Swallow Catalina 270 · Lake Lewisville
Swallow at her slip

Swallow

A 1993 Catalina 270 · Lake Lewisville, Texas

She is thirty-three years old, twenty-seven feet long, and ours since June 2026. This is where we keep the story of putting her right and taking her sailing.

The Captain’s Log About the boat
27′ LOA5′ draftPerkins Perama M20Lake Lewisville

Welcome aboard

Swallow is a 1993 Catalina 270, kept at the Dallas Corinthian Yacht Club at Oak Point on Lake Lewisville. We bought her in June 2026 after a long search and a very thorough survey, and she has been keeping us busy ever since.

She is not a project boat, exactly. The hull is sound, the engine is strong, and she has been in fresh water her whole life. But she is thirty-three years old, and thirty-three years leaves a mark: an electrical system that has been added to a dozen times and tidied up never, a shore-power inlet that had quietly cooked itself, a deck fitting or two letting the rain in. We are working through all of it, mostly ourselves, mostly at weekends, mostly very early in the morning because this is Texas and August is not negotiable.

This site has three parts. The Boat is who she is and how she came to us. Below Decks is the work — what was wrong, what we did about it, and what is still on the list. And The Captain's Log is the part that matters most: where we went, what happened, and who was aboard.

There will eventually be a fourth part. We are fitting a lithium house bank and a Victron Energy monitoring system, and when that is finished you will be able to see what she is doing right now — battery state, what is charging, whether the bilge is dry — from wherever you happen to be reading this.

Thanks for looking in.

From the log All entries

Hiding in plain sight

The first real piece of the new mains cabinet, cut in quarter-inch MDF so that mistakes cost almost nothing. A slow day in a warm garage, most of it spent finding tools and learning to use a router, and it ends with a hole that the panel gear passes through.

Practice cut

One piece of plastic cut square, using a technique I had to work out first, and which is going no further than the kitchen table. A week when the heat and something I cannot shake kept me at home — which turned out to be the cheapest possible place to find out that the panel is the wrong thickness, and that the two sheets I already own are each about half right.

Clean

Two small jobs on Friday morning, done the sensible get-it-working way, and the feeling afterwards that I had spent it rearranging a mess rather than clearing one. What followed was an audit of everything I have already built, a decision to undo a good deal of it, and a Sunday spent on the floor.