We got a good night's sleep in the A/C, We checked our fuel, our fuel is good and by God we're going to New Orleans. We cleared the Galveston North jetties fairly early in the morning. It used to be and maybe still is the longest jetty in the country. Right at 5 miles if memory serves. It should be an easy eight hours over to Sabine Pass but I've heard from some of the old timers and my sailing mentor Vic Kopycinski if you're ever going to do Sabine offshore make sure you go in at low tide and daytime because at high tide the south of Jetties are or can be fully awash. Translation, they are underwater. It’s another hot summer day and because of what we experienced yesterday precautions are in order. Mike and Jill are both nurses and Mike has procured a prescription for a seasick medication. I don't know that it was new back then but it was new to us and that was the Transderm Scopolamine seasickness patches. I have never had an issue with motion sickness or seasickness in this case but if you know you know. Better safe than sorry applies here. You stick them on your body somewhere and it's supposed to make you not get motion sick. Now, the issue with scopolamine was that it's known to cause hallucinations. How fun right? 

Side Story. My mentor, the aforementioned Vic was on the very same Veracruz race a few years earlier. He was at the helm and was concerned about getting seasick and because it's hot and you don't want to get sunburned he had a nice light shirt and it was open and blowy but still sweating. He put the patch on his back between his shoulder blades where he could reach. Vic had been at the helm for an hour and nervous that the patch wouldn’t stick to his sweaty ass he’d reach back to touch it about every 15-20 minutes. His OCD was in high gear. An hour in he’s checking and dammit there’s no patch! Everyone sweating cuz it's June, It’s Texas and there’s no freaking A/C. It must have slid off.  He digs into his pockets for a replacement. Ah, another patch. All is well. He sticks it right back in that same spot and he sails along and everything's fine and dandy. No mal de mer here which is key. He resumes his patch checking routine. About an hour later he can’t find the damned patch. Not to panic. He has a whole box. These suckers ain’t cheap and Kopysinski is a world renowned tightwad. He even has a card proclaiming his stinginess. Fine. He gets a fresh patch. He does his best to dry his skin and all that before putting the large ish patch on. It's getting close to the end of his hitch and he wants no wooziness when he’s trying to sleep. Mental crew check, Three guys down below they're getting their shut eye, Two guys are on the windward rail for ballast  all good. Vic reaches back and pat's the little patch area because he's fixing to go down below and son of a bitch the goddamn patch ain't there! Shit! Activate Plan B. This patch goes on his right shoulder were he can keep an eye on it. Doesn’t matter if the other crew give him a ribbing he has to have enough patches to get back from Mexico next week. He recalled being within 15 of his time to be up and they're sailing along making good time he said it was the most horrifying thing he'd ever seen. The whole fucking Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)  just erupted in flames right in front of him. He freaked out. Took the helm and spun it like a roulette wheel, hard as he could to port which surprised the shit out of the crew on the rail. They were sent rolling backwards onto the deck. Vic said I screamed like a girl at the top of my lungs because the whole damn thing was on fire. Three guys come running up from down below and want to know what the hell's going on. Someone pries Vics hands off the wheel and they sit him down.He is clearly in distress. They're talking to him trying to figure out what's going on He's just sweating like a hooker in the front pew so they get his shirt off and lo and behold here's four of these transderm patches and they’ve slid down his back but are still on. 

Back, Mike's a little more susceptible to motion sickness than I am but we didn't want to take any chances it's hot if we lose our wind we're going to be rolling around again and it's while it's only 8 hours, kinetosis is not nice. I've got a patch on and so does Mike. I've been at the helm most of the day and I'm going to take a break we are nearing this Sabine Jetties we're probably still a good 12 miles that's 2 hours for us away I put Mike on the wheel and I'm going to go up and stand watch up on the bow and that's about the time our wind just goes away it just stopped like somebody hit the damn switch as wind does on a sailboat so fine let's fire up the engine we know we're good we had issues yesterday we got those cleared up. We turn the engine over and over and that’s all we get. My little Universal 21 is not getting any diesel. It’s fucking Groundhog Day. Mikey goes down below I take the helm we're flopping around now we were adding the smell of diesel and if you've ever had those three ingredients in one combination you know that if you're going to yak you've got a legitimate excuse. Did you know there is a type of algae that groes in diesel tanks? This is when I found out. Mikey, God love him to death has managed to get a lot of this stuff out but he's sucking it out through the fuel lines. Not a chore to be done underway. And I use that term loosely. Mike’s getting wobbly so I need to get him topside ASAP. Fine let's get the sails back up we've got a little bit of an offshore lets milk it for all we got. We're sailing again, just barely but sailing it is. Sun has set so now we're in the dark, I've got my Steiners out I'm looking for any kind of flashing light and I'm coming up with blanks. On Shore, I’m guessing Beaumont area you can see a pop up thunderstorm going on and see the lightning flashing but it's so far away you can't hear anything. So far so good. We're moving along, slowly, and out of the blue, and my right hand to God I saw a flying Spalding football with white wings. It was as clear as my right hand. I was stunned. My mouth actually fell open. I looked back at Mike and I'm looking at him “did you see that”  “see what” “seriously?! you didn't see that football just fly by it was right off the freaking bow”? I'm thinking okay we got to start paying attention. I pulled my transderm off and gave it back to the Sea. Lord knows I got nothing against a nice buzz but not here and damn sure not now. The plan was to  stay in 70 feet of water so you don't have to worry about the Jetties. At the very end of the Jetties it's like 45 ft deep so we're going for a little extra. I'm asking Mike for depth to make sure that we're still in good water, and we are up to that point, I could be wrong but I will go to my grave believing that I heard water breaking on something. It could have been an echo from the surf I don't know. I do know you couldn’t have pounded a straightpin up my ass with a sledgehammer. I yelled at Mike how deep are we he said we're in 30 ft and holy crap I don't know how close to the Jetties we are but we're too close. HARD STARBOARD! In my mind I was watching a slow motion train wreck. You sailors have been there. 3 knot breeze on the beam and you have to turn in to it right fucking now. Does anything move slower? Nope. I love my Catalina 36 but this fat bottomed girl is made for comfort, not for speed. No engine means we have to get the wind across the bow and literally head back the way we came. Perfect. I'm still scanning the horizon looking for lights and I've got finally got a couple. I identify them as the jetty markers. Yes, the ones at the opening, we are indeed too close to shore. 

Not by much but then again it doesn’t take much. Turns out there's a shallow bank on our side of the jetty that gave us the 30 feet. I've got the jetty entrance lights we're doing okay as we sail out past them. Now it’s time to start looking for traffic. I don't see anything coming in or out so we turn back to port. All things are looking good, we still have our little bit of a breeze but we don't have any traffic to be worried about and no we still don't have an engine. Okay fine. I wouldn’t have it any other way. We're on plan E by now and we're probably a mile inside the Jetties when the tide starts running out. Perfect. That's slowing us down and you know when you're doing three knots you slow down to two or less you're slow and your help is iffy on a good day. 

Remember the thunder storm I mentioned earlier? It’s a lot closer now. Lots. We can see the lightning but now we can hear the the Thunder claps and as you know as a big storm gets closer to you there comes a point that it will negate any offshore Breeze and that's what happened next. Now we got no wind at all and damn my ass if we're not backing up. Why, yes we are drifting backwards. We have no Helm. Why?  Because we're drifting fucking backwards at about a knot in the Sabine Channel. Turns out Ol’ Brigadoon Too with her fin keel and spade rudder don’t do too bad in reverse. Who knew? I don't know who, not that it matters, said “and what do we think that is”? Lo and behold it's a big old Texaco oil tanker coming in to fill up and he is coming in hot because he's fighting a thunderstorm and the current. For what it’s worth he gives us five on the whistle to let us know that he thinks we're in his way which we are. Fine. We get the dinghy in the water, a little bitty five horsepower curse and carry installed. We’ll just tow this 19,000 pound sailboat out of danger. We opted for the north side so we're going to get on this guy's starboard side to try and stay out of his way. Can’t get too close to the rocks because as he approaches bank suction is going to take the water away and then when his bow wake gets here he is going to put it back with an attitude and I don't want to be anywhere near this pile of rocks with my plastic boat. By now this guy is laying on the horn we can see him bigger than Dallas. We look up and he's got his whole Bridge lit up like a Christmas tree and and the whole damned crew is up on top to watch this shit show. By the grace of God we got lucky. That’s the only word I've got. We were far enough over and he course corrected and while it was one hell of a ride it was, manageable. Now he's just laying on his horn because he's probably announcing to everybody in Jefferson County, hey wake up the search and rescue crews because we're about to get us a little boat .I won't say we were in the right spot but we were close enough to the right spot yeah it got bumpy and it got lumpy but we came through it unscathed by this point I know he's trying to get us on the radio but we have managed to kill our battery so we don't have lights we don't have a radio we ain't got shit but a little bit of luck. We are a bona fide hazard to navigation. Our dinghy is managing to drag us in shore. 

We crashed at the first dock we came to. It was on the south side and I believe at the time it was a Conoco dock. We didn’t even get tied up before old boy comes out to say you know this is a private dock you can't tie up here. I explain the situation to him and he says Oh, that was you? I’ll get you an extension cord. So there we were crashed at a Conoco dock in Sabine Pass. closest I've ever come to getting killed on that sailboat. And the adventure continued. I won't say it got worse but it definitely got more interesting.