More Messing Around

This is about the remainder of our little bouncy rubber boatie trip out to Turtle Rock and back last week.   We got beat up in squall chop. There might be a blues song in there somewhere.  Makes me want to grab my fiddle...

 "I got beat up by squall chop, mama.
My rear end's wet and my back is sore..
All whacked up by that squall chop,baby,
This dog don't wanna ride it no more"

It was a lumpy trip back to the east.  Lumpy enough that we needed to pull over to someplace smooth and calm at the first opportunity.   This place looked good.  It was tucked up in the lee of the  island.  The terrain was effectively blocking the freshening north wind that had bedeviled us since leaving Turtle Rock.   I  angled into the first beach, cut the engine as we approached and let the little boat slow down and drift gently up against the soft shallow sand bottom on its own.  The sudden silence after the clattering cacophony of the little two stroke outboard was like a back rub for the inside of our ears.   As the echos of internal combustion died away the only things we could hear were the sounds of the waves lapping up against the shoreline.  Oh yes, this little spot will  work just fine.

 The sky was darkening as the wind picked up out where we had just been.  We headed back from Turtle Rock at a good time.  Sooner would have been even better but we were out from under the leading edge of the squall line that was coming from the north.   It would not be long before  the sunshine stopped sparkling on the wavelets here.   But for the moment we had a private beach all to ourselves, and what is life but a series of moments anyway.   Great place for us to stretch our legs.  All eight of them in total.  To be accurate, Dooley the Deluge was a tripod there for a while after he got ashore.  He gets selfishly interested in water management  after a few hours on a boat.

This part of the island  has a series of these small secluded beaches tucked back into the limestone shoreline.  These are nice places to take a break, and a boat is the best way to get to them.  They're sheltered from the wind in three directions and usually deserted.  I   managed to snap a photo of this one before Dooley the  Determined tracked up the unblemished sand.   I think that must be a hobby of his.  Dog detests a blank canvas.

Dooley the Delighted was extremely happy about the opportunity to go ashore and do a little exploring and beach combing.  I think he was hoping to find a fire hydrant washed up somewhere.  If you can read dog face, you can probably tell that he was grinning from ear to floppy ear here.  He'd be laughing joyously if he could figure out how.

 We walked the beach for a while, working our way around the rocks, relaxing and looking for anything interesting.  Are rocks interesting?  I think some of them are.   I liked this view enough to take a photo, anyway.   I'm guessing that somewhere in upstate New York, or perhaps Montreal or Bergen or Moscow or London, someone is looking at this and thinking, "oh yeah. I want to go there." And you should.  Life's too short to miss out on places like this.  

Dooley the Delinquent was keeping himself busy.  He was looking for some kind of animal life to harass.   I don't think he found anything moving in the rocks.   I was  hoping he'd back a crab into a corner.  That's always good for some laughs.  The crabs here can get feisty and they don't seem to worry themselves much about small yippy little dogs.  They're armed.  But the beach scene today was quiet, and no crustaceans were harmed in the making of this blog post.

We kept an eye on the weather just to the  immediate west of us.  We knew we had a limited amount of time before the gathering overcast turned this into another windy gray scale afternoon.  But for the moment we still had sunny patches of cerulean sky and clear warm water.  La Gringa walked the boat down the beach to keep up with Dooley and me.  We were beach combing.  She was just chilling.  And enjoying not getting beaten up by the boat.  Do you recognize that hill in the background?  We're just outside the entrance to South Side Marina. We could swim home from here.

We hadn't revisited this little beach since last year and I noticed that the slow processes that turn these islands back into sand are making their small inevitable adjustments and changes in the terrain.   I don't recall this little cave as being this large before, for example.  And I pay attention to sea caves.  This one is big enough for a couple of people  to get out of a rain storm for a while. For example.   There might even be room in there for a dog, too.  Unless the dog was wet, of course.  Wet dogs are suddenly just too big for small caves.  Medium sized caves, too.

Our resident four paw drive was up and down the rocks and all over the beach.  I think he probably trots about a mile for every ten meters I walk. I get tired just watching him. He never likes to get too far out of sight of La Gringa or me.   Preferably both of us.   He's appointed himself as our guardian.  He thinks pretty highly of himself.   He loves this place.  He thinks it's one of His greatest creations.

Sometimes when the overhanging ledges crack and fall over onto the sand they create nice protected paths between the sea and the island.  It makes for a nice place to walk, and some good scenery typical of the south side of Providenciales.   There are about a half dozen or so masts right in the center of this photo.  And our little floating home is in the center of those masts.  Nice neighborhood.



I found another sinkhole down through the limestone ledge that I had not noticed on previous visits.  I tried to entice the dog to  go down through the hole and come out underneath for a good photo.  He was having none of it.  I think he was suspicious of my motives, which is understandable since I've been messing with his head his entire life.  So when I tried to convince him to crawl under the ledge and pop out of the top so I could get a cute Jack in the box photo, he declined.  Nope.   He wasn't going for it.  So I just stuck the camera down through the hole and snapped a random photo.   See all the little dog claw scrabble marks next to my foot?  He really didn't want to go down into that hole.        

After I thought about it for a while I realized that wearing the life jacket was probably making him leery about climbing into tight spaces.  He normally loves digging into burrows and going into caves, it's what he was bred to do.  But he's also had some scary times alone when a camera I attached to his life jacket got him caught up in bushes, unable to escape.  It took us a long time to find him.  Well, it was probably only about a half an hour that he was trapped, but a half hour to us is the equivalent of a weekend in jail in dog years.    When he realized I was trying to trick him into a cave for a photo, he moved off and kept his distance until I got distracted by something else.

See, caves and overhangs are perfectly fine with him, as long as HE gets to choose them.    I told him that these overhangs eventually get undercut to the point where the next pounding storm surf vibrate them loose and they fall.   He wasn't listening to a word I said.  And he wasn't getting within my reach, either.

So I went looking for something else to photograph and found some conglomerates in the sedimentary rock. Whoo whoo... big deal.  I think maybe this is the result of a long ago subsea landslide in which broken rubble got covered over with the calcium carbonate detritus of the sea that eventually formed these rocks.  I called Dooley over to take a look, telling him I needed his opinion, but he was totally uninterested.   He only cares about consumable conglomerates.   Bacon bits in beans would get his interest.  Cheetos mixed in his dog food would rate highly.  Rocks?  Not so much.

I mentioned the pounding waves that hit these shores when we have strong winds from the south.  It's those pounding waves that eventually break the ledges off, chipping away at the perimeter of the islands.   Here's a section of someones dock sitting up almost three meters above sea level.  That should give you an idea of how high the waves do get here during storms. 

And the collapsing ledges make for some interesting places for little dogs to explore.   This is where he retreated to when I told him he needed to get back on the boat.  Suddenly he was acting all helpless and tired, wanting me to carry him.  I just turned and headed for the RIB.    We know how to handle this miscreant.  Lots of experience at it.

We only hung around  here for about a half an hour, just long enough to stretch our legs and work out some kinks.   I figured out later that we had traveled about 14 or 15 miles in the RIB this day.  The first half of the trip we were heading west, with the wind behind us.   That makes for a comfortable ride in a small boat.  But when we turned around to head home back to the east we were facing the oncoming waves and wind.  Sitting in the same position for five miles of that had left me feeling like I was permanently twisted to the left to operate the outboard motor.   This is not a hands-off kind of boat.

When we were ready to leave the beach we had a hard time convincing the dog that it was time to go.  He wanted to spend the rest of the day there.   Finally La Gringa and I walked out to the boat and I started the engine.   Dooley knows that the sound of the motor means the boat's leaving and he knew his only ride back to dinner was about to depart.   That did it.   He paddled his way out to where we were waiting.  Suddenly Mr. Helpless Dog was cruising along at a couple of knots just fine.

I think it was about at this point he realized he couldn't climb back on the boat without help.  He gets this real pitiful look on his face.  It's a familiar look when he wants to look helpless and needy.  I think of it as his "POD" look, for Poor Old Dog.    And he's gotten pretty good at it.   He practices in front of a mirror when he thinks nobody is looking at him.

La Gringa hoisted the dripping POD over the side of the boat so we could head back to the marina.  The handle on his life jacket is perfect for hoisting the little blighter aboard.  It's also convenient to snag it with a boat hook at times.

I think he was planning to ride up on the top of the side tube, which is where we usually sit ourselves, but of course that idea went south as soon as I twisted the throttle handle and the boat started moving.  He was down in the hull in short order.  A safe place to ride under my feet.  I didn't get any photos of that as I had already put the camera back in my pocket.  But you're not missing much.  The trip back into South Side Marina was anti-climatic.

I hope these photos gave some of you snow-bound sailors, beach lovers and island dreamers a small break from the brutally cold weather we've been reading about lately.

 I like to end these posts with a sunset photo, but this time I didn't really have a current one. 
But then I remembered that I had another photo that might work as a sunset photo with a bit of a story.

A few afternoons ago we were working in our boat doing whatever kind of boaty work things we were doing at the time (there are plenty) when we heard these deep, throaty sounding engines coming into the marina.   Like Harleys with hulls.   We didn't recognize them.

So we went out to take a look, and pulling up to Bob's fuel dock were two of the sexiest launches we'd seen in quite a while.   One of these boats was a really tricked out Nautica RIB with dual engines, teak trim, and a uniformed captain.   The other boat was a larger, fiberglass launch and it was also very unusual looking.  Lush seating for a dozen people.  The boat had the name "Yalla" on the transom.  There's a big clue there.

Right at dusk, three black SUV limos with darkened windows pulled into South Side Marina, and about a half dozen people exited  and immediately climbed into the larger of the two launches.  Some of these guys were obviously security.   The boats had been warming up for about an hour, and left immediately in the gathering dark.  This, too, is unusual here.  These are dangerous waters in the dark unless you know them, or have a local guide.  Then we saw their police escort and they did have a local guide, just to show them the way out.  We were intrigued, as you may imagine.        I went inside and Googled up the "Motor Yacht Yalla", and man, did I get an eyeful.  Check out that website.

The  M/Y Yalla belongs to the wealthiest family in Egypt.  Here's one photo I lifted from the website I linked to above.  I wanted to show you this one especially so you could see the fancy launch that I was talking bout.  It's the boat tied up alongside there in this photo:

The weather was rough, and we figured that there was a chance this boat wasn't too far away if they were running important family members back and forth in the launches.  So the next morning we walked up Jim Hill to see if we could spot the yacht.  And we did.   She was anchored off of South Dock, about 4.5 NM (8 km) away.

The wind was howling, I had only my pocket camera, and no tripod, but I did try to take some photos of Yalla using the little Nikon's zoom.   I braced the camera on a wobbly, disintegrating realtor's sign and did my best to get an image or two we could use.   La Gringa thought it was funny.

And here, at four and a half miles, is the M/Y Yalla.

I  turned on the digital zoom feature, and cranked it up to  maximum and got a couple more photos.  Enough to identify the boat, anyhow. Of course the quality of the photo gets pretty bad at 40X. 

There's really no doubt what boat this is, though, even at that distance.   The boat was angled away from us.  This makes it look foreshortened with the stacking effect of the zoom.  Here's another shot from bow on.

I recognized the name of the owner, Naguib Sawir,  from news I'd been reading recently.  This is the guy who offered to buy an island to house the Syrian refugees.   Sounds like a decent enough sort of person.  I guess he was too busy to stop by our boat and say hello.  This is becoming a trend. The Russian billionaire didn't say anything to us, either, when he was in town.  Maybe I need to bathe more often.

This little blog side trip was all about me not having a sunset photo, remember?  Well here's the one with the procession heading out at dusk for the Yalla.   The first boat is the Marine Police, the second one is a local boat run by a friend of ours hired as a  guide to get them safely back, and then the launch with the tail lights is the one with the rich guys on it.  I'm not sure why they needed the inflatable too.  A spare boat for their spare boat I suppose.  It did have some people in it who looked like they knew some things.

Billionaire's boats at Bob's.  How's that for a change? 

Terrier of the Tropics

Wow, a week goes by fast when you have a deadline.   Even though it's pretty much self imposed it's still there, ya know?   Nipping at my heels, slapping at the back of my head.   Fortunately we seem to have had a fairly busy week when I look back at it.   Plenty of material.  Not hectic, not slow, somewhere around mid-throttle as our lives have gone lately.  And the deadline bit actually seems to help, somehow.  I think I just need direction.  And adult supervision.

I have a sunrise photo I took yesterday morning that I was going to post here, but then today La Gringa took this one.  A nice sunrise at the last moment just as I was writing this post. I liked it better than mine.

We had this great thunderstorm going on between us and the sunrise.  Well, two of us thought the thunderstorm was nice.  We do have one small quadraped in the family who sees no value, no use, and absolutely no humor at all in thunderstorms.  He was nowhere to be found while these photos were being taken.  This dog will hide from memories of thunderstorms.  He'll run from a rumor if it has lightning in it.

This is the shot I was going to use, until my better half trumped me with her better eye and fancier camera.  pfttt.  Maybe I put too much weight in the departing sloop.  A lot of that going around in my head, lately. Envy.

I'm just kidding, of course.  I liked her photos better and that's the long and short of it.  My masculinity can handle the fact that my wife is quite often the better photographer.   She zoomed in on the sunlight on the water just under the cloud.   That's a little break between squalls.  Like this:

Okay that's enough sunrises for one morning.  Some might say more than one sunrise in a day is cause for alarm, come to think of it.   Unless you're an astronaut, I suppose.

Anyhow, moving onward, we had a busy week again at South Side Marina.   We're there a big part of most days as has been the pattern of our lives now since the beginning of the year.   We're working on our boat, and we haven't been doing anything of a fun nature for what seems like centuries.   I guess we could say we're committed.  Or should be.

We do get breaks from the drudge work.  This week was a nice surprise for me personally. Once again we've been fortunate to get to meet an internet pen pal in person.  And this was a good one.  Not all of them are, you know.   I suspect you've discovered that on your own already.

John Pederson and I have exchanged messages on a variety of boating related issues over the past several years on a multihull sailboat forum.  John lives in England and also sails a small catamaran.   Usually in England.

This is the view from Bob's Bar three days ago.

If you look out onto the Caicos Bank, just above the railing you can see two catamarans anchored just off the beach here.   The wind was blowing 24 knots from the east, and Sapodilla Bay was getting bumpy.  So some boats moved over here for some calmer water.  And to take on fuel and water from South Side Marina.

The yellow boat in the foreground is John's boat.  It's a Richard Woods design called the Sagitta model.  That is the s/v Scrumpy.

My British internet pen pal just sailed that little boat alone from England to St. Lucia.   He'd never done a trans-Atlantic crossing of any kind, and his first one was in a small, non-production catamaran.  With no crew. It took him 21 days to cross the Atlantic, 2800 miles in storms that had him surfing down waves at 20 knots while doing everything in his power to slow the boat down.   He has some interesting stories to tell, and we were fortunate enough to hear a few of them when he visited us on Twisted Sheets at the marina.

For example, in addition to the howling winds and heavy following seas, his two old outboards had finally given out, and he sailed into Providenciales with no other form of propulsion whatsoever.   He picked up a six hp motor while he was here, and that's all he has on the boat in addition to the sails.

Now here's an even better story, he's leaving here bound for Nassau and Bermuda and then he's sailing s/v Scrumpy back across the North Atlantic, alone, for the second time. I'm not sure I've met anyone who was doing two solo trans-Atlantic sails in one season before.    Certainly not in a 30 foot boat.       There's hope for us all.    The crazies, I meant.

We'd hoped to get together again before he left,  I wanted to hear more about how you sleep when you have to sail for 24 hours a day.  He wanted to know more about putting a 3D printer on a boat.  But the winds changed to briefly favorable and we looked up from our boat work yesterday afternoon to see John's mast moving away from the anchorage.   I dropped my  globby old glue scraper and belatedly checked my email and saw  that he was grabbing the weather window to head up to Mayaguana.   On the move again.  La Gringa and I hopped in the car and charged up to the top of the nearest hill to try to get a good photo of  him leaving under sail.  He goes everywhere under sail.  No kidding.  This is the road at the top of the hill.  We've shown you views from up here before.

We've flown the kite up here a few times for aerial photos, too.   This time we drove to the end of the road and I climbed up as high as I could get for a good vantage point another couple of meters above La Gringa there at the end of the road.

And we were too late to get a good photo.  The wind was buffeting me and I only had my little handheld pocket camera.   And the boat was getting smaller by the minute,  so I only got crummy photos, but hey they're better than nothing.  Besides, I promised you guys some blue water photos last week as I recall.   Here's Scrumpy heading out, with Bay Cay in the background.  Big ocean out there for such a little bitty boat.

If you want to follow John's progress, he has a pretty good sailing blog going at
Sagittacatamaran.  Some great photography, too.

That day was an unusual break in what's been a very windy season so far. After John and Scrumpy left there were two other boats who departed for various scattered destinations.   We met all of these cruisers while they stayed at South Side.  We get to know a little bit about people passing through, as most of them stay several days to a week or so.  And we get together at the bar, and we talk thoughout the day and often help each other with lines and fenders and advice and parts.   We know where they came from, some of their  thoughts and experiences, and in most case we know where they plan to go next.  

In this  next photo, for example, you already know that the boat on the left is heading north up through the Bahamas to Bermuda and across the Atlantic home to England.    The middle boat, a Beneteau monohull, is heading south to Luperon in the Dominican Republic and then down the Lesser Antilles into the Caribbean.  The trailing monohull under power on the right is heading east, skipping Puerto Rico to avoid paying US taxes on the boat he bought in Panama, and planning to cruise the British Virgin Islands for a while.  That's all I'm going to say about that, but you get the idea.  They sail in, hide from the wind for a few days and get replenished.  Then they scatter and it all reorganizes, and it happens again.  We'll have a new batch of neighbors in the marina shortly, and they will all be different but with commonalities as well.  Like minded people.

 I think someone should start writing a regular column about this place, Tales from the South Side or some kind of thing.  The marina gets a pretty reliable stream of interesting people coming through.  Especially this time of year.  People are starting to head back north after a season in the islands. Things have shifted in their worlds, as many return to corporate and community lives after a sailing hiatus.   There's plenty of material. And it's constantly changing.  I didn't even tell you guys about Trevor and the Princess, or the Russians, or the drowned dog.  Maybe some of this stuff needs to wait for the book.  After we're safely away.

After these three boats left on the favorable departure winds the marina was just about emptied out for the short term. It's never completely empty this time of year of course.  There are fishing boats tied up, several dive charter boats in and out, and there's our old boat still there being refitted.  Slowly.

Breaks in the weather generate a sort of sailing peristalsis up and down the Bahamas and Antilles.  Boats  leave here bound for their next destination, and in a big slow game of musical nautical chairs other boats leave places like George Town, Gt. Exuma, or Clarencetown, Long Island, or Luperon D.R., headed here.  And it continues throughout sailing season.

Not everyone who comes here stays in the marina the entire time.  Many sailors are on very tight budgets.   These guys spent several days tied up at South Side and then moved out here to save a few dollars by staying 'on the hook' in a protected  anchorage.  It's a good way to live on a boat that's largely self sufficient to begin with.  They're also only a short dinghy ride to the dock if they need help or supplies.

There's a young family with three pre-teen boys on that boat. A floating version of a tuning fork.  I'm surprised someones' not in the water, yet.   I'd be.  It might even still be this water.

We hear rumors that things might be changing in that view in the photo above. And soon.  Plans for dredging and building apartments on the shoreline.  Oh boy. Lots to write about.

While  up on the hill I snapped a photo of "our" hill off to the east.   We live in the little house with the white roof right in the middle of this image.  Not the big house on the right.  That belongs to the artist formerly and now again known as Prince.  Our part-time neighbor.

And you, too, can be Prince's neighbor for a while, if you like!  No kidding, it's the once in a lifetime opportunity to live next to a rock guitarist's vacation cottage.  Our house here will be going on the market  shortly after we move onto our sailboat full time.  Quiet neighborhood.  Smashing views, to boot.

I've heard from some readers that they miss the more frequent updates on Dooley the Demented.  I can assure you he's presently out on bail and doing his usual Dooley routine.  I was working on some shiny metal stuff for the boat this week and decided to take some photos of it in case I desperately needed some DIY to fluff up a section of this blog.  This was my backup in case nothing else happened to write about.   The dog has a love/hate relationship with the camera.  He gets nervous when I aim it at him.  I think this is related to the automatic flash, which sometimes goes off during a photo.   I also use it for fill sometimes when the sun is causing me shadow problems.  And I think he relates that flash of light to things like fireworks and lightning bolts.   Remember this is a dog who gets the vapors watching Boston weather forecast reruns, and he's never even been to Boston. But anything that reminds him of his storm experiences with us scares him and the camera makes him nervous.  But at the same time whenever I pull it out and hold it up he knows that something has caught my interest.  And that gets his interest.  He will invariably come over to see what I am so absorbed about.

It becomes difficult to get a photo without the dog in it, sometimes.  There was absolutely no doggie reason for him to give this anything more than a cursory sniff and  then move on.

And telling him to go away doesn't work.  THEN he gets suspicious about whatever it is I don't want him to see.  He knows something is going on.  He just can't always figure out what it is.   We have different scales on what constitutes 'interesting'.

I find very little of interest in a dead lizard or the lower foot and a half of a tree, for example.   And Dooley just can't get into close ups of flowers or boat parts.

So typically I just have to be patient and hope that something else comes along and distracts him for long enough for me to get the photos I actually wanted in the first place.

While we're on the subject of Doolance Winchester McDog I wanted to ask you for some advice.   See, we're planning to start exploring quite a bit of a wider area once we're moved onto the boat and mobile.  This has long been a plan of ours.  We just got distracted.  For ten years. 

 It's common for cruisers on boats to have little business cards printed up, called 'boat cards', that have the boat name, some contact info and that sort of thing on them.  They exchange cards with other cruisers, and keep in touch via email and radio and telephone.  We've got quite a collection already.

We've got our own boat cards, but I also wanted to print up some t-shirts with the boat name on it.  Just something a little different.  Printing t-shirts is not that big a deal if you want to go through the trouble.   So I had this mental image of a cartoon Dooley the Demented, Terrier of the Tropics thing going on.  But I need the graphics.   I'm not a good artist, although I can eventually work my way though a sketch.  No natural talent there, though.   So I found out about this Fivver thing, where artists and suppliers will sketch your pet for five dollars.  Supposedly.   I contacted an artist in India based upon examples of her work on Fivver and good reviews.  I sent her a link to Dooley's Facebook Page and told her I was interested in a drawing of Dooley standing on the bow of our boat.   I cobbled up some pirated (no pun intended) bits of clip art to show her kind of what I had in mind:

I can't use that really, because it's someone else's work that I sliced and diced, as an example of what I had in mind.    I wanted something original. I was thinking of Dooley with a caption, and I could come up with a new one every six months when the old ones wore out.  A series of unique t-shirts.  This kind of thing appeals to us. I was expecting a drawing for five bucks  within a day or so.   It didn't work out that way.  Probably due to my own naive inexperience dealing with Fivver.  I sent the link, a bunch of photos of the dog, and  I also sent the artist a rendition of a Catalac 12M boat.  And we only need the bow, with the dog on it.

And I thought I was pretty clear that what I wanted was something that looked like our dog, standing on the bow of something recognizable as our boat.  For a t-shirt.  I'll do the words and design, I just need the dog drawing.  I'm getting redundant again, aren't I?   Well, it didn't work in India.

 We eventually progressed to this point, with this being her first sketch back to me that we thought looked promising.  But it took a long time, and I started to get the feeling that I wasn't doing a very good job of communicating.  Still, this is workable.  

Finally, three weeks and fifty dollars into it we agreed that she'd drawn a caricature of Dooley.  What do you think?

Yes, me too.  I have mixed feelings about it.  Not exactly what I had in mind, but I don't want to keep this exchange with India going any longer.  I played with the eyes a bit and discovered that I can change things pretty easily as for expressions. 

So if I can get the colors right and a sword in his hand or a bandana and pistol or some pirate stuff on him, it might work.  Oh, I did finally ask about the dog on the boat, and when I saw the final work I realized just how deep my communication problem with artists in India is running. Well, this is what we have so far:

That doesn't look like our boat.  And this is when we decided we need some artists who are more familiar with our intended lifestyle.   

I think I am going to send photos of Dooley to four or five other artists and see what they come up with.  For $5.  

But one way or another, we're planning to eventually have our own t-shirts with the dog and the boat.  Or a cartoon strip.  Do any of you guys know a graphic artist that likes to do dog caricatures, by any chance?  Will trade ya a t-shirt....

Okay, that's  it for this post.  We have just seen some cool photos of our long time friend Fishy Trish with a huge wahoo in a tournament here, and I wanted to use them but I'm still waiting for permission.  And well, it's Monday.  I have a commitment here.

And a sunset.   See you next week.

That is.....

Unless you also want a boat DIY update.  This is the DIY section, with nothing but toil and trouble and not a single pretty tropical photo to be seen.

If you read this far you saw the piece of aluminum that Dooley was sniffing around in the post.  What happened was that I needed something to cover up the hole left when I removed that nasty old holding tank pumpout fitting from the boat.  We don't have a lot of choices down here on the island for marine hardware, and sometimes I just decide to make my own.  Like now.    

I have several hunks of various materials in various configurations.  I save junk, to put it bluntly. And sometimes it pays off.   I used a piece of glue encrusted aluminum to make a deck plate.   A three inch hole saw on the drill press cut the soft metal well enough.

I'm not sure what the mist around the piece is, in the photo. It might be a cloud of the lubricant I sprayed on the metal to cut it.  The hole saw was spinning in the photo.

I hit that disc with some various grades of sandpaper to clean it up a bit.

It looked like it would do  the job at this stage, but I decided I didn't want that 90 degree sharp edge right where my bare feet would be slipping and sliding as I run from one end of the deck to the other in blind barefooted panic.  Should that ever happen.

Besides, when you look at it close up like that, it still looks ugly and sharp and un-smooth.   I wanted to take the un out of un-smooth.   That's not even a word, is it.

I cut a hole in a piece of scrap plywood and hot glued it to some 45 degree plywood supports.  This made it pretty easy to get a uniform bevel on the aluminum.  This drill press has become my machine shop several times now.

I polished that up a little more, and it really wasn't that much longer before I had a suitable (to me, anyway) deck plate.  I think it looks a whole lot better than the one that says, and means, 'waste'.   I know it's a whole lot cleaner.  And with a fresh history.   

In addition to this little deck plate job, this week I completed installing the port water tank we fiberglassed, and adjusted the pressure on a new water pump for it.  And we keep working on the interior.  That's finally starting to pay off.  We're now working in the other main "guest" cabin.  La Gringa finished painting the cubby holes in our cabin just last night.  And this is how it looks as the ugly old stuff comes off and the new hull liner and paint go on.

The white light and fan fixtures are new and I'm upgrading and replacing a lot of wiring as we go.  But we're starting to see the light at the end  Two weeks ago there is NO way I would ever have sat in this particular locker.  But now it smells like a new car.

Or as John Pederson said, like a brand-new boat.   

And us DIY guys don't needs no stinkin' sunsets, right?

or do we?  I guess some of us might, when nobody's looking. Oh well, better safe than sorry.

and now I can say 'see you next week'.