Storm Surge

We've been watching the Weather news about all the snow and cold up in the high latitudes and we're quite happy not to be shoveling anything other than metaphorically.  But we don't get away without any weather issues here, either.  Oh it's nothing like the blizzards in Boston or the temperatures in Toronto, but we do have these fierce sunrises on the south side of Providenciales.

Somehow, I'm not expecting much sympathy here from people looking out their frozen windows at over two meters of snow with more on the way.  I know it's going to be a stretch for some imaginations, but these days we start feeling chilled when the temperature drops down to levels that I suspect are still warmer than the settings on most home thermostats. The temperatures dropped into the low 70's here right before Jacob went home to New England.   Dooley hauled his favorite Colorado winter sweater out of his suitcase to help Jacob mentally prepare for the cold.

We're just getting to the end of a nice little two day storm that blew through here over the weekend.   The original forecasts were for almost 40 knots of wind, although I don't think we saw quite that much.  Such a storm forecast coming at the beginning of the yearly cruising season produced a bit of a crowd at South Side Marina.  Anticipating strong winds and seas from the north, sailors were looking for places to hide from the storm.  Every single slip at Bob's marina was filled.  South Side Marina is sheltered from the worst of our north and north east winds.  It's a good place to hang out in a blow.  Here's a view looking upwind, into the salina.  You can see what the wind is doing to this protected water.  We heard it was pretty grim on the north side of the island but we were too tied up in our own little world to drive over to look.   It was bad enough here.

We  decided to see if we could get some aerial photos during the storm.  You might remember that I've now got three kites picked for various wind conditions.  I've got a big 12 ft. delta style that will fly and lift a camera in six knots of wind.  This covers me on mild days.  And that kite gets very little use.   Next in line is our standard 9 ft. delta.  This one is good from around 10 knots up to near 20. We use that kite most of the time. But I've also got a small parafoil kite that I've been told should hold together up to 30 knots.   We decided to see how it would handle these conditions.  We had a nice little storm to test it with.  The parafoil kite fits into that bag. Nice package. 

And it worked.  We managed to get some useful photos in driving rain and wind gusts to 30 knots.   Here's South Side Marina full of boats riding out the storm.

 

I'm  not sure what kind of photos we were expecting in these conditions, but we were pleasantly surprised to get any at all.  I used 200 lb. dacron line, and had to wear gloves to handle it.   The parafoil kite handled the wind, although the rain,  reduced light, and platform motion didn't produce our usual tropical scenery. The strain from the wind and constant gusts got to me very quickly, and I took a wrap around one of Bob's parking lot fence rails to control it.

I was expecting something to come loose from the KAP setup with all the violent motion we were seeing from the ground.  Here's a view from the camera pointing toward the kite. The KAP setup is usually  50 to 100 ft. down the string from the kite itself.    You can see  how everything was tilted at an extreme angle due to the wind velocity.

That's a view looking west from South Side Marina, showing some of the Discovery Bay canal system. Gnarly day. And I am almost certain I would never have been able to get any useful photos if we'd been using any drone that I could afford. There's just something to be said for simplicity.

Now I didn't want you to think that Providenciales looks like those photos for the month of February.  Because it doesn't. We get these storms blowing through from time to time, and then the weather gets back to winter normal for us.

A normal afternoon at South Side Marina is much more laid back than it would appear during a storm.  We often set  up a camera just for the heck of it, but hours go by before any boat action so we never bother to post any of that footage.  I'll show you what  we mean.

Here's most of an afternoon at South Side Marina, with the camera attached to our boat Twisted Sheets.   The dive charter boats all come in shortly after noon.  There's a little story in this video. There was a cruiser aground just outside the entrance to the marina.  It's obscured in the video. The Club Med dive boat, "Batray" fouled on the anchor the grounded boat put out.  The Club Med boat finally had to swing around backwards to get free of the grounded boat's anchor line, helped dislodge the grounded boat and for some reason decided to come into the marina backwards, with  engines in reverse.   They spun the boat around as soon as they had room to do so, and the other boat traffic that was waiting for the mess to get sorted out all came in behind them.  LaGringa sped up the time lapse to make the hours go by quickly, and slowed it when the boats were maneuvering.  So that's what was going on in this video with the boat traffic:

Watching this makes it seem like we're stable when we're on the boat.  It's the rest of the world that's looking a little shaky at the moment.

Last week after the storm before this blew through, La Gringa and I  decided to see if we could get some fun photos by sticking a GoPro camera to the SUPs.  I stuck one camera on my head again and won't bother you with additional images of that ludicrosity.  And we tried using a suction cup mount on the SUP. Of course the first thing I did was attach it to the underside of the surfboard.  I got a few hundred mostly useless images of murky water because it was still stirred up after the storm.   I'm not even going to post any of those photos up here.  They are terrible and not representative of the water clarity here.  We also  tried sticking the camera to the top of the  paddleboard to see how that would work. We got some surprising results, although not what I was anticipating.

We continue to learn things about attaching cameras to moving objects.  For an example I can illustrate one of my own "duh" moments right here.   I had moved the suction mount from under the board to the top of the board.  I tied a piece of paracord to it as a safety line should it fall off.  Or in the more likely event of a big bald headed oaf falling and knocking it off.   This has been known to happen.

Can you tell how murky the water is?  It typically takes about a day or a day and a half for the sand to settle out after a storm blows through.  This was only a few hours after unsettled weather passed through.   If you look at that photo above you can see the shadow of the GoPro camera on my head that took this series of photos.  You can also see that the camera is not pointing just exactly straight ahead on the board.  I wanted it pointed straight ahead.  I thought I would just scootch up on the board and turn it. Wrong.

You see, moving my considerable weight that far forward on the paddleboard caused the front of the board to go underwater, raising the back of the board into the air.  And dumping the dummy firmly and completely into the ocean. The GoPro on my head was on a two second repetition rate and it caught this image as my grasping hands slid completely past the camera I wanted to adjust.  I think this is about when I got that unmistakable and momentary "Ah Oh!!" feeling...

You know the one where you suddenly realize what's going to happen and that there's not a danged thing you can do about it.

We all knew what kind of situation I was going to be in two seconds later, I suspect.

I mentioned earlier that we got some surprising results with the camera on the SUP, but what I didn't say was that these results were not in the water.  The results we want to show you were from the trip home from the beach.

If you're not familiar with these cameras, you should know that they have a firmware /menu  setting that  flips the image upside down.  This is so that the cameras can be attached to the underside of things and still record video right side up.  I had the camera set to be shooting upside down.  I didn't worry much about the images being reversed because I can easily change that with the editing software. When we loaded the SUPs on our vehicle to take them home, we left the camera in place and turned on. This is what it looked like on the board:

And this is what the ride home looked like with the camera in the inverted mode:

Yes, sure, we could have flipped it back over in software, but then it would just be like a zillion other 'SUP with camera on top of the car on a dirt road on a tropical island" videos, wouldn't it? I like this  better. And if you really feel the need to view it right side up, well, you do have options.   You might look silly doing it, but hey, your choice.

Other than little things like that, it's been a quiet week.   We got some some of that crystal clear weather that often comes the day after a weather front blows through and I tried the little pocket digital camera to see how it would do with night photography.  This is the night sky from our patio.   Now there's a view you haven't seen before, and now that I know the camera can handle it I might be able to get some more of this.   We have some incredible starry nights when the moon is away.   I just haven't tried to talk about them here before.

Other day to day mundane things include getting another flat tire fixed. That doesn't sound like such a big deal, does it? I mean, EVERYbody gets a flat tire from time to time, right? Sure.

But do you average one a month?  For ten years?  With five different vehicles?

This is bad country for rubber tires.

That's bordering on DIY so I'm going to grab this opportunity to show the sailors among us another little project that might be useful.   Rust stains on sails.  We had the sails off of Twisted Sheets recently to try to eradicate ugly things.

Needless to say, this takes a calm windless day.   We found out the hard way that things get real complicated when trying to lay out a big sail on a patio on a windy day.  Don't do it.

But for this experiment we managed to  grab a calm day.  This is our jib on the patio.

Apparently one of the previous owners of our old boat had rolled up the sail with some metal shackle or something similar in contact with the dacron.   The metal thing rusted, and left a series of stains on our nice white sail.   We didn't like that.   We had a bunch of stains like this:

There were a number of rust removing compounds included with the boat equipment, and I had already tried a number of them with mixed results.  Finally I noticed that the main active ingredient in the ones that worked the best seemed to be oxalic acid.  I needed to get the well set rust stains out of dacron sails.  I didn't need all the conditioners and lubricants and greases and oils that some of the rust compounds include.  I mean, after all, they're mostly formulated for iron and steel objects.   Sails don't need oil.  I bought a jar of the active ingredient without the marketing additives.

We weren't able to find a lot of information on relative strengths so with typical oafish overkill I mixed up a small batch and saturated it with as much oxalic acid powder as would dissolve in hot water.   I used a toothbrush to scrub it lightly into the rust stain.

And it worked immediately, if not sooner.   This is that particular set of stains after about 30 seconds of contact with the acid:

And this is the stain after a minute.  Notice all the small stains to the left of the main one are practically gone, and the main one is getting close.  I applied one more little splash of the acid to the stitching and about thirty seconds later the stain was just another fading memory. The next and important step is to scrub the entire area down with a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and water. This neutralizes the acid. You know you're done when the bubbling stops. Then rinse it with water and let it dry!

I could show you the last photo, but you already know what it would look like. A white bit of sail with no stain.

I wanted to end this post with some nice local water images instead of rusty sails, so I picked a few more from another little scenario that we witness quite often here lately. We live very close to the Caicos Marina and Shipyard.  This is one of the very few marinas between Puerto Rico and Florida that have the ability to lift a boat out of the water for repairs.  So it's not uncommon for boats with engine problems to get themselves close to us using their sails.  They  typically drop the anchor just outside the marina and call for help.  The marina will send someone out in a power boat to tow the damaged vessel in to safety.

This sequence is just another example of exactly that very scenario.  This sloop was unable to start their engine, and the forecast was for bad weather.   They managed to get themselves here by sail alone. In this photo, Jamie from Caicos Marina is  discussing the towing operation with the stricken sailboat.

He passed them a line and secured it to the transom of his boat and the bow cleats of the sloop.

And after a few minutes of adjustment he was able to tow the boat into the marina for some welcome repairs.  And you might ask why I bothered to include this.  Well one reason is that it's just another of the little vignettes that make up our typical days around here.  

And the other reason is that Jamie's boat is our former Contender 25 with the 300 HPDI Yamaha outboard that I am so intimately familiar with.  It's great for us to see "Off Cay" still out working and boating.  So many boats here seem to break, get parked on a trailer for repairs, and stay there.  For years.  For ever.  But not this one.  We're glad to have found a good home for the Contender as we moved further and further away from power boats and into sail.

We're continuing to spend the majority of our time working on the sailboat.  Most of the major systems are up and running, and I'm finishing up small projects and cosmetic issues.  I had already shown you photos of how a friend solved his engine access issues using mast steps.   I had decided to do something similar because it let me get rid of two aluminum ladders.  I won't go back and revisit that whole boondoggle.  I liked Frank's solution better, although I didn't choose the same kind of folding steps.   Frank used mast steps, and I used folding steps from a firetruck supply company.   A third of the price, two fewer holes to drill, I ordered a handful of these:

From what I have seen, this step is going to be  a lot friendlier to bare  feet.  It doesn't stick out into the area so far, and it's not pointed on the end.   I think this is going to work out well:

Those rust stains on the left are from the recently removed water maker.  I decided that I didn't like sea water that close to our solar controllers.  And they're slated to be moved as well, as soon as I figure out where to put them.

I've been meaning to post this photo for some weeks now, and it keeps getting put aside because it's unrelated to the other things I'm working on at the time. But I'm not going to let it slip any longer.  

Bob's Bar is surrounded by drop-down hurricane shutters.  People who gather at the bar often use one of the marking pens that Bob and Nevarde supply to write their names, boat information, or messages on the inside of these shutters.  When we returned from our trip to Colorado last year, we found  that some visitors to the island had stopped by to say hello to us.   We missed them, dagnabbit, but they did leave us a message written on a storm shutter:

Neil and Terri, thank you for taking the trouble to try to look us up.    We don't get that many visitors in this little out-of-the-way place, and we're sorry we missed you.  We hope you had a great time in the TCI and that you'll try again if you ever come back through.

Well that's it for this Monday's post.   We have a lot going on right now and I don't anticipate any problems filling this blog up with photos going forward.  In fact we're a bit excited about some of the trips we have planned.   And soon.

Time Out

We've just returned to the island  after two months of camping in the Rocky Mountains.  We had Dooley the Demented with us and it was quite the experience.  He's still talking about it, in fact. Now we're back and finding out that trying to pick up where one left off can be tricky in a place like this.   Things change quickly here without constant attention.  All four disc brake rotors on the car rusted themselves silly and immobile while parked inside the garage, for example. Rainy season erosion has run unchecked and the driveway looks like a quarter scale version of Palo Duro. The house electricity was turned off for ten days before we returned home.   I've thought of several phrases to try to describe the very organic experience of cleaning out a freezer full of rotting meat after a week and a half without refrigeration.  In the tropics. I think the kindest thing for me to do here is just to leave it at that and not to even mention the similarities to falling face down in bovine road kill.

One thing that quickly caught our attention was how much further south the sun is appearing and disappearing over the horizon, almost ten weeks after we last saw it.

The islands have almost made it to the end of another hurricane season.  And the lucky streak continues. There were  several credible threats, some winds and a lot of rain, but the strongest storms to blow through the islands this year stayed just shy of hurricane status.  And Tropical Storms are quite enough on their own, thanks.   Ten inches of rain doing fifty miles an hour may not be a hurricane, but it's enough to make you scrunch your eyes up  into little slits the thickness of paper when you're trying to walk face first into it. We were delayed two days on our flight out due to the presence of Tropical Storm Cristobal. It made quite the ugly annoyance out of itself.  The evening before our scheduled flight out we stopped by Bob's Bar one last time before our trip. It was all closed up against the raging storm, but we managed to all huddle into the lee for drinks and hor d'oeuvres.  I wish I had taken a photo of that.   I did manage to snap a photo of Nevarde and La Gringa inside the closed up bar area.   The party was on the other side of that wall behind them.  We opened that up once the immediate squall went looking for us downwind.

We continued to work on our old sailboat right up into the end of August. We experienced  Tropical Storms Arthur, Bertha, and then Cristobal, with some admittedly diminishing enthusiasm.  We  finally packed up and left while Cristobal was still blowing, in fact.  That's a story in itself.  I think I'll save that one for the paperback.

 We toyed with the idea of leaving the boat in the water and continuing to work on her unless a major storm threatened. We go through plenty of years here without major storms scoring a direct hit, although they whoosh by to the sides of us all season long. We've gone through three hurricanes of note since we moved here, but all three of those occurred in a two year window. The other seven years we've been living here we had no hurricanes at all. So we were considering taking the chance and hoping that if we needed to haul the boat that the good folks over at Caicos Marina and Shipyard would have room for us on short notice.  And of course that's a gamble in itself. A few weeks of this stuff takes a lot of the fun out of tropical living.   Here's a still image from one of the videos we took during a tropical storm.

Well, the season drug on. All the cruisers with any sense were long gone to someplace safe. Bob  had asked us several times what our plans for the boat were. We looked down the dock, and felt a bit strange to be the last cruiser still in the marina. Kind of like being the last to leave the party.

We'd already begun winding down our flow of supplies and equipment ordered from the US. We got to the point where the Fed Ex truck only stopped by the house three or four times a week. Yeah, we're on a first name basis with the Fed Ex delivery man.

In July we anxiously watched as what later became Hurricane Arthur approached. In early August we closed up and hunkered down while what became Bertha came lumbering across the Atlantic at us. Then in late August we had Cristobal shut us down for several days. And each time we worried about the boat. Should we haul it, or can we control our anxiety long enough to chance another storm? It's not much fun watching these things come right at you while trying to appear normal on a diet of caffeine, fingernails and cheek lining.  Besides, it was getting kind of lonely there at the marina with only a single ferry cat for the perpetually re-stalled West Caicos development, and a few local fishing boats for company.

We were still enjoying our evenings watching the sunset at Bob's Bar, but storm clouds were gathering, again. It is that season, after all.

We finally decided we'd had enough hurricane and uninsured boat anxiety for one season and we took the boat out of the water for a couple of months. We showed up early one late summer morning in August to untie the lines from South Side Marina for the last time in this '13-'14 yachting season. The little diesels awoke with their usual puff of white smoke drifting across the smooth morning water. The smoke is really just steam that fades as they warm up with a rattly little diesel rumble that smooths out about the same time the smoke disappears. The vibrations of the still cool engines shake the hulls like drum heads and cause ripples in the water next to them. You can see them here, in the water just under the blue fender. Bob, we need to talk about that last tie-up cleat.

 

La Gringa had things ashore to do, so I took the boat around to the boatyard without a crew. At least I think that's what she was referring to by calling me crewless. Or maybe it just sounded like crewless, my hearing isn't all that great. I know this is really a small catamaran as these things go, but it's still a strange feeling to be alone on it when I'm accustomed to someone else on board to help with lines and fenders and watching the water.   It just doesn't feel right not to have someone else to shout at and blame things on.   But we had delayed what we knew we should have already taken care of. We have absolutely no incentive to take chances with this boat, and the best place for it during hurricane season is strapped down to the dirt a few steps away from the ocean. I backed the boat out of the slip and turned her to the open water. Pretty easy in an empty marina.

 

 

It's also pretty easy backing out when both engines work. This twin engine capability has been a rarity in our history with this boat. 

The fishermen on board the other boats waved as I slowly motored past. They've watched us working on this boat for the past ten months. It's a pretty small community here. And our friend Stanley (aka Burleigh) lives on the last boat on the left as we leave the marina.

 

 

I've already bumped a hull off one shallow rock out here that surprised me, so I take it very slow and easy until I'm out in deeper water. Here's one of the outer buoys marking the entrance to South Side Marina. After I clear this one I turn hard to the left and head east for several miles through coral heads and rocks. You know, the usual.

 

 

I hadn't really thought my way through the logistics of taking the boat east early in the day. The sun was low and the reflection on the water essentially blinded me to what was directly ahead of the boat. I should know better. Especially without another pair of eyes to help me spot the coral heads. I was having a real hard time trying to discern what was under that glare.   And the way these things work, the glare was  continuously and directly hovering exactly where I was heading next.  Can you spot all the coral heads between me and that distant point of land?    No.  Me either.   And that's the problem.   

The next time I need to make this trip I hope I remember to schedule it for early afternoon, to give the sun time to rise higher before I leave the marina.

After about an hour of white knuckled squinting  I passed the mysterious rock figures on the little hill overlooking the entrance to Caicos Marina and Shipyard. Finally, I was able to turn so that I wasn't being blinded. I could stop munching on the top of my heart every time a dark mass of rocks slid by seemingly just millimeters from the hull. Finally, I could turn into the entrance to the boatyard. I had a 10:00 appointment to haul the boat. I was there at 09:58.

 

 

La Gringa was watching my hopefully unexciting progress from the house. I think she knew that I was being optimistic about my appointment at the shipyard. I also think that she was also a little hesitant to haul the boat out and stop our forward progress.  There's just something counter intuitive about putting your summer toys away in August. Especially in a place where a totally acceptable version of summer pretty much runs year round.

 

The boat did not get hauled as planned. Despite my three weeks on the calendar appointment, they slipped two other boats in front off me. Here's a photo of Twisted Sheets tied up over at the Shipyard, still waiting to be hauled in the late afternoon. Silly old me had made an appointment to have the boat hauled at 10:00 in the morning, and had actually been there waiting at 10:00. And I was still waiting six hours later, when they shut down for the evening. We had to leave the boat overnight, and go through it again the next day. Someone who didn't know me might have mistaken me for irate. It was actually worse than that. 

 

But hey, it's island life, mon. You get over these things. Eventually.  Even on something like this, the third time it's happened.

 

We were back at the yard the next morning, and this time we managed to get the boat hauled out. They have workers  on hand to haul the boat into the slip. We back it in because it fits in the travel lift better. The forestays rub against it if we go in forward. These guys have a lot of experience pulling boats around by their lines.

 

 

Finally the boat is centered in the slings under the travel lift.

 

I've already posted plenty of photos of Twisted Sheets being transported around the Caicos Marina & Shipyard, so won't' repeat that here.   Finally, about 26 hours after my appointment to have the boat hauled and blocked, she was hauled and blocked.  This should be a pretty good spot to ride out all but the roughest of seas over the next few months.

That was basically some of the last things we did before leaving for over two months.   We had a lot of things to do at the house, of course.  Almost as much trouble as the boat.   And they're both more trouble than a simple camping trailer. Lately I've noticed that most of our lifestyle choices seem to incorporate some difficulty in keeping a full set of appliances running.

We are about to put the boat back in the water, and we have a lot of plans for some totally new areas to explore over the next few months.  So the blog should be improving again shortly.

We haven't been back long enough to accumulate some good new sunset photos, so I'll have to make do with one taken right before we left.    Unless, of course, you want to see photos of northern Colorado instead of tropical sunsets.  

Nah, I didn't think so.

Miscellaneous stuff and a big hunk of wood.

I have no clue how many sunrise and sunset images we've taken in the Turks and Caicos Islands, but I know it's a bunch. Pockets full of sunsets. A veritable shirtload. Then we pick one we think is representative of what it looked like to us on that day, and we post it. And then I delete almost all of the ones we don't use. Saving sunset and sunrise photos seems almost pointless. They're old news within minutes. The prettiest of sunsets existed for only the exact instant the shutter opened on the camera. It would have existed longer if I had not deleted the files... and.. oh, well... before I drift off into quantum physics.. Here's a recent sunrise on a nice, almost cloudless day here on the Caicos Bank:



Sometimes I wonder if this entire blog is just an excuse for us to take photos. We've both been 'shutterbugs' for a long time. No real explanation for it, is there? It's a pure hobby. Ongoing attempts to capture images for the fun of it and the pleasure when one comes out like we'd hoped it would. Then, when we have one just nearly right, we look at them, say "oh, nice picture!', and in most cases, never ever look at them again.

This blog lets us do one more thing with the images that we were determined to make anyway. It lets us share them with other people. It's kinda neat for other people to say "nice photo!", and it totally justifies our addiction. So thanks for looking at them, by the way. I guess that's what I was trying to say.

Lately most of our posts have been about specific trips or events. Usually a boating trip. That's probably predictable. I mean, this little country is all about the beaches, water, and reefs. And boats are a huge part of it. When we want to get away and do something fun, 90% of the time here, it involves a boat. At least as far as we're concerned. Now, if you're into golf, Providenciales has a really nice golf course. I've been told by people who are semi-fanatical about these matters that the Provo Golf and Country Club is first rate and has been getting better.

But we don't play golf, so boats it is. Mixed in with some diving, and soon again, fishing. But we also realize that most people who visit a little country like this for a short vacation don't have ready access to small boats while they're here. So I need to talk about something other than boats on this blog. And DIY. The DIY is part of living here, but it's not part of visiting here.

So in this post I thought I would just reach back into the previous couple of weeks and pick out some random images that we recorded that are NOT so much boat-related. These are photos taken between the boat trips, for the most part. These are just some scenes that would not have otherwise been posted here, as they were not part of a specific trip. These are more part of the journey between the destinations. And they are things you can do here without a boat.

On that nice sunny morning briefly immortalized (is that an oxymoron?) in the photo above La Gringa decided to take her camera and the dog and go for a walk down along the local shoreline. She got some nice photos on her little beach walk.

One of the first things to happen when Dooley the Dry and Dusty gets near the ocean is that he jumps into it. The nearest water on this trip was one of the small local marinas. I don't know what he thought he saw across the water. Probably hoping it was something he could chase, or at least bark at. I know it wasn't something he smelled, because that wind drift across the water , and the waves, pretty much tell us that the wind was coming from the left.

Maybe he heard something. I'm convinced that his eyesight isn't that great. Oh but his hearing is outrageously good. I swear, I would believe it if someone told me that dog can hear cheese being packaged at the dairy in Wisconsin.



And like most dogs his sense of smell is also excellent. Terriers are alert little beasties. He's always paying attention to something. And we don't have to worry about a "three second rule" for quality assurance if we drop a morsel on the floor here. It's history before the first bounce.

A little west of the marina there's an area of soft beach. I know I've already expounded the difference between quartz sand and limestone / coral sand, so I won't go back into that. This is soft powdery sand, right in the tidal zone and there are plenty of plants here who find that environment just dandy.



There are also quite a number of animals who happily get through their day while alternating between hours of baking sun and being a foot underwater. These, for example, seem as happy as a clam.....



Or maybe they were just chilling out after flexing their mussels.

This place is a wonderland for people who like to look at sea shells. Or just beach combing in general. We can spend hours on a stretch of beach, just looking at all the interesting stuff that washes ashore from the rest of the world. Here on Providenciales the easily accessible beaches get walked fairly often, but the tide does refresh them a few times a day. And you don't have to go far to get to a beach that might not have been visited in weeks. Months in some cases on the other islands. That reminds me that we want to make a boat trip out to a beach facing the Atlantic on North Caicos and take some photos of the things that wash ashore from the open ocean. It's always interesting stuff. The last time we were there I recognized bits of oceanographic and ASW equipment from at least three manufacturers in the New England area. I'm sure we can get at least one good blog post out of beach combing that one section.

On this stretch of beach on this day, La Gringa was also experimenting with her camera. Trying out the macro functions on a nice unbroken shell, for example:



There is a lot of sea life that can be observed without a boat around here. The marinas are great places to look down into the water. And the water is typically so clear that you can see to the bottom in most places. You might not always see big fish, but you are almost certain to see a lot of little ones. And jelly fish. And crabs.

Looking to the south southeast, those little islands are called the " Little Five Cays". It's easy to get a little confused when you first hear of them. That's because there is another entire area of Providenciales called Five Cays. And those Five Cays are different from the   Little Five Cays. And all the cays have names. Some of the names include the word 'rock'. I am not quite sure yet what the difference between islets, rocks, and cays are. I think it might have something to do with vegetation. Or maybe islets are permanently attached to the earth, and rocks are not? No.... that's not it, either. Sugar Loaf in Rio is a rock. So are Gibralter and Ayer's. I think those are attached pretty well. I've seen islets equated to cays, and to rocks, but we all know Cays and Keys that are bigger than a lot of islands. Hmm. This bears some research.  I guess cays are good for unlocking minds.

This is a good spot for kite boarding when the wind is right. And kite boarding is another thing you can do on vacation here without a boat.  You can rent the gear, and lessons are available. The water here  is very shallow out for several hundred yards offshore. If you watched your footing, you could easily walk out to these little cays. It might be prudent to do the 'sting ray shuffle'. Shoes would be a very good idea to wear on the rocks, anyhow. Trust us on this one.



And remember what I told you about this dog of ours? Well, given that he hadn't been in the ocean for probably ten minutes at this point, he took this opportunity to once again go for a swim:



This dog swims for the pure joy of it. Notice nobody else is in the water but him. Normal behaviour for a Portuguese Water Dog or a Labrador Retriever, but this is a JRT.

Or, at leat he claims to be.  I've also heard him claiming to be a lawyer from New Jersey.

He'll happily paddle back and forth, trying to figure out what we are looking at with the camera. It's difficult to get a beach photo without him in it. And if we yell at him, to 'get out of the picture DOOLEY!!'.... he's likely to just come straight into it.



And his whole attitude about being yelled at is: "You rang? I heard shouting. Something fun going on over here I should know about?"



Well, at least that moved him out of the viewfinder long enough for her to get another angle looking further to the south, without the imposition of a wet dog wedged between you and the mangroves:



La Gringa spotted a large hunk of wood washed up into the bush at the extreme edge of the high tide zone. Of course the moment she started paying attention to it, Dooley the Detrimental had to hop right into the middle of the investigation. As he is wont to do..



It's not easy to tell from these angles, but that appears to be a hunk of very hard wood. It is square on three sides, and I think it was the first piece to be ripped off a hardwood trunk at a lumber mill someplace that has large, hard trees. Once this first cut was made, subsequent passes through the saw would produce boards flat on both sides.

So this is basically a big slice down the side of a tree, that shaved off a big knot. It's got some interesting grain to it. She knows I like that kind of stuff.



This thing was way too cumbersome and heavy to lug back by foot, so it was left on the beach until we could come back with a truck and take a closer look at it.

On the following Saturday morning we were listening to the local "Cruisers Net" on the marine VHF radio when we heard about a 'flea market' being held at Turtle Cove Marina that weekend. We like going to Turtle Cove. That's where a few nice outdoor restaurants are located, and usually the creme of the local boat crop shows up there on their way through. Yes, I know I said I wouldn't talk about our boats in this post. These are not our boats. And this is something to do that doesn't require a boat.   You can do it while vacationing here.   So I'm covered.

I also imagine it gets a little confusing when I jump back and forth talking about different marinas here. I will try to explain myself better, realizing that not everyone reading this knows the island all that well.

Turtle Cove marina is on the north side of Providenciales, protected from the open ocean by the reef that is only around 0.8 miles (1,400 meters) off the beach at this point.

I have talked about it here before. Probably most recently when we posted the snorkeling photos we took while splashing around on Smith's Reef. In fact, this would be a good map for people wanting to go snorkel Smith's Reef.



That line you see snaking between the little patch reefs is the only safe way into Turtle Cove from outside the reef. If you think it looks complicated for that little section above, take a look at the whole route:



The other line coming in from the right side and ending there in an anchorage off the beach is showing how you come down along the beach from Grace Bay to get to this spot. Interesting that there isn't a direct route marked out from Sellar's Cut to the beach anchorage. Might be a classic case of "you can't get there from here". And if you don't know these waters really well, or don't have a nice sunny day with calm seas and clear water, you don't even want to try. The chances of damage are high.

Here's the "latest" Google Earth image of Turtle Cove, showing the island in the middle. I believe the smaller, undeveloped island to the left is called "Little Diddle" Cay. I can't tell you why it's called that, other than to maybe point out that many of the place names here are descriptive. For whatever that's worth to your imagination.



I wrote "latest" Google Earth image, because if you'll notice down in the left hand corner of that photo you can read that this imagery date is 2004. The Google Earth images of most of Providenciales are that old. And this place has changed a lot in seven years. Streets have been paved. There are sidewalks and street lights where there were mud holes in 2005 when we got here. It will be interesting to see the differences whenever Google gets around to updating their satellite images. I guess the good news from our standpoint is that nothing of global interest is happening here to make the world look at these islands too closely. I would hazard a guess that most people have never heard of them.

So, that Saturday morning we headed down to Turtle Cove to the island in the middle, to check out the flea market. We were there fairly early, and the crowd was already arriving.



I very quickly reach my low tolerance for crowds so we decided to take a walk along the dock to see the nice shiny boats that were in the cove that weekend. It wasn't as crowded as some popular weekends during holidays or fishing tournaments, but there were still some fairly serious toys in town:



I think it's another level of boating entirely when the dinghy has a 150 horse outboard.



Or when the stainless steel in the anchoring system is worth more than someone else's entire fleet...

It's humbling.



We love seeing stuff like this. It stokes our imaginations to know that there are people living on boats quite comfortably with a constantly changing world just outside their windows. There's a whole set of sub cultures of motor yacht cruisers that we don't typically get involved with because our interests are more into sail. It's the stuff of dreams, of course. And from a practical standpoint we don't even want to know what the fuel bill is on dream boats like these. I think our own personal ceiling on boating would be well before the point where we would need to consider adding staff.

The big motor yachts are not the only boats that come into Turtle Cove, of course. Plenty of large sailboats come in here. It's not the only protected marina on Providenciales, but it does have the deepest draft. I think you can get a boat that draws 8 ft. into Turtle Cove. Both marinas on the south side near us are limited to between six and seven feet and only at the highest tides.

While strolling around the marina admiring the yachts we noticed Mike Robertson's Osprey Marine Services truck, backed up with the welding cables stretched out.



Osprey was on the job, repairing a visiting catamaran's broken dinghy davit. Welding barefooted, as usual. I've never yet seen him in shoes.   That should tell us something.   I think one has to be pretty good at this to do it barefooted.    For years.     Heck, anyone can weld barefooted for  a few seconds.   But Mike NEVER wears shoes.

Mike specializes in stainless steel and aluminum welding, along with rigging in general. He's a real resource on the island, and is often called out to one of the marinas to fix or fabricate something for a boat passing through. I took this opportunity to ask him about making us a combination grab rail/windscreen frame for our little skiff console. I guess I had better "Sketchup" what I want, unless I can find one already made online to buy or copy.



At home we continue to watch the sea every day. It's always there in the background no matter what we're doing. And it's an ever changing canvas. Besides the sunrises, and sunsets, and the squalls, and waterspouts, and electrical and tropical storms, we get to watch a variety of boats going by every day. We have come to recognize most of the local boats now. For example, recently we spotted this trimaran approaching the boatyard under mainsail alone:



The fact that it was under sail in that location pretty much told us it was a local before it ever got close enough to see the details of the boat. Most visitors would be going slowly here, under power, feeling their way into the channel, on the radio with Bernard or Donovan at Caicos Marina. Only the locals blast along in whitecaps like they know where they're going. We could also tell it was a multi hull rather than a single hulled sailboat by the upright angle of the mast.

Well, before they turned onto a broad reach into the boatyard we knew the boat was the Minx.


And sailing right into the boatyard, and up to the dock, is pretty indicative of someone who knows his boat, and this water, and the wind.



The Minx is a fiberglass trimaran that is probably one of, if not the, fastest cruising sailboat in this area. It was hand built by Mike Robertson, the barefooted welder, and the Robertsons sail it often. We know they took it up to Bermuda and back just a couple years ago. That's a nice little 2800 mile jaunt, before you add in the squiggles and changes in direction.

Now on another day we'll look out and spot a boat like this one:



And we would likely assume that he's probably not local, or if he is he doesn't come to this part of the country often. He probably needed fuel, and draws more than six feet in that monohull. Otherwise, it wouldn't have made sense to travel past Southside marina to get to the Caicos Marina unless they also needed repairs that Southside couldn't handle. They're sailing along downwind on a light air day with a partially furled headsail. So we figure they are being real prudently tentative about our cornucopia of coral, but they like to sail rather than run the motor. It's also possible that this is a boat normally stored at the boatyard and it has just been launched and we never saw that sail before.

See what a fun game we have built into living on this spot here? "Guess the Boat" and no batteries required.

Oh, before I forget, I wanted to ask for opinions on this hunk of wood La Gringa (and Dooley the Detective) found on the beach. After she told me about it, we went down in the small Defender and picked it up. I don't know what kind of wood it is. It's very dense, but obviously it floats or it wouldn't be here.



I was thinking of bolting it to the wall above the door and just using it as a shelf. Or I could run it through a saw and end up with some interesting grained planks to work with.



That's pretty much cleaned our my little stash of un-associated photos from the past few weeks. I tried to keep our boating out of this post, just to give y'all a break from the same old 'wet-dog-gazing-at-thunderstorm photos.

But before we close out this post, there is one little video that was taken from our boat. We were headed over to Pine Cay one day recently in the skiff when we spotted a large group of 8 Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin cruising around in relatively shallow water inside the sand bars at the mouth of Pine Cay cut. We have seen a very definite interaction between the dog and dolphin before. He acts completely differently around dolphin than he does for cold blooded fish. When Dooley sees a fish, he just wants to bite it. Without exception, and no matter how big the fish is. He'll bite a Barracuda just as quickly as he will a Pilchard (that's like a sardine except not in a can surrounded in olive oil or tomato sauce).

But when we encounter Dolphin, Dooley always seems to get into some kind of discussion with them. His ears perk up, and the Dolphin usually head right over to the boat. In this case, the big group of Dolphin we initially spotted broke into two groups of four. . One group held back while the younger crowd came right over to the boat and were obviously very interested in the dog. I didn't think to start the camera until well into it, but they were still talking to Dooley when I started this. One of them was rolling belly up, and I was (excitedly forgetting my self) pointing at it in the video. Maybe he just wanted a scratch. Who knows what Dooley told him?

We had drifted almost over the sand bar, and I had the boat in reverse to pull us back into deeper water. After we were back in deeper water, the dog kept whining and the four dolphin came back yet again. This was the third time they approached the boat. Finally, when the first four dolphin moved off for the final time, the the second, standoffish group came over to see what we were doing, with one of them swimming under the boat. Then they joined the first group. The second group seemed more interested in just checking us out and then moving on. They didn't pay much attention to Dooley, but of course they had probably heard all of the original conversations. Or maybe they were just 'cat people'.


(music is “Stairway to Heaven” by Rodrigo y Gabriela)


That's pretty much the end of this post. I just need a sunset to close it up. I was out washing the boat off one afternoon when I looked up and was convinced we had the makings for a great sunset from that angle. So I got my camera all ready.... and blah. Nothing colorful at all. It looks more like a morning-after photo or something. But I put so much time in to waiting for this to turn into a good sunset I am going to post it anyhow. Another photo never to be seen again:



And that clears the old buffer out and lets me finish with one of La Gringa's nicer sunsets. As usual. Same view, different day:



And please, friends and neighbors, keep those emails and comments coming. It's good to know that someone out there is reading some of this. Otherwise, we would stop doing it.

Hey did you notice not one word about DIY in this post? Awwww.... I just went and ruined that. Okay, then, not two words about it...