More Aerial Photos of Little Bitty Islands

I'm going to upload a couple randomish dozen of the several hundred photos we've taken recently. I'll post them here with some brief explanations, recognizing that brief is a very subjective concept.

Here's a photo of an obnoxious little dog  running along the beach at Mudjin Harbour over on Middle Caicos.  He had been investigating that far clump of stuff on the beach. He didn't get excited or want to discuss it.  We didn't go over to personally identify whatever got his attention.

The things that Dooley finds interesting  on remote beaches  are very rarely things that we'd want to take home.  Or photograph. Or even get downwind of.  I'll leave the rest of that to your imagination.  He's a very material dog. We've learned to use some caution whenever Dooley goes into his " Hey, you guys just gotta come over here and get a good whiff of this" mode.  He's never that keen  on fragrances of a floral nature.  It's a shame the way he abuses that good sense of smell of his. I guess it's good for a dog to have some sense. 
 
We recently had visitors who'd never seen North or Middle Caicos.  They had  already seen  Pine Cay and Providenciales. I don't think either of those extremes is very representative of the Turks and Caicos Islands, or people, in general. This trip was also an opportunity to try out a new  kite and camera system I've put together for traveling. I've managed to fit a kite,  flying line, pendulum rig, and camera inside a  backpack. Even though we had some learning curve problems with it, we did get a few aerial images to show you. This next photo of the Dragon Cays is not one of them.  It was taken from a table on the deck of the new restaurant at Mudjin.

Some of our regular friends and family who read this blog might wonder why there are no "Preacher in Cay Lime" photos this time. That's because we decided to go over on the TCI Ferry for a change.  I didn't think to take many photos of the ferry boat itself, but if you're interested you can see it on their website, along with their route and schedule.

I did, of course, take a photo of the part of it that interests me.  I was discussing the engines with Trenton as he checked the oil in their three Yamaha 250 horsepower Four Strokes.    I asked him what happened with the big Suzuki's they used to have on this boat.   He told me the Suzuki's were good engines, but when they broke it was too difficult to get them repaired quickly. I would have to admit that Yamaha has the majority of what outboard market exists here, and there are a lot more Yamaha mechanics around than there are Suzuki mechanics.  And parts.

I'll get back to the subject now.  See how easily I drift away from the concept of "briefly describe"?  I'm going to have to start exercising some self control with the keyboard if I want to get this post finished any time soon.

We were last here in October of 2012. Back  then we took photos of a new restaurant under construction at Mudjin Harbour.  We had heard that it was open for business now, and decided to check it out for lunch. This is the new Mudjin Bar and Restaurant:

That trail that the happy young couple are walking down looks like this  to another happy  young couple walking up.

We spent a very nice hour or two on the outside deck, enjoying the view.   This is the view from inside the dining area and bar:

As you can see, it wasn't very crowded while we were there. We got there a bit early and the lunch "crowd" was just starting to settle in as we left.

This is a view of the restaurant and the bluff and cave from the air:

I didn't think to take a photo of the lunch menu.   All I remember of it is that La Gringa and Natalie had some kind of sandwich wraps which they thought were excellent.  Daniel and I had burgers, which were also pretty good. We did get a photo of the dinner menu:

One member of the group was pretty upset that he didn't get a menu.  Had to settle for a few dropped pieces of various sandwiches.  I think he was just happy to be out and exploring. He loves these trips.

He's not real happy about the leash arrangement, though. He says I treat him like a dog, sometimes.   Go figure. He got away from our group later, which he justified by claiming he was looking for me.   I was off to get the kite out of the car.  He was supposed to stay on the beach with everyone else.  Kind, concerned strangers in the parking lot informed me that our "puppy" was back upstairs at the restaurant.  Sitting under this same table.  I guess he figured this was a logical rallying point.  With provisions and a half dozen kind strangers dropping little fried tidbits to the cute doggie while he waited for us to find him. They're clever, these terriers.

This is the view from the corner table of the outside deck.  Nice  That's a pano of three images and it just makes the railing look crooked.  The deck is well built and the railing is actually straight.

See the trail or road or whatever we should call it meandering off into the distance in that pano photo above?  La Gringa and I decided to take a walk down to the end of it.

It's getting taken back over by the local plant life, but still makes a pretty good walking trail.  This view is looking back at that view in the photo above.

We thought this would be a good spot to launch the kite. We were well upwind of the restaurant and the Dragon Cays. Speaking of which, here's a vew from the trail looking up the coastline.  Or is it down the coastline? Do people in the southern hemisphere have a direction called down north?

Here's a wide angle aerial view from where we first launched the kite:

It's difficult to see in the photo from the kite, but there was a group of people on the beach having their own photo-shoot with Mudjin as the backdrop. There were also some people crossing back over from Dragon Cay while the tide was coming in.  La Gringa got a much better photo of all of that:

I'd like to take a kite out to that cay, but we didn't come prepared to go for a swim this time.  Well, most of us didn't.  Dooley the Delighted is just about always up for a swim.  One of the advantages of being short is that he doesn't have to go far to be belly deep.

I don't think I've ever met a dog that loves the beach as much as this one.  He doesn't need a stick to chase, or a Frisbee to catch.  His happy little feet dance across the sand for the pure fun of just being alive.

Speaking of happy feet, there have been a few of those traipsing over the sand in the cave at Hidden Beach. La Gringa took this photo of the stairs that come down from the hole in the ground. There are other photos of this in the previous post from last October that I linked to above.

It reminded me of an Etch-a-Sketch that never gets erased, but that is constantly being slowly over written.  It never rains on this sand. What a great time lapse that could be. Between storms.

I know we've posted more than a few photos of this place, but I had to just put up one more  from Hidden Beach. 

It's impossible not to drag the camera out on a day like this, on a beach like this, with weather and a view like this.

We didn't just visit Mudjin on this trip.   We actually started out at the far end.   Our original idea was to see if we could get any information from aerial views of the old Haulover Plantation area a few miles south.  We wrote about Haulover last October, too. 

I won't repeat all of that info here, it's easy enough to go look at if you're interested.   I wanted to know if we could see much more of the old dock and waterway structures from an aerial perspective.

This is a much more isolated stretch of beach than the fairly well visited Mudjin Harbour area.   



We were using a new kite for the first time on this trip.  It's a soft, or parafoil type of kite.   The good things about it are that it folds up and packs really easy in a backpack, with no sticks or rods needed to support the kite. It also has a wide wind range.  It's complicated, with a lot of strings to get tangled and wound up wrong. It can suddenly collapse. We used it for the first time here.  This is a view of the old opening to what was once a series of docks for working on boats.  The entrance is filled in with sand these days.  If you look at this on the Google  Earth image from years past, it was still open to the sea  until fairly recently.

If you've looked at the earlier post about Haulover Point, you'll see a couple of structures standing on the point of land that extends out into the water here.   Here's what they look like from about a hundred feet up in the air:

I walked up and down the beach a bit, getting accustomed to the differences with this kite as compared to the delta design we've used for our other kite photos. The soft kite has a wider wind range for flying than the rigid kite.  But it also flies at a much lower angle.   This means that I have to let out a LOT more string to get the same altitude. The camera is much further away, and it's harder to judge it's orientation. It also means a lot more effort to pull all that string back in. Especially with heavier winds. Oh, I  am no longer using the kite reel that I originally built for this KAP stuff. I've gone to a much simpler line winding device, which I guess would most accurately be described as a figure 8 on a bobbin instead of a rotating reel.  No moving parts.  No metal components. Simple and fast are some nice characteristics for mechanical things.

This is a fairly rugged stretch of beach.   Here are some images from the ground.

We were here at low tide, and the combination of wind and waves and current had brought some floating grass and seaweed in.   And of course this is just NOT the kind of place where you'd run around barefoot for very far.   Check out that ironshore.  This is no place for worn Croc flip flops, either.

It was low tide while we were here, so there were plenty of little stretches of clear sand to walk on while the water was out. This would be a great spot for a picnic.  At low tide.

I walked around the end of the point where the old structures are standing, to try to get the kite and camera in a better spot. I was trying to see where the sand has filled up what was once the entrance to a nice sheltered little "marina" in years gone by. Doing this at a minimal tide gave it a different look. There was a dark  cloud of some kind of finely ground still barely vegetable matter settled into the sand ripple pattern of the sea bottom.  It was outlining the rocks where it came to rest momentarily as the tidal current slowed to a stop. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, this stuff was organic rust. This will all be washed back out  into the big grinder within six hours.

I'm not posting all the photos here, or we'd be here a long time. And for every photo I got, I got ten mosquito bites. I was looking at one of the local newspapers later, and read about how many problems Middle Caicos has been having with mosquitoes this summer. Seems a bit early in the year to me. It was such a problem for us on this trip that we cut the Haulover Point visit short. I had to budget some extra time for scratching and cursing.  We decided to head to the Mudjin  Bar and Grill from here, where they stock antiseptics and various plasma replacement options.

Mosquitoes don't seem to bother Dooley the Dehydrated much.   He does get hot and thirsty, though.

When the dog starts tripping on his tongue, it's probably time to go find some shade, anyhow.    And that's how we ended up at Mudjin Harbour.

In addition to the trip back over the MIddle Caicos, we've been continuing to experiment with kites and kayaks.    We've discovered that the best way to do it seems to be to just tie the boat up  and get out to fly the kite.  This is one of the small cays just north of Leeward Going Through.

Looking off toward Water Cay to the north east you can see several of the string of these little cays stretching out between Donna Cut and the Caicos Bank.   That indentation in the far bank in this photo is labeled "Hurricane Hole" on some of the older charts I've seen.    We'll have to go explore that too, one of these trips.

This next one is looking back toward Leeward from our stopping spot   It really makes it easy to see where the deep water channels are located with this bird's eye view stuff.  No WONDER they are so good at fishing.

If you look at the Google Earth images of this area you can see that there are a series of channels eroded into the bottom from the ebb and flow of the tidal currents through these openings between the little islands.  It can be tricky to see where they all are from water level.  Easy from the air:

That's the area called Donna Cut there in the middle of that photo.    The little group of trees to the left is what's being increasingly referred to as "Iguana Island" by visitors and some locals.  That's probably as good or better than the correct name for it,  Little Water Cay. It's full of rock iguanas, and the Turks and Caicos runs a small park there. I won't go into the details, but Dooley has been kicked out of there. He sure generates some excitement when he gets into a group of big, fast lizards.  Park attendents get a little bit huffy about it all, though.  It's  natural for iguanas to shed their tails like that while being pursued. That was back when he was young and we didn't realize how terriers are wired.  He's much better behaved now.  And we know to secure him.

But he still can't buy an admission ticket to Iguana Island.

We took the boat over to that stretch of beach in the above photo, and put the kite back up.   This is looking over Donna Cut to Little Water Cay:

I believe that everything that's filled in with sand in that photo was once open water.  I think that  it all changed with Hurricane Donna in 1960. I've tried to find some photos of the area prior to that, but so far, no luck. I'm sure somebody must have taken aerial photos of this place before 1960. It's 140 miles east of Cuba.

Here's another view that also shows what I am thinking is the ancient shoreline of Water Cay.  There are still some natural depressions and sink holes along here that fill with rainwater.   I doubt that this is where Water Cay got the name, though.   I think I have an answer. I'll get some evidence for what I think happened, and will show it to you if it makes sense.

After getting the kite up for that photo above, I walked aross the sand toward the beach in the distance for a few hundred yards.  I was trying to get the camera in a better position to photograph that corner where the edge of Water Cay meets the beach at Donna Cut. This is one of those photos:

You can see that there are some pretty well defined trails around Water Cay.   You can also see some of the underwater rock structure just off the point.  It amazes me that this was once a channel between all these cays.

I brought the camera down and re-positioned it to get some aerials of Water Cay itself.   I've got the camera set up to take a photo every five seconds.  A typical trip up and back with the kite takes about fifteen minutes.   On this particular day, we put the kite up four times.  So if you do the math, you'll realize that we got something over 720 aerial photos of this area alone, on this one excursion

Here's one of the views looking up Water Cay toward the Aquarium and Pine Cay:

That little enclosed bit of water on the right side of the photo, at the end of that trail, is the area I've seen referred to as a Hurricane Hole on some sea charts.  It does look like it would have been a good spot to secure a boat back in a previous century, before it all got sanded in.

I intended to put together a time lapse sequence for this post, but someone keeps interrupting me here.  Something about a stupid ball.

And this annoying whining noise that has me totally distracted.  I'll save that one for another post.  I have a dog to mollify.

I swear, sometimes I think the little booger plans it all out ahead of time.

We've got a lot more photos and sometimes that makes it difficult to decide when to just stop uploading them.  I need to finish this post, so we can start thinking about the next one.  This one could keep creeping onward if I let it.  We've since taken another kayak/kite trip out to get some small remote cay photos.  I've finally got the 3-D printer going, and  La Gringa has been getting some decent sunrises lately.    And we're just about ready to put the skiff back in the water, as well as 'splashing'  Twisted Sheets again.    Should be plenty more of this kind of fun stuff to keep the old blog going for a while yet.   We hope.

Mudjin Harbour

This is the last  of our little 3 part series on our most recent trip over to Middle Caicos.    The subject is Mudjin Harbour, and we saved these photos for last.  This is probably the most photographed spot in this entire little country. It's one of those special places  that you run across from time to time. Very photogenic, too.   As usual, I'll start the post  with another recent sunrise from  Providenciales. I wish I could take credit for it, but this is some more of La Gringa's work.  She's getting pretty good at this:

I did some online research on Mudjin Harbour for this post.  I like to appear to know at least something about the subject matter. Not so much trying to look smart as it is trying NOT to look stupid. And I found scads of photos of all of the same views as the photos that we took.    I guess the purpose of this post is to let  you know that this place does indeed exist, and that you can find plenty of photos of it online if you know to look for it in the first place.  It might even be the last little bit that convinces you to make a special trip over to Middle Caicos if you ever come down to the Turks and Caicos Islands on a vacation in the first place.  I don't know if all this makes much sense or not, but at least it makes me feel better about posting the same old photos.

There is a unique  component of this place that helps to make it so scenic and photogenic.  That is the  pile of rocks named Dragon Cay that is located just off the beach here .

These rocks are sitting right on top of the reef line, which runs very close to shore all along the coastline in this area.  The deep blue color of the water on the other side of Dragon Cay is because it is, indeed, deep blue water.  Very deep.  That is the open Atlantic Ocean just on the other side.  In times of heavy seas, there are dramatic huge splashes of waves crashing up and over the rocks.  It makes for some spectacular photographic effects. It also produces some interesting variations in the long shore currents that build up the sand spit that connects Dragon Cay to Middle Caicos at low tide.   The seas were relatively calm on the day we visited, and yet the water was still rough enough to make me start wondering about a few things.  This is a common affliction of mine.  For example, I started becoming very curious about the  name of this place.  Why is it called "Mudjin Harbour"?  It's not muddy, and it's not a harbor.  I decided to look into it.

This is a view of the area taken from Google Earth.   Dragon Cay is the rock just at the northern tip of that inverted "Y" shaped section of beach right there in the middle of the image.

  The roads visible just inshore of Dragon Cay are the paths and roadways around the Blue Horizons resort.   The little town to the east is Conch Bar.  This is the major population center of Middle Caicos right here.  It's not a very busy place.   The area labelled "Secret Beach" will make sense a little later in the post.

So... I'm wondering just where did this name come from..  Unless I'm missing something, it's just not  a harbor.  I looked up a number of definitions of both harbor and harbour, and they're all basically the same i.e. "a sheltered port where ships can take on or discharge cargo."   We've been here at least a dozen times. These visits have taken place  over a number of years.  We've been here in the Turks and Caicos versions of winter, spring, summer, and fall.  We've been here in wet season and in dry season. Not once have we seen a boat anchored here.  I looked through a lot of  photos posted on the internet, and I couldn't find a single image of a boat taking on or discharging cargo here.   The water's just way too rough to anchor in for most of the time. The guide books even warn people about snorkeling here with a caution that it's only safe on  calm days.  If you examine that satellite image above, you can see that while the area just to the west of Dragon Cay would be somewhat sheltered from the easterly trade winds, there's no way to get a boat in and out of there.   The reef closes it off from the open ocean.. There are no cuts or openings in the reef.   It's common to find  descriptive place names here.  Some good examples are "Leeward-Going-Through", "Crossing Trail Place", "Blue Hole" "Heaving Down Rock".  "Blue Hills" and "Logwood Beach". Those make sense.  But the use of the term "Harbour" for this place continues to puzzle me.  I'm hoping one of our readers knows more about it.

The name "Mudjin" is actually pretty simple.  That's just the truncated pronunciation of the original name of "Bermudian".    It's pretty easy to imagine a place called "Bermudian Harbour" to get shortened to  " 'Mudian" and then to just the easiest roll off the tongue "Mudjin", which then gets spelled wrong.  If we were to spell it phonetically, it would be more like "Moodjin".  That part all made sense to me immediately after  reading this article while researching  the name.

The day we took these photos was a fairly calm one.  We parked our rental car at a little area that the good folks at Blue Horizons provide and maintain for that very purpose.  we followed the trail down to the beach.   There's a new restaurant/bar being built right here alongside the path.  And yes, that's Dooley the Demented standing there impatiently under the Mudjin sign, waiting for me to stop taking photos and get on with the exploring part.  He's like that.  Dooley is not a disciple of delayed gratification.

We'd heard some  grumbles from people over in Conch Bar about  this restaurant  being built "right in the middle of the view" here, so we wanted to see what that was all about.   I guess they have a point, in that yeah, this bar is going to become part of the view from a lot of places.  But there's no doubt that the view from the bar itself should be pretty spectacular.    I know the local guys who are employed in building the place seem pretty happy about it all.  I would imagine that a steady job is a rare thing here.

The trail down to the beach is an easy one, well worn and safe.   Even for old guys with bad knees.    It follows the natural terrain down in front of a fairly impressive cliff that has been eroded into the island over the centuries.  There are some nice benches installed down under the cliff, a shady place to watch the ocean, the birds, and life on Middle Caicos.

Part of the life one can observe here involves the small sand crabs that haunt the dark edges where the beach sand meets the bottom edge of the limestone cliff.   It's difficult to get a photo of a live crab when Dooley the Detrimental is in the area. He tends to scare smaller critters away, and all we could photograph was their tracks.  The big clumsy tracks are Dooley's.

I walked down to the edge of the rock cliff face where it meets the sea.  There was some pretty impressive surf coming in past the reef and breaking over the sandy bottom.

Dooley the Determined was convinced that he had to go for a swim.  He didn't spend much time in the water, and I think he was surprised at how strong the current was right up against the beach.  This is one of those places where the retreating waves will pull the sand right out from under your feet.  This is the section of beach that connects to Dragon Cay.  It's out of the water at low tide.   We were still a few hours away from low tide on this day, so we didn't go out to the rocks.    We're already planning another excursion trip back to Middle Caicos sometimes in the next few months, and photos of the far side of Dragon Cay are on the list.

Walking out on the sand spit toward Dragon Cay, there's a good view looking back toward the west and across Mudjin Harbour.   Doesn't look like such a great anchorage, from this angle either, does it?

We recorded several little snippets of video while we were wandering around. La Gringa put them together into one.  They are all of the same area.  Try as I might, I just cannot see any place where I would anchor our boat here and feel like we were in a secure harbor.   Does look like some nice potential for body surfing, though.


When the tide and conditions are right, the waves on both sides of the Dragon Cay sand spit cross over each other and collide along the top of the narrow ridge out to the Cay.   The result is a convergence of the waves that makes a nice visual pattern on the water.   We were tempted to wade on out to the rocks, and estimate that the water was just over knee deep at the rocks you can just see there in the distance before Dragon Cay.  Because of the unstable nature of my remaining knee we decided to wait until conditions are more favorable.  Either a lower tide, or a stronger knee  will do it.

You can get an idea of the pattern of the converging waves in this video:


There is another natural feature of Dragon Cay that we thought was pretty slick.  There is a pool formed in a depression on the top of the rocks.  Waves from the Atlantic crash in and over the Cay, and they fill up the pool.  Then the water cascades down the inside of the rocks after the wave has subsided.  It's like a natural hot tub.

The beach has some good possibilities for hard core beach combers, but being so close to Conch Bar and the Blue Horizon resort I suspect the 'good stuff' gets taken  early on.  Still, it would be nice to be staying here and to get out first on the beach after a high tide to see what new treasures Poseidon has deposited for our amusement.   On this day I was interested in some of the sand migration patterns.  This entire area changes with the force of the waves.   I noticed the difference in the size of the sand particles on the outside of this plastic tub as compared to the sand on the inside.    The unprotected sand is much coarser as the force of the water takes the finer sediments away with it, leaving particles of a specific grain size and larger.  But the sand inside the tub is protected from the current, and so the fine sand settles out in there.  It isn't as clear as I could wish in the photograph, but hopefully you can see that there is a noticeable difference in the fineness of the sand inside and outside the plastic barrier.  A sand grading system.

After we walked the beach for a while we decided to climb back up to the path that runs along the top of the cliff.  This is the place with the best views.   Dooley doesn't seem to be very interested in views.  He cares a lot more about smells than he does scenery.  This is a pretty good bird's eye view of the sand spit that goes out to Dragon Cay.   You can see where the sand would be exposed at low tide.

I leaned over the side of the cliff to get a photo of our footprints down on the beach below.   La Gringa was yelling at us to get back away from the edge.  She's got this thing about crumbling unstable cliff edges, I guess.     So to do my part to help preserve family harmony, I limited the number of photos I took from here.   I think this is good enough that you get the idea.

The view from up here is fairly dramatic.   On a stormy day the waves crash against the rocks and throw spray high into the air.  We were happy for a calm day on this trip.

All of the safe paths along the top of the cliffs are well marked and paved.   I wouldn't recommend straying too far from those paths unless you know where you're walking.   The entire area is mined with open holes and treacherous footing.  It would be easy to do some leg damage if you went wandering off through the bush here.   Dooley was overwhelmed by the sheer number of potential rodent hiding places he found.   There are hundreds of holes and caves like this in the limestone.

At the western most end of the small paved path there is a narrow stairway that disappears right down into  one of these holes in the rock itself.

Dooley is normally pretty fearless when it comes to these things.  He's a natural when it comes to digging his way into little caverns and holes.  Part of his breeding as a fox control officer.  But for some strange reason he was not too keen on going down into this stairway. It was very uncharacteristic of him to be reticent about  exploring a cave.   He was the last of us to descend, and even then I had to call him several times before he followed us into the darkness.

La Gringa led the way on point, with me in the middle and Dooley the Distrustful followed up walking drag. this is looking down toward the beach:

And this is the view looking back  toward the upper entrance.  Some of the steps are cut into the rock, and some have been constructed from poured concrete.  All in all, it seems very safe to me.



When you exit at the bottom of the short cave, there is another flight of stairs down to the beach itself.

Bringing up the rear, Mr. Suspicious finally made the trip down.  He didn't waste any time sniffing around inside the little cavern either.  I never figured out what it was that he didn't like about this stairway, but there is definitely something about it that puts him off.
La Gringa sees an optical  ambiguity in this photo.  She says it's difficult to tell whether Dooley  is  going down stairs or  up stairs in this one.   Is he higher or lower than the photographer....?  Hmmm.

Once he was down on the beach and off the stairs he reverted to his normal form, and immediately started digging in the sand.  I suspect he found an ancient aroma of a lunch long gone.

The small beach here is completely blocked off from the rest of the shoreline, and indeed there are only two ways to get to it.  You can go down the stairs through the cave, or you could swim around the rocks in the water.   This is the area I labeled "Secret Beach" on the satellite image up near the beginning of this post.

We hadn't come prepared to swim, so all we could do was watch the waves and look around for a while.   A very nice secluded place to relax and enjoy the ocean.

Since we were not going to try to swim our way out, we had to head back up the stairs once more when it was time to leave.

Once Dooley  determined that we were ready to leave he was the first one up the stairs and out of there.  I intended to get a short video following behind him, but he was so anxious to be out of the cavern that he was gone before I even had time to set the camera to video mode.   A very unusual reaction from him.  He normally likes caves just fine.  Something about this one seemed to make him nervous.

Back up on top of the cliffs we took a break at a very nice spot that is paved and has some benches to rest upon.  There is a statue of  hands in an attitude of prayer.  This would be a great place for a wedding or just to watch the sunrise.  It's easy to imagine sitting here with a good book and relaxing away a big part of a morning.

I'm sure that this area could get crowded at certain times of the year. If the resort was full of guests, perhaps, or if there was a function going on over at Conch Bar or Bambarra.   On this day we saw a total of three other people over the course of several hours of exploring.  A very relaxing place to visit.

We did stop for a rest there at the patio with the praying hand statue.  I was watching the waves in that photo above, and thinking about what this all must have looked like to early sailors approaching this shoreline three and four hundred years ago.    Dooley joined me for a contemplative moment.  I can only imagine at the deep thoughts that must have been running through that active little mind of his.

That's the end of the Middle Caicos trip, and I bet you're glad to see it.   It must seem like "The Weekend That Wouldn't End!" to those who have been reading it. Thanks for bearing with us.  There are reasons for that. 

I'll put just a little bit of DIY stuff in here now, along with an update on what's been going on with us lately. Remember the little camera slide I built in the shop a while back?  I know some of the good people who read this are also into photography, so I want to pass along a modification I just made to it.  

Sliding the camera by pushing it was making for some 'jerky' motions.  I want to eventually come up with some very slow motor modification but in the meantime I thought a hand crank might smooth things out. I wanted to use stuff I already had lying around the garage.  I used Starboard plastic that we found on the beach, a couple of pulleys left over from the alternator wars on Twisted Sheets, and some elastic shock cord.  The photos pretty much tell the basics.  Used a hole saw to make an axle from Starboard:

Used a larger hole saw and thinner starboard to make a large flat washer:

I attached the pulleys to the end blocks that hold the  rails on the camera slide.  The  pulleys are assembled with stainless screws going through the starboard flat washers and axles.   That starboard stuff is real slippery plastic, by the way.  Great stuff for places where there is light friction like Teflon.  I think it would make good drawer slides, too.   

I decided to make a crank handle (which now needs shortening) and strung it all together with shock cord. This seems to give us a lot more control than shoving the camera by hand.

  

That starboard stuff is pretty amazing to work with. It's giving me some ideas for other applications, which I'll no doubt be sharing with you as  time goes by.   

I'm putting this post together in early December from photos that we took in late October.  Well, there's a reason for this.  I didn't want you to think we've gotten that lazy, or that we would normally go a month without doing anything interesting enough to be worth a photo.  Nope, we have a good excuse.   

We spent almost all of November in Oklahoma and Texas.   I had a knee replaced at McBride Orthopedic Hospital in Oklahoma City.  That  is the most excellent hospital that I have ever encountered. And I  do have some experience with hospitals. Contact us if you need some work done and want contact details. I don't want to gross people out so  I'll just put up  before and  after photos from the back, here in public view. 

There are some more photos showing the front of the knee and me removing staples, if you  just click this link then you can   navigate  back and forth through the images on Picasa.    I found out that there's a bit of a technique involved in removing surgical staples.  It would have been real nice to have an instruction booklet for that before doing it. But you do learn quickly when it's your own staples that you are removing.  Pain makes an excellent negative reinforcement.

So, now you know why we had to stretch a long weekend of Middle Caicos photos into enough posts to cover a month or more. I didn't think you wanted to tune in here during the early winter,  and see photos of Oklahoma City .  And we both liked OKC a lot more than we expected to, but it's never going to be mistaken for the Turks and Caicos Islands no matter how warm the climate gets. The other alternative was to just disappear for a month with no new tropical photos at all.  We thought that would be kind of rude to family and friends who like to keep an eye on us from the comfort of their own homes. 

We plan to dust off the old inflatable Hobie i15t kayak and use that for knee rehabilitation, again.  It did a pretty good job last time.   This means that we should be doing some kayak trips in the not too distant future.  It's been a while since we checked out the Discovery Bay canals.  Those are always interesting and good for some  dog bark footage.    I didn't have another good sunset to close this post with, but have an extra sunrise we can use.