Riding a ship from Houston to the Gulf

The camera was fastened to an outside rail and set to take a photo every six seconds. Quicktime then assembled the photos into a .mov file that plays back at 12 frames per second. So, one minute of movie time represents 72 minutes of trip time on the channel. The first half begins just below the Port of Houston Authority Turning Basin (the very end of the channel) and continues down to Green's Bayou. The second half takes us from there to Morgan's Point at the head of Galveston Bay. From there we still have 31.5 miles of channel across the bay to the pilot station outside the Galveston jetties. This particular trip was supposed to begin at 1030 pm but we didn't get off dock until a little after 11 pm. We got to the pilot station at 5 am...

It looks incredibly fast, but we were actually only making 5-6 knots in the first half and no more than 10 knots in the open areas of the second half. There is no "posted speed". We are expected to use good judgement when passing moored vessels so as not to cause them to surge and break away from the dock. Speed varies with the size of the ship and its draft. This was a Panamax ship, 106 feet wide, and about 600 feet long with 32 feet of draft so I had to run slow.

The second half of the film is here. Thanks to a Reddit thread, the route can be seen on the map below. One is quickly reminded of how industrialized the Houston metroplex is (and of how people in large cities are sometimes denied the pleasure of seeing a dark, starry sky).