Some boat time.....finally

Someone vacationing in the TCI last week sent us an aerial photograph he took of our neighborhood through an airplane window as they left Provo. This is where we hope to be living very soon:

That's a really nice shot, shows the whole area including our new house. You can probably see why we would dearly love to see that marina completed. That would be such a great place to keep the boat. We could probably even see it from the house.
Thanks for the photos, Ronbo!

The past couple of days have been pretty busy. La Gringa's brother was staying with us, and we were showing him around. We took him out to the new house site on Thursday, but made a slight miscalculation on the way. We went to Horse-Eye Jacks for lunch. La Gringa and Bro-in-law tried something from the drink menu called a "Horse Eye Jacktini". They said it tasted like bananas and pear nectar. I suspect it must have had something else in it, to make the back of a Land Rover look comfy and inviting:

Maybe it was the peaceful quiet and gentle warm breezes....the sound of the waves lapping on the shore...but I wouldn't discount the banana and pear nectar, either.

He did tour the house before his nap. He did not want to go fishing for the afternoon. It didn't seem to affect La Gringa, and she had these "Jacktini" things right along with her brother.. I guess a certain amount of tropical conditioning is required to function normally around here.

Here's another one of Ronbo's aerial shots of the house:

I can see that was taken the week before the driveway was graded.

So, that's our neighborhood, as it currently stands. The roads to the top right and bottom left in the photo are dead-ends. And there are only these six homes here so far. I think ours is the smallest. It's also the only one of the six without a swimming pool. Oh well, maybe next year.

Then, finally, on Friday we were able to take the boat out for the latter half of the morning. Bro-in-law had to catch an mid afternoon flight back to the frozen north country, but we were able to take him fishing for a while first. The fishing was slow. He managed to hook into a small barracuda in the first half hour. Now there's a evil, wicked grin if ever I saw one:

Take your pick on the grin..

We put the barracuda in the livewell and turned the pump on. This kept him alive until we could find someone who would want it. It also keeps the dog occupied with a live barracuda on board. We trolled for about another hour without any luck whatsoever, and then started back to Leeward so that Bro-in-law could head to the airport. Then we got a really nice, hard strike on one of the lures. I graciously offered the rod to our guest, but he told me to go ahead and take this one. Couldn't have had anything to do with how fast the line was coming off that reel...
Anyhow, I cranked a decent little wahoo in on that one.

We don't have a scale of any kind, but I would estimate this one to be about 25 lbs. I think I have a pretty good feel for it, after watching the weigh-in at the wahoo tournament last week in the Tiki Hut.

Now, see, this is the difference between a nice friendly smile, and that evil grin..

When we were on the way back into Leeward, La Gringa called Preacher on the cell phone to see if he wanted the barracuda. This was right at lunch time. By the time we got to the marina and our boat slip, Preacher was waiting on the dock. It's always fun to hand people live barracuda. Preacher didn't bat an eye, he just hooked his thumb and finger through the gills and headed out with it. I think he's done this before.

I barely had time to snap a photo of him with the fish, he was already on the way to his car.

He said he had to go...he had rice already steaming on the stove, and that the barracuda had him by the lip. This fish was still very alive, you understand...the one with the teeth in the other photo...

La Gringa got her brother to his flight back to 5 degree weather (ha ha) and we needed to fuel up the boat because we volunteered to run some arriving family members out to Pine Cay around dark. So we went back to the marina for our second boat trip of the day. We love boat trips.

I maneuvered the boat up to a side of the fuel dock I hadn't used before. I carefully eased it up into the lee of the dock, threw the lines to La Gringa, and then looked up to see Preacher was standing there watching.

Very unusual, in that just about every time I do a sloppy job docking the boat, someone I know will be watching. I think this is part of the unwritten law of the sea. If you do some brilliant boat handling, nobody knows it. But screw up something, and there are half a dozen witnesses...but this time it went smoothly, even though several other experienced boat guys were there to critique and ready to laugh...

So, since Preacher is still standing after lunch,I guess the barracuda was good, no ciguatera in the fish, for about the hundredth time now...we need to stop testing them on our friends and eat one for ourselves. We have probably given away over a hundred by now. Nobody has gotten sick from one, and we would have heard about it if they had.

Duran is the man, when it comes to fueling operations at Sherlock's Marina:

Let's see....30 gallons of gasoline, at $ 5.10 a gallon...(ouch!)

Then we just basically hung out around the marina waiting for Big John and his guest to arrive by taxi from the airport. Dooley the Demented gets a lot of attention from the younger set:

And the older set, too, come to think of it. There are a lot of dog lovers out there. Some of them just don't know it yet. As in...

"Watch, he's gonna bite her!!"

Fortunately for us, the weather held pretty good for the trip to Pine Cay and back in the boat last night. It was a clear night. The wind and chop did pick up a bit after dark but La Gringa and I made it back to the marina without incident. This was how late afternoon looked, before we left:



Well, not exactly without incident.....I ran the boat up onto a sand bar getting into Leeward. It is extremely shallow on the north side of the channel, and, well, in the dark...while distracted, punching at GPS buttons, I, uh...cleaned part of the hull. Good thing the sand is soft as talcum powder down here. Coral and limestone sand is so much more forgiving than quartz sand. And then...getting into the slip took me two tries. At least, there weren't too many witnesses. This was our first time coming into Sherlock's in the dark, and the quartz halogen lights in the parking lot are blinding from the water. But we'll get the hang of it.