Key West to Galveston aboard Kipeki

I am now in Galveston TX waiting for a flight back to Key West.  I intended to drive only to find out that the rental car alone was almost twice the airfare.  Of course then there would be gasoline and hotel rooms if I stopped to visit museums along the way.

The trip was pretty easy.  We spent quite a bit of time with very low winds and since we needed to conserve fuel we did bump around a lot.  At one point when we were becalmed we just let the boat drift and went swimming in 10,000 feet of water.  We had a lot of fun swinging off the halyard into the water.  We were also visited on a daily basis by an ever increasing pod of dolphins.  I have film of both, I will post it when I get back to the necessary cables to transfer it from my camera.

For those of you who were following our progress on shiptrac.org we did actually find a wormhole that permitted us to end up in the southeast Atlantic for a bit.  We were hoping to catch up with our friend "Sweak" who is transiting a boat to Africa.  But the wormhole collapsed before we were able to find him and we ended up back in the Gulf of Mexico for our next report.

The trip into Galveston via the fairways that avoid the oil platforms was a bit less difficult than expected.  We did the transit at night and did not realize how many ships just loiter around near the oil wells.  Once we got the general gestalt sorted out on the radar we were able to calm down quite a bit.  We entered the Galveston channel at dawn with 6 - 8 foot rollers on the stern and lots of ship traffic.  And of course when it came time to tie up the winds decided to blow at 35 knots.  But, as Willie the S says, "All's well that ends well."