Fun Sailing Outing
Monday, September 15th, 2008I live in the Clear Lake are of Southeast Texas which is South of Houston and located on the top end of and connects to Galveston Bay. This area is considered as one of the largest concentrations of recreational boaters in the United States with over 7800 permanent docking slips and who could even guess the number of trailered boats in the area.
I decided that I wanted to go sailing and started searching for sailing Clear Lake options. It quickly became evident that not many places offered sail boats for rent especially if you were interested in taking them through the channel and out of the lake for Galveston Bay sailing.
I did find a couple of places that would rent sail boats if you had a Certificate showing you had completed a recognized Coast Guard approved course of sailing instruction. I guess these are rather like a sail boat driver’s license. However, I not only didn’t have such a training card but worse, I had never been to any kind of sailing school and truthfully had never even been in a sail boat. It didn’t seem that significant to me as I wasn’t going on an ocean cruise but just wanted to fool around in the Bay for a couple of hours and have some fun.
One of the larger communities on Clear Lake and home to many of the recreational marinas is Kemah. So, I got out my trusty phone book and started looking for sailing Kemah and was pleased to find a sailing and rowing club in the Kemah Watergate Yachting Center that had a large group of sail boats including small Sunfish sail boats that were free for all of the members to use and did not require a training course.
I need to get on to dinner now but I will give you the complete story of my first sailing adventure in my next post