Harvest Moon Regatta

We had left Grand Isle and spent the first night at Beaumont. The next day was a short one as Renita had found us a spot at Galveston Island State Park. I don’t like driving through Houston, especially when pulling our fifth wheel, and so we turned off at Winnie and headed to the Ferry at the end of the Bolivar Peninsula.

As we crossed the bay, Renita pointed out the large numbers of sailboats. Looking it up on Google, she found out that the Harvest Moon Regatta was taking place. It’s a race from Galveston to Port Aransas. There are often over two hundred sailboats that race/participate and by the time we had set up at the state park, many had already started to go around the curve of the earth.

If you look closely and blow the images up, you can see that the hulls of some of the boats have disappeared. At the time of Columbus, no one believed that the earth was flat, the real argument was the size of the circumference of the earth and whether Columbus would be able to sail around the world.

There is a formula that tells you how much of the boat disappears, the horizon is the square root of (your height in meters times 13) and it’s a little over one foot for each three miles. Renita had also found out the race had a live web page that showed the names of each boat, the crew, and its current position.

By the time we reached Rockport, the next day many of the boats had beat us by sailing all night using the full moon, (the lead boat averaged 7.9 knots per hour and took less than a day to travel the one hundred and seventy five mile distance).

There was free coffee and doughnuts on Sunday morning and so we arrived as many of the boats were leaving the Port of Aransas, heading back to Houston.

I later mentioned to Renita that we should sell everything, buy a sailboat and travel around the Caribbean, but she didn’t really like the idea. Now maybe she would change her mind if we could find a small pocket cruiser, a type of sailboat that can cross the Atlantic? Clear skies