Swallow Catalina 270 · Lake Lewisville
Swallow at her slip
Hull no. CTYB0038D393 · Built April 1993

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.

27′ LOA5′ draftPerkins 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 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

Power

New inlet, new cable, a galvanic isolator, and 120 volts arriving on the boat properly for the first time. Also a lesson about seacocks.

Under her own power

A few hundred yards from the temporary slip to the permanent one — the first time Swallow moved with us aboard, and the first real test of an engine we were not sure about.

She's ours

Sea trial, signatures, and the handover of one key. After the better part of a year looking, the search ended on a Sunday afternoon in June.