As you know from the updates that I sent out around November of 2004, we left Watergate Yachting Center on the 10th of November for the Dry Tortugas. I should have know better than leaving on an offshore passage on the Marine Corps Birthday, but I did. We had three crew on board, Ken and Shirley Morgan and Al Shattuck, plus Kitty and myself. I took a lot of pictures, as I thought that we would not be back to Houston for a long time.

We had an uneventful trip down the Houston Ship Channel, and out into the Gulf of Mexico. Around 1800 on the 10th of November I was woken from my nap with problems that the crew could not hold the boat on course. When I checked it out, there was a real problem. We not able to steer the boat using the wheel, but we could steer the boat using the auto-pilot. I decided that we should turn around and head back to Watergate Yachting Center. Back at Watergate we could look into the real cause of the problem and get the problem fixed.

We got back into Watergate Yachting Center around 0300 on the morning of November 11, 2004. As you know from the updates, the steering problem turned out to be the hydraulic pump. I had it rebuilt, and that fixed the steering problem. Rebuilding the pump actually caused another problem that did not show itself until the next passage. The details of all of that is covered in the Updates and Logs for December of 2004.

The pictures in this section make up for the complete lack of pictures for the December of 2004 passage. All of these pictures are of us leaving the fuel dock and continuing out the Clear Creek Channel. There are pictures of the crew, pictures of most of the restaurants on what is known as the Kemah Boardwalk, and some fisherman. Since the trip was so short, I did not get any more pictures.