The Boat People

by Jeff Johnson

    When I was about ten or eleven years old my dad decided the family needed a hobby, he chose boating ( I don't know what the rest of the family chose.)  So out he went and found a canoe, a big canoe, one long enough to hold a family of seven.  Little did I know this was the beginning of our 'sailing' enterprise.  Yes, I know there is not a sail on a canoe, so dad went out and bought a "Sailfish" board boat, a boat that has a completely flat deck and is only ten inches thick at its deepest.  Now this has canvas, no boat, but canvas.  Canvas to catch the wind and carry the soul to the idyllic depths of dreams; to be - a sailor. 

    Once on an excursion, after he had mastered the art, my father was instructing his junior captains of the sea in the proper handling of a ship.  The three of us, my father and younger brother with me at the helm, were cruising the oceans of lake Whitney upon that tiny but sturdy board boat.  The winds were fairly strong, so we had no problem catching the power of the breeze.  The boat surged through the water with amazing speed.  It was then that my father decided that we should learn the joy of planing the bow of the boat.  ( This is when the bow comes high out of the water like the front of a surf board on a wave.)  My father, the captain calls for all hands to move ab-aft (move to the rear of the boat.)  There are only two rails on the flat deck of a Sailfish of about three feet in length on each side and they are mounted amid-ships.  Suddenly the sailboat veers off into the wind out of control and my father is hollering, "What the heck are you doing." (sailor talk.)  I know this was what he said because I could hear him as he and my brother went soaring off.  You see, after having moved back far enough on the deck  I was left with only hanging on a rope tied to a piece of canvas trying valiantly to drag me off and the stick of the tiller doing the same.  The deck of the boat was wet and as luck would have it slippery, they won and I was in the drink.

    Soon after we had a fleet of captains and were short a few boats, so dad decided to remedy the situation. He purchased a Sunfish, a boat exactly the same as a Swordfish with the added attraction of a hole in it.  A two by two square hole cut into the deck ( but not the hull ) in order to place your feet and possibly hang on or at least store something ( like rations or emergency gear.)  But one just wasn't enough, a second one had to be purchased, after all the captain did have two sons able to pilot a boat.  Now these boats are great fun when you want to get wet on a hot Texas summer day, the spray in your face and the waves washing over the deck and if that is not enough for you, ya just simply tump the boat over an go swimmin'.

    Enter the women.  With two daughters coming up and of coarse a wife this began to portend a small problem for my father.  Some women don't like being dumped into the drink while enjoying a leisurely ride across the seas, especially in the winter!  With only half of the year to be enjoyed on the water, the captain talked his wife into allowing him to acquire another ship, a twenty six foot Clipper Marine.  The Clipper was a sloop ( a sailboat with a single mast with main and jib sails as pictured above ) with a small pop up cabin, good for day sailing in all kinds of weather and the definitive waterbed.  The boat was equipped with a swing keel so that if you ran over a stump, it would simply swing up over the object an crash down with a loud thump to let you know there was something there.  It was also 'untumpable'.  We tried so hard to put that mast in the water, the girls would get scared but us boys were attempting to beat the highest watermark record of the know universe on the side of the hull.  Once we even attained water up on the deck, but every time the boat heeled over far enough the keel would come out of the water and the boat would snap to upright into the wind with the loss of control.  This was a real family boat!

    Some time following, my father begrudgingly (ahem,) did the favor of accepting the ownership from a friend of his that was in dire need of appeasing his wife from the complaint on their surplus of boats.  The ship was a Snipe, a seventeen foot dingy with a sloop rigged mast on it, a beautiful wooden vessel finished in varnish.  Of course my mother was pleased to see that her family now owned half a dozen sea worthy vessels.  With boats up to her yard-arms mom put her foot down, on dad.  "Get rid of some boats!"  The captain remorsed, requited and resigned two of his fleet, the two small Sunfish, leaving the canoe, Sailfish, Snipe and Clipper.

    Meanwhile out at the ranch, the boy scout ranch that is, I had accepted the position at summer camp staff as sailing instructor.  ( By the way did I mention I am an Eagle scout.)  Camp Constantine was equipped with three sailboats, they were Daisies.  No they were not pansies, they were sailing boats, the kind real men battled with cresting waves left by passing motorboats.  They were eight foot plastic coated Styrofoam tubs with curtain rod masts and tablecloth sails.  They were the same kind of boat you could get free from Salem with proper amount of cigarette coupons.  They had to be tied down once they were pulled up on shore to keep the wind from blowing them back into the water.  One weekend, in between the rounds of campers, I actually  sailed one of them completely across Possum Kingdom lake.

    Several years had passed and I was introduced to the captain of a Capri, a seventeen foot sloop, for the purpose of being a deck hand in a racing crew.  A typical sail boat race was three laps around a triangular in shape set of buoys, ideally with one leg beating into the wind.  I would generally work the fore-deck handling the changing of the jib and the huge ballooning spinnaker.  This captain was a genius, at the start of the race we could see all the boats leaving us behind, but at the last leg of the race, heading for the finish line, we would be out in front to win the race.  We could never figure out how he did it, but determined the only explanation was a good crew.

    Then came the big boat.....  As time would have it (and it always will) my father, the captain, began to dream of plans for end of his landlubber career, thoughts of a waterfront retirement home arose like the tide.  The fulfillment of the dream began with the purchase of an empty lake lot on lake Granbury, located of course at the waters edge, followed by plans for a cozy mini resort.  The little quaint town of Granbury was explored and enjoyed, the town square with its barber shop next to the ice-cream parlor, the forth of July parades with farm equipment floats and the community fair with the knobby knees contest.  Joyous weekend visits were made to picnic, mow and make exploratory voyages across the lake.  As fate would have it though these plans were soon dashed by a controlling and not to honest lake home owners association.  This dream had to be abandon and the lot sold.  So the captain decided the problem was not enough water and turned his thoughts to the Galveston bay, a more satisfying "lake" with less complications.  Galveston was merely four hours away and the Clipper with its swing keel was easy to trailer.  Although the small craft handled well within the bay and surrounding waters, there was an open ocean to be explored in the gulf of Mexico and the ship was to small for the high seas.  The haunting theme song of Gilligan's Isle caused him to rethink his perspective.  Some how the captain managed to talk his dear wife into sinking their life savings into a forty foot Easterly, a sloop with a fully functioning galley, able to sleep six comfortably, a diesel engine, lots and lots of teak to polish, and a head with a shower.  Now we're cooking with gas (propane.)

    Now a forty foot boat with a seven foot fixed keel is extremely hard to trailer around and launch, it has to be set in the water with a sling hoist, so a permanent mooring had to be found.  Since the captain had not yet obtained a beach front property in Galveston nor did he assume it safe to moor the boat in open water ( this is like parking your car in the middle of the road, unlocked and three blocks away ) he found a newly constructed marina on Clear Lake that was hungry for tenants.  Clear Lake is connected via a small canal to Galveston bay and is where the NASA Johnson space center is located.  This marina was part of a hotel / convention center that was in the process of being built, where the rooms cost sixty bucks a night, had a restaurant serving a full continental breakfast buffet every morning, a large pool with a waterfall and swim up bar, and an in house discothèque ( can you say party, can you say babes ), you can see the hotel, marina, pool and our boat in the movie "Point Man".  As the years progressed, I would make the arduous, self sacrificing offer at my annual vacation time to spend the week on the boat and work on it, instead of enjoying my time at some expensively lush resort ( yea, right!)  Some times the rest of the family that could make the trip down would join me and we would go off on ocean excursions across the gulf.

    On one of these trips my mother and the captain coaxed me into joining them on a trip down to Freeport to spend the night.  We decided to go out on the open gulf for the trip down and as was the custom in those early trips the captain chose to stay in sight of land so as not to get lost at sea.  As we were sailing along I began to notice large light green balls, about the size of a bowling ball, floating shallow in the passing water.  As we sailed on they became more and more dense, I brought this phenomenon to the attention of the captain, mother was down below feeling the pangs of sea travel and would have no part of it.  All of a sudden the boat gave a tremendous crash and repeated the crash, shaking the very timbers of the boat with every swell of a wave that came upon us!  Mother was screaming down below and the captain and I were in a panic wondering what on earth was happening, we quickly came about and headed back the way we had come thinking to escape the situation.  The jarring crashes continued a few more times before they finally ceased and we were out of the "Jason and the Argonauts" catastrophe.  Apparently in our delight of the green globes, we had not noticed that we were sailing past the mouth of the San Louis pass, our pleasant little green friends were feeding on the rich nutrients that flowed from the pass and we were actually bouncing on the sand bar that the delta created as the San Louis left the land.   This was the beginning of mothers lack of enjoyment of the boat and my referring to my father as 'Capt. Sandy Bottoms'.  Who says you can't play pogo stick on the ocean.

    During an extended weekend, I think it was labor day, I had invited a female friend to go with me on a pleasant overnight sail with the captain ( although he had every confidence in me with anything concerning the boat he would not allow me to put the boat into the slip, there are no breaks on a boat, pun intended.)  We sailed about the bay and even went out on the gulf a ways and then returned that evening to moor with the freighters, think about parking your bicycle amongst a bunch of eighteen wheelers.  There is a boating rule that states that a sailboat has the right of way over a motorboat, there is an exception to this rule, any ship that must stay within a channel has the right of way.  Most of Galveston bay, and a greater part of the gulf, is only seven to twelve feet deep.  A ship channel forty feet deep and sixty feet wide has been dredged out to allow huge ships to make their way up to the Houston port.  The following morning when we arose to greet the day, the day greeted us with a Londoners thick as pea soup fog.   After getting ourselves and the boat ready, we proceeded cautiously to find the channel and then make our way down it, the captain at the helm and me at lookout on the bow spotting for buoys ( those are the only kind of boys I ever looked for.)  I had dutifully managed to locate the first three or four and was certain we were in the channel when I found another marker.  I turned to call back to my father and point out the resting place of the hidden object, the captain hollered a return reply "never mind the buoy what about that!"  I turned to see a barge being pushed by a tugboat bearing down on us at full steam.  Needless to say we swerved out of the channel to allow him passage as he had the right of way.

    Not all of our trips were misadventures, I was able to be apart of a great event with the captain.  In 1992, as part of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America, the Spanish government had sent over replicas of the Caravels; the Niña, the Pinta, and Santa Maria.  The ships were to travel from port to port starting at Brownsville and ending at New York for the big Columbus day celebration.  My father had planned to get a crew of six together and sail to Corpus Christi to meet the fleet and follow them on their journey to Galveston.  I was unable to attend the first leg of the journey in which the captain, three of his friends and my youngest brother traveled down the inter-coastal waterway.  So I flew into Corpus and my youngest brother flew back.  We attended the fair and toured the Caravels there, provisioned our boat and meet the final member of the crew for this journey making the total six.  Why a crew of six? because three sets of two people on a four hour watch could cover a twelve hour period and we would be sailing non stop for two and a half days.  When the festival at Corpus was over the Caravels set sail and so did we, just out of site of land we discovered a few secrets of the fleet.  The fleet met up with a Spanish Navy gun boat, they lowered their sails and were chained together like a momma duck and her ducklings so they could be towed to the next port.  This only made sense because if they had sailed on their own power these traveling museum pieces would have taken months to cross the Atlantic and weeks to pass between ports.  There is no wonder in my mind now that the sea crews of yore would get so sick on their voyages, those round bottomed ships rock incredibly even in the modest seas.  We followed along behind the 'ducks' at a safe distance to keep from causing any problems going far out to sea, through the strings of oil derricks,  At night the derricks would light up and the scene looked like a freeway at night, but we were the only traffic and there were no buildings.  In the wee early hours of the third morning of our trip, long before dawn, our entourage stopped and the Caravels were unchained.  We sailed along the line of ships and they hollered greetings to us in Spanish, but one of our crew of Mexican descendant and could translate.  Dawn was just breaking when I was able to capture one of the greatest pictures I have ever taken, it is one of the ships in a calm wave-less sea backed by a very stormy dark sky.  When the dawn had lit the sky the Caravels hoisted sails and the gun boat played the "Releasing of the Bulls" over their loudspeakers.  We followed along until we saw the throngs of boats coming out of Galveston to greet the incoming fleet.  Quickly four port authority boats cordoned off the fleet to protect and escort them into the bay.  Fire boats were sending up columns of water high in the air.  There was every type of boat you could imagine and some we couldn't believe were even out there.  It was the best water parade I have ever seen.

    I have witnessed many miracles of the sea on these trips, porpoise jumping in front of the bows of freighters, porpoise swimming along side our boat, throngs of seagulls attacking a shrimp boat hauling in its nets, whale sightings.  There are many other tales I could tell but there just isn't that much room.  Things have changed over time.  The captains eyes became weak with age and could no longer see the channel markers so was forced to sell the big boat.  I purchased a house on lake Lewisville and the remainder of the boats are in my care.  I will always be grateful to Capt. Sandy Bottoms for teaching me how to fall off a boat and showing me all the wonders of the seas.  Thanks dad.

NOTE: Sailing lessons available.