, but she was a good sport.

It was almost 2 p.m. before we made it to the marina, and the weatherman had obviously lied. It had not continued to rain, and there was not a cloud in the sky. We could have left early Saturday morning and been anchored out overnight if we'd planned correctly.

I usually rely on the Weather Underground app when I'm looking for a reliable forecast. I used to check three or four places until I realized that most apps -- including Sea Tow and Yahoo! Weather -- are just pulling their forecast data from Weather Underground.

I still use the Sea Tow app for it's tide data. Unfortunately, I've never found the perfect weather app that puts the forecast, wind speeds, radar and tides all together in one nice package.

This weekend we once again relied on Weather Underground, and while their forecast of no rain held up, their forecast of wind speed did not. We expected 10 knot winds all night and got beat up with gusting 30 knot winds.

What's the most reliable weather source for sailing?

Boat party

With Gimme Shelter safely berthed at Marina Del Sol, it was time to let go of all the anxiety that had been incurred over the past couple weeks of discussing this purchase, surveying, getting loans, finding insurance, etc. This is Mary's boat, so she was taking care of most of that stuff, but not being in control of any of it was stressing me out.  This boat was my first major purchase, and the first time I've ever taken out a loan.  At first the thought of spending this much money really made me sick to my stomach, but as the day got closer and closer all I wanted to do was get it over with and start enjoying my new boat.

Everyone in the marina got a tour Friday night. Then Saturday I went jogging (just had to brag a little, didn't you?) and had a late breakfast with the crew of the Tina Marie while Mary disappeared to Wal-Mart for two hours.  I got super lost.  The Walmart in Kemah is off the google maps.  

We went back into Houston for lunch with my parents who were visiting, and then it was back to the marina just in time to start the boat warming party.

Hamburgers were grilled.

Guitars were played.

Rum was drank.

It doesn't always turn out nice when your friend bubbles collide, but in this case everything went well.  My friends are mostly French speaking, and our friends on the dock happen to be French Canadian, so the conversation flowed nicely.  It was nice that my friends got to hear Freddies singing/guitar playing for the first time. 

I showed my friends the "little" boat and they were impressed.  

I went to bed around midnight, but I'm sure the neighbors hated us because I heard our overnight guests still stirring at 4:30 a.m.  Not everyone goes to bed at 11 on Saturday nights!

Sunday arrived with a ringing in my ears and a pounding in my head. Mary tried to sneak through the salon to make coffee, but with two people on the fold-out and two people in the aft berth, there was no way to be sneaky enough without waking them all. (I knew we should have held out for a center cockpit with an aft cabin!)  You lose the large cabin in a center cockpit, and besides how often do we have three couples on our boat?  Once so far.  

I went to work making pancakes, eggs, and bacon for both our crew and the crew of the Tina Marie. Then Mary served breakfast using her new nautical themed plates from West Marine on the Edson table in the cockpit. I think everyone was quite impressed.  There's nothing like waking up to a sunrise behind palm trees.  You sort of forget how magical it is when you're there every weekend.  It's nice to have fresh eyes look at your life to get some perspective. 

Sign on the dotted line

Wednesday night we excitedly rushed out of our respective offices, met up at Mary’s house, raced to the car, and then ever-so-slowly drove down to Kemah in Houston’s rush hour traffic.

It was time to sign on the dotted line.

I wasn’t nervous at all – then again, it wasn’t my money.  Thanks, Fred. 

The paperwork at the broker’s office took about ten seconds. Mary signed, and it was a done deal.  Much less than I expected, so weird I got no papers at all on the boat -- not even a receipt.  Hopefully they come in the mail!

We had hoped to move the boat that night, but as it was cold and raining, we just went to sit inside of it for a few minutes and enjoy the ambiance instead.  We got to have that great moment, when you buy something new, where you just run around and open everything. It's even more fun in an old boat because there is so much weird stuff to find!  

The broker left us a bottle of champagne in the boat.

 

We decided not to pop it open because we immediately had to drive an hour back to Houston. Instead we left it in the refrigerator – something we couldn't do on the Seahorse. However, we probably should have gone for it because by the end of the weekend, we still hadn't had a chance to toast together to this new phase in our life.  Yeah, I don't understand how in a weekend full of celebration there was never the right moment for champagne.