Eastbound & Down
We’d figured it out by now. Navigating the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GICW) through Texas at night in our Aspen C120 power cat—a speedy, fuel-efficient, 40-foot phenome of asymmetry—was a two-man job. At the helm, Larry Graf, Aspen’s founder and CEO, did the steering while simultaneously keeping tabs on our Garmin plotter, where AIS signatures materialized like measles as the miles moseyed along. In the copilot’s seat, I handled the VHF while simultaneously trying to interpret exactly what was coming at us; or, more to the point, how the phantasmagoria of running lights, masthead lights, special flashing lights, deck lights, spotlights and lights ashore would impact the next couple minutes of running time.
“Man,” muttered Larry, a long-time denizen of the Pacific Northwest, “we never see traffic like this out on the West Coast. Most of this stuff is huge. Some of these tows are 1,000-footers at least. Some gotta be 1,200-footers! And they just keep on comin’.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, squinting through a set of Steiner binoculars. “Navigation down here is a realm unto itself. Skinny, narrow water, too—real skinny, real narrow.”
It was half past midnight. We were many hours into a hell-bent-for-leather delivery of the C120 from Galveston to New Orleans, a distance of roughly 300 miles on the Intracoastal. As rain hammered the windshield and giant bolts of lightning blazed, our big, pantograph-type
