I have been a big-boat (27–42 feet) sailor for many years and am now enjoying sailing and learning on a smaller platform—my 20-foot-long Liteboat.
I spend my summers sailing in Southeast Alaska.
I just returned from an attempt to sail and row this new craft up the Texas coast, from Port Isabel at the Mexican border northward, with limited success but lots of fun and loads of learning. I describe my journey here: adventuresofcharley.com.
I am looking forward to joining my first Raid and to the camaraderie that is often mentioned in the reviews. I have sailed a big boat and paddled a kayak in the Desolation Sound area, but this will be my first small-boat journey there.
I enjoy long-distance adventures—sailing, bicycle touring, backpacking, and rowing—traveling at less than ten miles per hour. I wouldn’t want to ruin that pace in this Raid, so you speedsters are safe from any challenge.
The Boat
The boat is a 20 foot long Liteboat XP20, originally designed for the Race to Alaska and successfully sailed there. It offers a small cabin for sleeping and with the cockpit tent is quite comfortable for camping.
It only weighs 330 pounds empty and my challenge will be to keep it light and not carry enough supplies to cross the Pacific.
Hi there, I read your Texas Adventures With Charlie with great interest. In 2015, we took a 17′ daysailer with a swing keel, Miss Moose, from the Rocky Mountains all the way to Lake Winnipeg (2200km). It was one of the first sailboats to take that ancient highway since the York boats of the fur trade. We began by hiking into the Saskatchewan Glacier, the birthplace of the river, transferred onto a rubber raft for the upper reaches of the North Saskatchewan River, then onto our sailboat at Lake Abraham. It took us 7 1/2 weeks to get to Lake Winnipeg. Originally I wanted to go all the way to Hudson’s Bay but the weather was turning and I had to get back to my PhD!
Some of the things our skipper hadn’t anticipated included squirrelly winds as the river snaked its way through Alberta making it almost impossible to sail, thus his extensive use of the 10-foot oars he had made (one broke, luckily he had made a third), and as it was the lowest river levels in decades, we were constantly running aground once we hit the Southern Saskatchewan, sometimes 10 times in a few hours. We had to take great care also to not hit the huge boulders in the river, again because of low water levels. After a day of running aground maybe 20 times (on sand, thankfully, but enough damage done to our hull) we thus decided to portage that arm of the great river.
As in your Texan adventure, we saw the devastation made by the discovery of oil, in this case in Alberta (where they like to think of themselves as Texans). We sailed/rowed through a corridor I refer to as Mordor, it was so toxic. And the reality of global warming as well as of hydro electric dams and their impacts on the great river system, our lifeblood, was impossible to ignore.
Perhaps my greatest fear on that trip was tornados, and indeed, at one resupply stop (we had to hitchhike 15km to the nearest community) we returned to the boat and a huge squall started and literally picked up our boat and deposited her higher on the bank. Another time we waited out a fast storm under a bridge. Yikes. It was a fantastic journey and one day I may write about it. In any case, we took Miss Moose on the first raid and came last in almost every leg (and were tormented mercilessly by the gang already enjoying their martinis on Poor Man’s Rock who would make moose calls as we came into sight!!!) In 2023, we became the Grim Sweeper with skipper’s 47′ wooden cruiser, Western Yew. Touch wood, we’ll be the grim sweeper again this year!