Blue Haven Marina

We thought this photo of the water was a little different.  Something about the various horizons  interested me.  There's the dark silhouette  of the land.   The wind is rippling the near  shore water, but just a few hundred meters out it transitions to a  smooth glossy surface, out to almost flat.  That continued out as far as the eye could see. 

And then it transitioned to a low lying cloud layer sitting on the real horizon, then some cumulus clouds and on to the clear blue of the Caribbean sky south of us.   Anyhow, it's slightly different from the usual sunrise shot.

If you actually like the usual sunrise stuff instead, how about a little 20 second time lapse video?



This post is about the newest marina on Providenciales, the Blue Haven Marina and Resort.   We recently decided that we'd treat ourselves to a late lunch after yet another day struggling with the Immigration Department here.  We'd just forced ourselves to be nice and patient and polite to a number of people who were not trying to be any of those things themselves.  It took us three trips to the police, one trip to the post office, two trips to a computer supply store, one trip to a passport photographer, one trip to the bank, one trip to the Treasury, and three trips so far to the actual Immigration department...... to renew a permit we've had for 8 years.  The process took up some part of every day for a week.   It was a very frustrating experience, again, for someone who appreciates logic and efficiency. This should have been one trip to Immigration.  Check the boxes, sign the form, write the check.  Five minutes, tops.   That's not the way it works here. And it seems to get even more frustrating every time we do it. More people, less common sense.  Well, since we were somewhere near the end of the process, and in that area between grateful to just be done with it again and wanting to strangle someone, we figured a relaxing lunch was in order.

La Gringa had  heard about a new lunch spot and bar opening near the site of the Leeward marina area.   This is part of the complex that used to be called Nikki Beach.  After several years of aimless drifting through the lumpy financial seas that surround this little country, the operation of the marina in the middle of the Leeward channel is under new management.   We decided to go check it out.

If you'll look, for a moment, at the lower channel in that Google Earth image above, you should see the floating docks at the recently renamed Blue Haven Marina.   To be honest, we've actively avoided the place.   We're members in good standing of the old expat retro-grouch community who really did not want to see  the old Leeward Marina torn down.  I know we wrote about it all here on the blog.  We've been ignoring the new marina, and figuratively holding our breath until we turned blue. It doesn't work any better now than it did when I was four years old, either. The new marina is here to stay.  

And a nice one it is, too.  Easily the most modern and well built marina in this country.   If you're interested in all the details, you can find most of those at the Blue Haven Marina website.   I know I've posted dozens of photos of the floating concrete docks here.   We pass by them every time we boat from Leeward out to the north west. They take up three quarters of the former Leeward Going Through Channel.

We figured it was time for us to take a closer look at the marina from the land side.   Look at it as a possible resource, for a change.

The Blue Haven marina office and the new Salt Bar and Grill are in what used to be called the Johnston Construction Company building at Leeward.  Everything has been upgraded and modernized.  It all looks and feels brand new.

We had a late lunch at the Salt Grill. It was a decent lunch.  My cheeseburger was ho hum, but La Gringa's chicken wrap thingy was delicious.  We probably picked a bad time to be there, at 2:30 in the afternoon on a week day.  Oh, it was a good time to be there for the construction crew who set up a power saw a few feet away, but not so good for a quiet lunch.  I'm sure that any other day, or during peak serving times (like, for example, noon) it would be a great place for a quiet lunch.  The outdoor dining area is certainly located in a nice place.  I could see whiling away a bit of afternoon here watching the boats go by.

The grounds have been completely upgraded and landscaped. I took a walk around to see what had happened to the old parking lot where we used to park while we were keeping a boat in the water here between 2005 and 2007.   There's very little left of what was here before.

In addition to the landscaping, the marina has brought in sand, and built a really nice beach volleyball court. This should be a great way to attract some attention if they can convince some of the pro volleyball groups to  bring a tournament here.

I'm probably going to whine a little bit more about the old days before getting on with my life and accepting that this is a world class marina with excellent facilities and great plans for the future.  As the last of the nostalgia trickled away, I walked out to a spot I estimated would have been where the old Gilley's Restaurant stood. See that far traffic cone in this photo, below?

That traffic cone is just about where I was sitting in this photo of the old Gilley's restaurant and the Leeward dock, back in the day. That's me in the middle of the photo, on the deck next to the window. Facing the photographer. Whom I married.

To compare the changes, this is a Google Earth image of the area back before it was 'improved'.   You can see that it was a much smaller operation than what you see in the first GE image up above.

While I was mumbling to myself about the good old days and grumpily kicking rocks around on the new pavement, La Gringa managed to find an old friend of ours.  She showed up in a golf cart driven by Duran.  He worked here at the original fuel dock back when it existed.  Then he worked at Walkin's marina down at the other end of the channel for the past several years.  And now, Doran is the dock master here at Blue Haven marina. Here's a photo of La Gringa and Doran the dock master:

And here's a photo of Doran and La Gringa, taken at almost the exact same spot on the earth, back in  2007.  A lot has changed in seven years.  Duran can no longer fit all of his hair under a ball cap, for example.

I have to wonder how long she's going to nurse that rum punch, though.

We had the rest of the day to look around so Doran took us on a guided tour of the  marina.    As you can see, the docks are extremely well built and so far, drastically underutilized.  We've never yet seen them filled with boats. But to be fair, the place has been in and out of legal limbo for quite a while.

Our interest in this as a marina isn't entirely academic, either. We are very much interested in any options as places for us to keep a 40 foot catamaran with  electrical and water hookups.   We were interested enough to go into the marina office and talk to the staff there about monthly rates.   We were happy to hear that island residents even get a slight discount compared to transients.   Hey, this could work.  I mean, we're very happy with Twisted Sheets being at South Side Marina, but it's good to have options.  After talking to Doran for a while, we seriously began to consider this a pretty good place to tie up a boat for a while.

See what I mean about Doran's hair?  He's got it all Rasta'd up here. Hope I didn't offend anyone, I don't know the right term for when a guy's dreadlocks are all bundled up in a knit hat.  Hey, you've all seen my image here often enough.  I obviously am clueless regarding men's hair styles.  Not having one, myself.



Doran gave us a great tour of the floating dock facility.  The more I looked around, the easier it was  to picture us here in Twisted Sheets. That's not a bad view, compared to some marinas we've been in.  I know I'd trade Riviera Beach, Florida for this any day.

I  noticed that the dock power and water stations were equipped with the big four prong connectors the mega-yachts would need to get shore power.  That wouldn't work for us.   I mentioned to Doran that we only needed 30 amps and I didn't have an adapter to get to the kilowatt connectors the big boys use.   "No problem" he told me, and unlocked one of the swinging covers.  Yep, that's the connector I need there on the left.   The dock also has internet at the slips.   This place is sounding better and better.

Doran mentioned that the marina also now runs a facility in the canal over behind what was once called the Nikki Beach resort.   That's the  building in the distance here in the next photo.  It's all now part of the new Blue Haven Marina....... and Resort.   We took him up on his offer of a tour of that  area, too.  I mean, we still had the afternoon, a guide with a golf cart, and most of a rum punch left.

Before I grow up and move on, I had one more photo of the "old days" to show you.  This is a pano shot showing the Leeward area after the Nikki Beach was built, but before the old marina and Gilley's was torn down. I'll post this, and then shut up about what was then. Time to take advantage of what is now. The current photo (above) was taken from about where the Catch the Wave office was back in 2007.

We had to stop and get a photo of this chess set at the resort.  What a fun idea.   You can have an intellectually stimulating game of chess and some upper body exercise at the same time. I bet those two-up-and-one-over knight moves are a clean-and-jerk workout.

And a full board, diagonal bishop sweep might require a few minutes in which to recover.

These are Blue Haven's  protected marina and fuel docks located on the canal immediately behind the resort.  Nice facility for a power boat up to maybe 30 feet or so.  Not big enough for the sailboat we're thinking about.  These slips are not wide enough for us.

We've been recently reading about the upcoming attempt of a group to kite board across the Atlantic ocean. It's called the Atlantic Kite Challenge, and the Blue Haven Marina has been selected as the destination spot on this side of the ocean. That's happening next month. You can read about that in this press release.  

I've got to admit that the place looks pretty good. You know I'm softening up when I start spending money there. I did pay for lunch, although La Gringa got the rum punch on the house as compensation for the table saw background music.  I think I've now gotten over my seven year snit about the destruction of Gilley's and the old Leeward.  This is better from a cruising standpoint.  We are planning to bring Twisted Sheets over here at some point to determine if this is a good place to base the boat when sailing out to the north and east.   Who knows... maybe Johnny Depp will tie up his boat here again..  That would be worth a blog post, for sure.

Okay, for a complete change of direction, this next part of this post is about the other stuff we've been up to lately.  You know, the non-glamorous day-to-day mundane stuff it takes to live here.  And the challenges are everywhere.  I don't know exactly what it is about this tropical environment, but it seems to change just about everything it touches in some way. I know we've changed. The other people we meet here have changed.  And these rubber gloves from my sandblasting cabinet.... they've changed, too. Ya think?

These are the long gloves you slip your hands into when you are working with a sand blaster.  I unpacked mine from where it's been stored for the past two years since the last time I used it. These gloves were attached to it. They were actually inside a clean, dark ABS plastic cabinet.  It was stored under a blanket, on a shelf, under a workbench, inside a garage. They have never had any kind of solvent on them.  They have never been exposed to direct sunlight, even for five minutes.  So..... what ate them?

And what's it doing to La Gringa and ME???   

I can see what's happening to the dog, of course.  That's easily observable.  He hides from dark clouds and weather forecasts that he doesn't agree with.  He sits inside the house for hours trying to establish some kind of mental telepathy with the local lizard population.   The lizards, of course, are cautious enough not to buy into anything Black Jack Russell the pirate dog tries to tell them.

We've been putting a LOT of time in on the sailboat.   It's back in the water on a Cruising Permit and located just down the road at South Side Marina again.  The location makes it real handy to work on and the Cruising Permit allows us to import repair parts and supplies duty free as long as they're destined for the boat.  South Side Marina is a peaceful place to work on one's boat, too.  This is looking in the direction from which most of the weather approaches.  Nice and protected here, tucked down behind this ridge.  That notch is the spot where we've been putting the kite up for some aerial photos of the area.

We've got a long list of jobs to do to get the boat ready for some cruising this winter.  I've been rearranging the lazarettes.  We have lots of storage room on this boat. This is one of the starboard hull's lazarettes, showing the steering linkage and the top of the rudder post. I took this shot to help me design something to attach the small outboard dinghy motor to.   I think this would be an excellent place to store it. 

We've been  stripping the vinyl wall covering off the inside of the boat.  In the process, we are uncovering numerous small water leaks that have not been repaired in recent times. Or apparently in recent memory.  

For example, we have two of these hatches over the forward part of the main accommodation cabins in the boat.  Notice that the hatch was installed flush with the deck?  In a good installation, the hatch would be raised somewhat off the surface that would be awash in sea water or rain during a storm. Many boats have places for the hatches raised up in the mold so there is a higher , flat place to install the hatch.  This installation tells me the hatch maybe was added later.  Perhaps when the boat left the North Sea and made it's way down to the tropics.  The hatches work great for ventilation flow through the boat.  But they leaked.

I cut two  thick "gaskets" out of the plastic Starboard we found over on West Caicos.  Man, I have sure gotten some mileage from that little salvage operation. 

I re-installed and re-bedded the hatches with these gaskets under them.  Now, they're well sealed and raised up off the deck.

It's a slight change, but one that can make a lot of difference when the deck has a quarter inch deep layer of water from a wave or squall on it.   We just want to make that water go around us on it's return to mother ocean.   Instead of taking shortcuts through the boat.

You can see the gasket/spacers under the forward hatches here:

We've got a boat load of these little projects.  I hope you don't mind them, because I'm very likely to be consumed with Twisted Sheets fixes and upgrades for some months to come.  The boat has a long way to go, but is looking a little better now...

... than she did when we first bought her, a thousand miles north of here. Either the boat is getting better or we're getting used to its appearance. We're presently looking for a US based aluminum window manufacturer who can help us either fix or replace most of those windows. There are 21 windows, and 13 hatches on this boat. Welcome to the world of old sailboats.

We figure we've now removed over two thousand pounds of excess weight from the boat.  She's floating almost four inches higher these days, too. Some heavy stuff has come off, like the microwave, a large flat-screen television, a dockside-only refrigerator, a washing machine. And we are replacing and upgrading wherever we see the need.

A typical small job was the wooden anchor pad that was attached to the hull of the boat when we got it.   You can just barely see it here.  It's the rectangular piece of wood that is the only thing between that sharp metal anchor tip, and our fragile plastic hull.

I just noticed the nice reflections on the underside of the bridge deck.  That photo is from back when the boat was in the yard, about to be hauled out of the water.

This is what's left of that wooden board after I took the screws out of it.  The anchor had worn a hole almost all the way through it, and it was cracked.   I had to use a little bit of leverage to get it off the boat.  The glue was some good stuff.

And of course after I got that piece off, I replaced it with a bigger, wider, thicker piece of.......
Starboard! Ta Daaaaaaa!   

A brief word about wood.  We no longer use it to replace anything of any structural importance here.  We have now learned a lot more than we ever wanted to know about termites. We do still use wood of course, but only where we can easily see it, and inspect it, and replace it.  And it has to be coated with something termites won't eat.   The past year has been an expensive introduction to Termite 101 for us.

Speaking of ugly things... I was so flushed with my victory over the hatches that I decided to take on the marine toilets on the boat.  We have these heads - and by "head" I mean the seagoing term for a toilet on a boat and not a new agricultural entrepreneur from Colorado -  that are as old as the boat, and to put it simply, they were getting a little bit ugly. I promised La Gringa I would see if I could fix them. I started by taking them apart to see if perhaps a fifty cent o-ring might be all that I needed.  An o-ring, a full body scrub down with solvents, and a lifetime supply of anti-bacterial soap...  Those stains are just rust, by the way. In case you were wondering.

At least, that's what I kept telling myself.

Well, an o-ring wouldn't do it.  Oh no. I kept taking things apart until the entire toilet was in pieces back in my workshop.  The inside of the pump housing was chewed up.  I don't want to know what was flushed into this that would do that.  I really, really don't. BUT I knew how to fix it.  I bought a cylinder hone from the local auto parts store and polished it up well enough that new seals would seat well.  I  knocked the loose paint off and discovered the whole thing is bronze.

And then I looked into ordering parts for this toilet.  I found out that this is called a "Baby Blake".   A set of rubber gaskets for it and a few bits of hardware would cost over $200.  A seat hinge is $70.  A new pump for it is $1300.   I found out we could take a completely new approach, and for less than a pump to repair a 30 year old toilet, I could buy a complete new, composting toilet. This has some advantages for us. We can get rid of a bunch of hoses, pumps, and a 30 gallon holding tank on the boat. This makes the boat lighter. We also get rid of spare hoses, clamps, pump rebuild kits, and the weight of holding tank contents and chemicals.  It means I can close up some holes in the hull.  There are some other advantages. Cost, for a big one.  We decided to go for it, and last week we ordered a brand new, never used as a reading chair by anyone else... Nature's Head.    In preparation for its arrival, we spent this last weekend removing everything associated with this old toilet from the boat.  My nose hair turned gray overnight. I am not going to post those photos here. So you can relax. I know I will.  Eventually.  Maybe some short-term memory loss can be a useful thing under some circumstances.

Spending a lot of time working on the boat has meant that some of my traditional house and yard duties have fallen a little behind.   A person has to keep an eye on that stuff in a place like this, too.   As a quick example, yesterday I noticed that in the past two weeks the weeds have staged another coup attempt and invaded the patio. Again.



I went to grab my handy home-made patio weed tool and caught the crafty foliage attempting to hide it. They camouflaged it as a bush. This makes me wonder what the bugs have been up to while we've been spending all our time on the boat.



I just realized that this post has gotten a lot longer than I intended.  It's a good thing I stopped myself before continuing your education into the world of old British toilet innards.  Did you ever find yourself suddenly knowing things you really wish you'd just remained ignorant about for the rest of your life? It's  going to take me a few days to get over this one.

Maybe a half dozen Happy Hour sunsets at the South Side Marina will do it.  I was scrambling to get this photo before that boat coming in from the left wrecked my mirror.

Heaving Down Rock

I've written about this time of year before. It's a transition zone between seasons. There's something almost magic about a lot of the days in late September and early October.  We get most of our rain this time of year with frequent  squalls blowing through. We also get periods when there's not much wind for several days in a row.  The ocean smooths out into slow, lazy, glassy swells.  And we get some spectacular, Dooley rattling squalls, too.   He slept in his 'thundershirt' last night.  Well, "slept" is not very accurate.  I doubt you could have closed his eyes with a three pound hammer.   So I'll correct myself.  Dooley hid under the bed shivering and shaking  in his thundershirt during an impressive electrical storm  last night.  All night. 

 And it took the power company until noon today to restore power.  Now that's a squall.   Why do these things always seem to happen at night, and on weekends?   Oh well.  Price of admission, I guess.

 Here's a recent sunrise from La Gringa..

  Rain is welcome here, within reason.  We heard parts of downtown were flooded this morning. These next couple of photos are from another morning rainstorm last week when I was trying to get a good photo of a sunrise through a local squall.  It didn't come out the way I hoped, but hey you never know unless you try, right?  Can you see the raindrops in the photo?   Little dark smears in the open part between the sun and the clouds.

You might just be able to see the line across the surface of the ocean where the edge of the squall is fingerpainting the top of it. The sheets of rain looked like transparent curtains drifting across the ocean. Of course I wasn't actually in the rain taking the photo.  Nah, I was up under the roof overhang with my morning coffee, fat dumb and happy. And dry.  My momma didn't raise no fools.   Well, maybe one.

That PVC pipe you see coming under the roof is part of our rainwater collection system.  The rain runs into the gutters, and then into these pipes, which connect to  two 9,000 gallon cisterns built into the house foundation.  We  usually get enough rain to cover almost all of our water needs throughout the year. We sized the roof with a four foot overhang all the way around.  This collects more rainwater and also provides shade when the sun is high.  We typically do have to buy about two water-truck loads of water a year, or 5,000 gallons, at six cents US per gallon.  US gallon.    And that usually happens early in the year, during the start of the 'dry' season.  Which also typically corresponds to when we have a number of house guests still left over from the holidays.  Once the guests go home, the rain alone is enough for the rest of the time. I should mention that this is also one of the last parts of Providenciales to get town water, so eventually we won't be relying on rain water.   I didn't say we won't use it,  because even with town water available.We prefer the soft rain water to the hard RO (reverse osmosis) desalinated water.  It's okay to mix it.

We went down to Leeward-Going-Through last Sunday to see if anything of interest was going on.    We miss hanging out at Leeward.  We were there quite often in our first two years here.  It was a different place in those days. It was quiet for a Sunday afternoon. This is typical for the season.  The overall population of Providenciales is at its lowest this time of year. A lot of local people take their yearly vacations during September and October.  Many of the people we know here are 'off island' right now.  And  the number of visitors from the USA, Canada, and the rest of the world is way down this time of year. They have their own autumns to enjoy, and kids  in school, and let's face it, this is the smack dab middle of hurricane season here. And I am not going to say anything else about that at this point because I'd have to go touch wood if I did.  I don't want to  jinx anything. We do get a lot of divers this time of year.   The diving and snorkeling is about as good as it gets. The calm water lets all the little particles of sand settle out, and the clarity is astonishing.  Some of the best underwater visibility on the planet, in my experience.  Thirty meters would be average, with more not uncommon.

This is a Google Earth satellite view of where we took our kite and camera setup last Sunday:

This is a photo looking down at a local point called Heaving Down Rock, which is at the tip of that big yellow arrow in the above photo. This is right at the very end of the Leeward Highway, with Leeward-Going-Through there between it and Mangrove Cay across the channel.  Don't you just love the names here? So descriptive.

Leeward-Going-Through is self descriptive, I think.  It's a channel that lets boats through between the islands. I sometimes tend to forget that not everyone who reads this blog is up on their nautical terms, so Heaving Down Rock might be a bit of a puzzle for some.  It's not the seasick sailor  kind of heaving.  Here's the simple definition from one of the online dictionaries:

heave down

vb

(Transport / Nautical Terms) (intr, adverb) Nautical to turn a vessel on its side for cleaning.

We don't know  what this area looked like back in the "heaving down" days.   I think you can see how this area would have lent itself to pulling a wooden boat over on its side to clean the hull.   That's no longer done this way, here.  These days we pay for a travel lift to pick the boats up out of the water and they use pressure washers  to clean   hulls. I know my own imagination can easily erase the man made marina, and picture a wooden boat snugged up alongside the rocks here  200 years ago.
"Pressure Washer Rock" just doesn't have the same cachet, does it.

This area has a lot of significance for us.  Finally, for the first time, we can see the bottom over which our former boat Cay Lime got swept along with the floating docks that got torn away from their moorings during Hurricane Hanna in '08.  The boat was upside down right there where I am standing at the bottom end of  that kite string. By the way, the pickup truck in that photo contains two of the notorious Stubbs boys, Preacher and Joe. They had come over to say hello  after coming in from a fishing trip.  The back of that truck is half full of live conch.  And one barracuda.  These guys love barracuda.   And we've tasted it.  Not bad.   We've just got an irrational and ingrained worry about ciguatera.  It's irrational because we don't seem to mind eating grouper, and they eat the same small reef fishes the barracuda do. 

This is actually a better photo.  I had walked out onto the end of the rock itself.  This photo shows it all, Heaving Down Rock, Sherlock Walkin's Leeward Marina, and in the distance, the Conch Farm.  And that's Leeward Highway taking off to the right, up island.   Or is it down island? I'm still confused about which way is up when talking about islands and beaches.  Thought I had it almost figured out for a while, but then I gave up.  Or gave down, as the case may be.

That sandy spot between the floating dock and beached boats in the bottom right corner also serves as a local boat ramp for those who don't want to pay the $5 Mr. Walkin charges to use his boat ramp.  La Gringa thinks that this side of heaving down rock makes more sense as a place to  haul boats over.   There have been so many modifications over the years, I'm not seeing much evidence of where the original "marina" would have been 250 years ago.  I guess we need to mentally subtract all the man made stuff and try to visualize what the natural shoreline would have been.   I suspect the basin in front of today's marina has been dredged in modern times.

I find it interesting that such a simple thing as a well placed rock outcropping could have so much impact on the local history here.  I can't find much information from the early years.  I know there must be ships logs and personal journals somewhere.  Maybe in the museum on Grand Turk.   I'll have to look into that, because it interests me. For example, in modern times, this is where the very first motor vehicle on Providenciales was offloaded onto the island.  It was in 1966, and the vehicle was a jeep.   What an experience that must have been for the several hundred people then living on Provo.  That was the year I started driving in Texas. Legally.  There were sure a lot of cars on the roads in Houston back then. And one beat up jeep on Providenciales, with no roads at all. Cart and foot paths.

Discussing this with La Gringa, she had just recently read a story about that jeep, and how it influenced driving in the Turks and Caicos Islands.  We naturally assumed that we drive on the left here because this is a British territory.  I was somewhat surprised to find out that this isn't the case.    The 28,000 inhabitants of the Turks and Caicos islands drive on the left because of that first jeep.   No kidding.

According to a correspondent on the Turks and Caicos Islands Historical Society's Facebook page:

"The story behind why we started driving on the left. According to Mr. Bengt Soderqvist, the first vehicle which came here in 1966, which was a jeep had an accident, the tie-rod was bent and began to favour the left, hence the driver found it more comfortable to drive on the left, "and we started to drive left from that day". That puts paid to the belief of those who insist that driving on the left on the island is due to the fact that the traffic rules are patterned after the British."

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Turks-and-Caicos-Islands-Historical-Society/463878000377601

   

So the driving laws in the Turks and Caicos Islands are based upon steering damage to a US built vehicle, and are totally unrelated to England.  Still doesn't explain why someone thought badly designed roundabouts would be a great idea at intersections, though. 

This next photo is not totally unrelated to England at all. The rather nice little home there in the middle of the photo is the former residence of the former Chief Minister of the Turks and Caicos Islands.  He's been on an extended vacation in Brazil awaiting extradition by the Brits for quite some time now.  Nice house.  But I bet he has some 'splaining to do.  Eventually.  This is going to be one of the most expensive Portuguese language courses in modern times.

This next one is another view more to the north west looking up Leeward Going Through.  We had noticed a "new' catamaran anchored out in the channel,which you can see in this photo.   We found out that another of the notorious Stubbs boys, Jay, had just bought that boat and sailed it down from Florida the week before.  We spoke for quite a while with Jay about his trip down. It took him a week.  He told us about some of the troubles he had, and why it took him an entire week.  We heard tales of having to wait a day for wind while anchored in the Exumas.   

That same trip took us 40 days.  Lack of wind was never an issue. I'm not going back into all that here. We all have our sea stories, don't we?  

As you can tell, the ratcheting camera-turning gear is still working fine on the kite setup.  We get photos in all directions just by tugging the kite string. This view is out over the Caicos Bank.   I  walked out to the end of the   remaining floating dock at the marina  for these next few images. Before Hanna in 08, there were three.

This is the view  looking back up the dock.

It's not  too difficult to take a look at the water on each side of that dock and tell which way the wind and current are running.


And I thought you'd appreciate what might be considered a somewhat rustic approach to ferry boats or water taxis. Yes, this started out as a home built conch boat. One of many here, of identical design, from the same pirated hull mold.  And now here it is a commercial ferry, tied up in the Pine Cay slip at Leeward Marina.  

A view from the end of the dock in x and y, with an additional z component of a couple hundred feet of altitude....

The camera just keeps rotating, so we get hundreds of photos to choose from on these excursions.  Don't worry, I'm not going to post hundreds of photos.  But I mention it because if anyone has any good use for an aerial image of anything in this area, there's a good chance we have it.

For example, I think this is a decent photo of the layout of the Conch Farm.   You can see the circular pens where the conch are allowed to grow until they are big enough change from looking for sea food to becoming it.  I know you probably won't be able to make it out, but on the horizon just to the right of center is a black dot.   That's the wreck of the old freighter La Familia Express.    You've sure seen plenty of images of that on this blog.

If you ever find yourself on Providenciales looking for something unusual to do, try taking the tour of the Conch Farm if you can. It's been going through some legal hassles lately, which is understandable. That's some prime real estate right there. Only a matter of time before someone figures out that a whole lot more money could be made than is justified by raising conch.  So, you might not want to put that tour off for too long.

Speaking of land issues, we just spent almost three weeks away from home during the growing season here. That creates issues of its own. I found a good use for the stainless tank we salvaged on West Caicos.  It makes a great little portable incinerator for sand spurs.  Or grass burrs.  Or stickers.  Whatever you call those things that puncture the bottom of bare feet and stick to your clothing if you let them get out of hand.  And  three weeks is definitely long enough for them to get out of hand.  I rip up the thorny little boogers and burn them.  Then I spray the area with herbicide.  Buys me about a month before I have to do it again.

And when I mixed up my herbicide, it necessitated another little DIY thing.  I discovered that particles in the stuff were clogging up the screen on my little hand pump sprayer.  So I balled up a piece of cotton fabric to use as a filter,  and siphoned the mix down through it. I can see four different projects going on at my work bench.  It doesn't always look this bad. The siphoning and filtering worked like a charm, by the way.  This is good info to have here.   Bugs and weeds grow year round, and the regular application of  'cides of various denominations has become a way of life for us. It's  definitely a case of better living through chemistry.

 
One more little DIY photo and then I'll end this. Several people have expressed an interest in the 3D printer.  I've continued to improve and tune it, and now have it printing surprisingly well for a home-built kit of plywood and cable ties.  It's to the point now where I can actually print projects taller than a few inches. The precision of the various carriages has to be pretty tight in order to stack this many layers and have it come out well. I've also learned more about printing things with  supporting
columns to hold up overhangs.  That all gets broken and cut away when the print is finished, leaving the supported part. It's still very much an old dog/new trick scenario with this thing, but I'm learning.

We're getting a fair bit of use from this Printrbot.  It's fascinating to watch it. I'm convinced that 3-D printing is going to be making some big changes in the world of manufacturing and home hobby projects. Do you remember that line in the movie "The Graduate" about plastics being the way of the future?  These days, I think it's 3-D printing.  And graphene, of course.  That's going to be even bigger.

Well, that's it for this post.  We should be able to get back out on the water in the  next few days as life gets back to normal after being away.     In the meantime..... keep smiling.