The rest of the New Years pictures

So I finally got the rest of the still pictures from our New Years trip. Run your mouse over the pic and you can speed up the scroll rate. There is really no justice done to the immense size of those cargo ships. These things are like mountains cruising at 20 knots. (1.15 statute miles per nautical mile) Cutting across the Houston Ship Channel will definitely get your blood up. There was a fair amount of hanging about until we had a nice wide passage we could cut through. Even then, those things move deceptively fast.

Romance got pulled out of the water yesterday. I'll be flying into Houston this weekend to check on the progress. I also bit a major bullet and dropped $3,000 on a new propeller. That fancy feathering job I mentioned down below. This eliminates the need to try and fix the worn out proplock. It also ensures that I won't kill the transmission by sailing while the prop freewheels. Not to mention it typically adds up to 15% of the hull speed by reducing drag. That could give us 0.5 - 1.0 knot faster sailing performance. I'll take all we can get. The cruising kitty is starting to hemorrhage......I am afraid of where this will finally end.