It's Still All About This Old Boat

I was surprised to realize that we hadn't uploaded any new photos in over a month.  If I want to post anything in the month of May I'd better stop procrastinating. I figured that out three weeks ago so I guess the procrastination continues unabated..   I don't have a lot of tropical exploration type photos at the moment.  We've been putting just about all of our spare time into working on the boat.  And we're making progress.   This boat needed a lot of work.  It still does. It probably always will. Such is the nature of boats.

We've been getting a lot of decent  sunrise and sunset photos recently.   Too many to post them all.  I'll put several in this post, spaced out to dilute the reds.  I like the blue photos better, myself.  We're moving back into what passes as a rainy season here, and that means more clouds and of course clouds make good sunrise and sunset photos.  Sometimes.    I liked this one, on a calm tropical morning with the air and the water so still it was like the morning paused to catch it's breath before the trade winds fell upon us again.

Just about the only times I remember to grab a camera these days are boat related.   And when we're referring to 'the boat' lately, it's always about this one.   The old catamaran there on the right, in our favorite slip at South Side Marina.

I snapped that photo because we've read a lot of stuff about how catamarans won't fit in standard slips. One of the features of this particular boat that was attractive to us was that she was built back before catamarans got so beamy.   We're a little over 17 ft. wide while a modern catamaran of this length would likely have a 21-22 ft. beam.   That extra four or five feet makes a difference down in the islands where slips are scarce.  We typically leave room for a monohull next to us, as long as they're not too big.  This French boat was about as large as we can stand.   And we had to put rubber fenders between us to keep from rubbing together.  I mean, they were nice guys and all but we didn't know them THAT well.

Some of our regular readers might remember our trip down here, and some of the issues that we wrote about back in the summer of 2012.  One of my little frustrations early in the trip was a fuel filler cap that was as stuck as any screw on lid I ever saw. I ended up drilling and tapping holes in it, to get it loose.  I tried every marine supply place I could find on the trip down, attempting to locate a pair of 2" diameter fuel filler fittings.  I never did find any.   But a few weeks ago, I imported some.  I'm not going to ramble on and on about the beauty of new stainless steel compared to thirty year old aluminium.  I think you can figure out which is which.

The red rubber stuff with the ink marks on it is gasket material.   They don't come with gaskets.   I wanted gaskets.  So a-gasket-making we will go.   A tisket, a tasket, a diesel filler gasket.

I've looked through my photos of the past month, trying desperately to find some subject matter that isn't somehow related to our sailboat project.  We've been seeing more kite boarders in the area lately. These four were whipping by with 15 knot winds.  Didn't make me want to take up kite boarding, but it did make me want to sail....

And while we're on the subject of sailing.. our boat is almost ready for an overnight trip. See how quickly I got back on to the boat topic?  I've used our old corroded stove top as a training ground for welding stainless rods.  We had a bunch of these on the boat, used as curtain rods.  I've started cutting them up, and bending them in a vise.  Makes them look kinda like the Terminator's chopsticks or something.  

I'm using them to replace burnt out sections of this old stove grill.  And to my surprise, it's working.

I think I prefer welding stainless to mild steel.  I did have to junk all my old wire brushes and replace them with stainless steel ones to clean up my welds.   I got a kick out of the label on this small size wire brush.   Keep in mind that this is something that will remove paint .  Can you imagine what it would do to your gums? Might need some flavored pumice paste to get down to the last little bit of root.

I'm going to stick another neat sunrise photo in right here.  I like the reflection effects on those rare days when the ocean is calm.  In this one the clouds were between me and the sun, but the reflection further out on the water was from under the cloud bank.  Optical multipath.

I continue my on-the-job diesel mechanic self training.   I'm getting more comfortable taking bigger and bigger subassemblies apart.  What once were mysteries have become familiar components. Setting valve clearances, taking injectors apart. I've been chasing down some smoking issues with one of our engines. I took this photo of a little tool I made from stainless wire.  It's to pull some of the copper washers out of the injector housings.

We continue to find uses for the 3D printer.  I could probably fill a blog post every week or two just with printer projects.  I'm not going to detail them here, but can give you a recent example.   We needed something to attach curtains to a hanging bulkhead.  I don't like to drill holes in boats when I can possibly avoid it, so I was looking for an existing anchor point.  One of the window frame bolts worked just fine to put a printed part out there with a screw in the end to hold a curtain rod.   We're experimenting with several approaches, using bungee cord, and stainless wire.    These are probably temporary, but it's sure nice to be able to just draw up and print a part to do the job.   A part that only existed in my imagination an hour before.

I must be about halfway through this batch of photos, so I'll call this blog post local noon and all colorful atmospheric photos after this will be sunsets instead of sunrises. Sneaky how I put the nice colorful ones in with the boring boat DIY stuff, isn't it.   You know the old saying... "sometimes you gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you get to a prince".

The sunsets from the house are over the island of Providenciales this time of year.   This often produces reflections of the setting sun off the clouds, down onto the calm salina water, and then back up to the camera.  A double bounce of sunlight.  We never get tired of the sunsets here and will usually stop for a moment just to watch.   And most of the truly spectacular ones seem to happen when I don't have a camera handy.

There's a definition of "cruising" that I've used here before and that states "Cruising is just fixing boats in exotic locations".    This is driving the blind rivets out of our old window frame while fixing more leaks.  I guess we're cruising.

It can get frustrating working on an old boat like this.  I keep finding things done by previous owners that astound me.  For example, this male electrical plug is wired directly in parallel with the boat's shore power cable.  The idea was to be able to just plug it into a portable Honda generator and power all the ac outlets on board when not plugged into shore power.    Well, the downside of this is that those exposed prongs are alive with 120 volts of alternating current when we are plugged into shore power.  I  appreciate what it means to think outside the box, as long as it doesn't put me into one.

I found out that the prongs were live when I touched the electrical plug with my knee. I was in there scraping old adhesive off when I leaned up against it.  I was shocked.  Shocked, I tell you.

And while on the subject of tight squeezes, I've been a little concerned about the dog lately.   Some of you may remember his shameful treatment of a little squeaky duck toy some time ago.  He basically went ballistic and ripped the little squeaky thing out of it.    Well, now we're starting to see evidence that he's a serial desqueaker.  This time the victim was this little Santa toy he got when we left him in the kennel while we went off to Colorado for Christmas.  We didn't exactly catch him in the act, but I'm pretty sure we know who's performing these unauthorized squeakindictomies.

He became shifty eyed and said something about a nervous tic when I questioned him about it.  He claims it's all circumstantial evidence.  I dunno. That dog has guilty written all over his face.

We still stop by the Tiki Hut restaurant at Turtle Cove from time to time.  We don't do it every week any more, but that could pick up again in the off season.  It was just too crowded for us through the winter, with every seat taken by 7:00 PM on "rib night".   We usually take a walk around the marina after dinner, to check out whatever boats are visiting.  There weren't a lot on this particular Wednesday, but we did take this photo of a couple of 'reef balls' that are sitting there, waiting for someone to take them out and put them on the seafloor.  Crustacean Condos.

This was a potentially interesting scenario back at South Side Marina a few days back.   This is the local fishing boat "Galyana".  She ties up to a couple of pieces of steel rebar driven into the shoreline across from the marina.  There are typically three of these fishing boats "squatting" in the marina. That means they tie up to the shore and don't pay any fees to the land owner.   We think that the crew is fairly new at this, without going into details.  I will say we often pause in our work to watch when the Galyana is either arriving, or leaving.  It's been entertaining at some times, worrisome at others. This particular day was one of the slightly worrisome ones.  Can you determine why, from this photo?

I think it's a little more obvious when I enlarge that section of the image.   Yes, the boat is aground on the starboard side as the tide is falling.  And the tide still had a way to go at this point.   We were a little bit concerned.  Bob Pratt, the owner of South Side Marina, called the Marine Police who called the owner of the boat to come watch over it and try to get it off the rocks before it rolled any further to port.   I was a little curious as to why the Marine Police had the owner of this boat on their speed dial...

We get this view constantly as we continue to work on all the little neglected bits and pieces of our own boat.  Last week I tried my hand at making curtains.   Oh yeah, now THIS is a Renaissance Man.... giggle giggle.

Now this is more my normal style.  Another minor crisis in an engine compartment.  This started when I was installing the new fuel fillers that I told you about earlier.  I had installed the starboard side first, as that was the one giving me the most trouble.  Then I opened the hatch on the other side, and promptly noticed an abnormal amount of water in the bilge.  The packing around the propeller shaft was leaking more than usual ( they always leak a little, on purpose) but what was causing the problem was that the mercury switch on the bilge pump was not turning the pump on.  Fortunately for me, I had just made a modification to that bilge pump installation a few months ago.  It made fixing the switch easy.  Then I tried to tighten the packing nut to stop the excessive leaking and found out that it was as tight as it can get.  I had to replace the packing.  I had never done this before.  It's a bit of a nervous feeling to undo this nut while the boat is in the water.  The other side of this shaft is a couple of feet underwater, and with the packing removed, it leaks.  Quite a lot.  Still photography doesn't always tell the story in a dynamic situation, but there is a steady stream of water coming from the fitting on the right side and squirting all the way across this photo.    Stop looking up the leg of my shorts, it was tricky enough to take these photos under duress, as it was.

I tried another photo with the camera's flash turned on.   This is with the stream of water going from left to right.

And the packing that was on board the boat with the other 'spare parts and supplies' turned out to be the wrong size.   I zipped down to the local  marine supply store thinking they'd have the right size. Wrong. They didn't.  So I  ordered it on Amazon, as we find ourselves doing so often these days.  Should be here next week.   In the meantime, I managed to jam oversize packing in and stop the leak.

This is just a photo of our boat with a Norwegian flag flying from one of the halyards.   This does not mean that we have re-flagged our boat.  It only means that we allowed a certain group of Norwegian friends to display their flag on the 200th anniversary of the Norwegian Constitution.   I just sent a version of this photo to a company in New Jersey that builts aluminum radar arches and bimini tops.   Hopefully someday we'll replace all that ugly stuff over the cockpit along with the dinghy davits.  We also want to add a swim platform.  High hopes.  With some complication$ to be overcome.

We've been putting in an average of three or four hours something like five days a week working on this boat. Longer on the weekends. We have a lot of projects going on.  We were up at Bob's  Bar recently after closing up another day's sweat and toil when I saw this weather front moving toward us.   I though it made a dramatic effect, compared to our usual sunny skies and clear water.

Here's another view of the weather from the parking lot at Bob's Bar.   That's La Gringa headed for the car.  We wanted to get home before this one hit us.  

Some days we like to be in the boat when it's raining hard.  Makes it easier to find the next leak to fix.  And there's always a next leak, it seems.

But it's not all bad news on the boat, lately.  Some of our work is starting to pay off.   Do you notice anything different about this view over the bow?  

Yes, we finally got it out of the marina!  This was the first time Twisted Sheets had left the slip since October when we brought it here from the Caicos Marina and Shipyard.  Six monhs of troubleshooting niggling little problems and wrestling with some larger ones.   We took the boat out for the afternoon, with the goal being to drop the anchor and put the sails back on.  There are no sails in that photo above.

And here's a view over the dinghy that does not include the Galyana,

I think we'd like to sell that inflatable, and get a Fol-boat.   Anyone interested in a four year old RIB?  Those davits are destined to be replaced too, eventually.  The new design should be part of the planned new radar arch and new top.  A view off to the starboard, with no other boat in sight.  Ahhhhhhh....

We need more of that.  A LOT more of it.  I think La Gringa would agree.

And Dooley the Demented was surprised to be reminded that this is a boat, and not a floating hotel room.

This is an entirely different boat than the small ones he has gotten accustomed to.  We've decided that it's a good idea to put his life jacket on him when sailing the big boat.  He could fall overboard from here with neither one of us witnessing it.   Backtracking and seeing that bright orange vest would probably be the difference between having a dog for another day, and not.

And we did get the sails back on the boat, after several hours of working out how to do it.  You see, we'd never put the sails on the boat before.  This was our first time. I had assisted the previous owner two years ago up in Jacksonville, but basically all I did was pull on a rope when he told me to.  We had to work this out for ourselves.   I'm embarrassed to admit that we got the Genoa all the way up before we noticed that we had it upside down.  Or maybe that was for oceans south of the equator...

I surprised La Gringa with a new ukulele for Valentine's Day this year, and she's really taken to it.  It's a good instrument for a boat.  Doesn't take up much space and is very light.   We like things that float, although I don't think I am going to ask her to test whether or not this one does.  Let's assume so and skip the confrontation inherent in live testing.

I was looking for some different sunset photos to close this post out with.  Something other than the same tired old view from the house, looking over the salina.   I found this one of the 'sundowners' starting to show up at Bob's Bar for what's becoming a new tradition.

And on one of our trips to the Tiki Hut we witnessed a really nice one over Turtle Cove.  I snapped about 20 versions of this one.     It was a little bit difficult to pick one of the batch. So I decided to show you several.  First, a plain sunset with Casuarina trees.  Over the edge of Little Diddle Cay.

Then we shifted down the dock a bit to the east so that I could get an Osprey nest and a sloop into the photo.  I thought this might make it a little more interesting.  I mean, it's more interesting if you like your birds nests and boats with poles attached.  

Of course my personal favorite of the Turtle Cove Sunset series is the one with my Honey in it.

With all those to choose from, I found myself unable to make a decision. I liked them all.  So I reverted and found a completely different one.  Taken from the house.  Over the salina.  Like always.  I'm so predictable..

Some nice sunset photos

I've started to feel a bit remorseful about laying that last blog post on you. The one with all the rain and the wind and the squalls. I know some people look at this blog specifically to see nice tropical scenery. We know this because they write us emails and tell us so. Especially in the winter. And I know that they probably aren't even vaguely interested in watching Mother Nature power wash an exterior terrier. I contritely figure we owe you a sunset. And I think we've got a good one here.

One evening last week we decided to treat ourselves to dinner at the Tiki Hut. The Tiki's certainly not the most upscale place to eat around here, not even close. We're talking about an island where wearing a shirt and shoes to dinner is considered formal and is by no means mandatory. We eat there because the food is decent, the service is usually good and the ambiance is what we like. We like looking at the ocean and we like watching boats. The Tiki is great for all that.

It's an open-air dining kind of place, as are many of the local establishments. They don't really need to be seating people indoors when the yearly temperature range only varies +/-10 degrees from 80F. Providenciales is a comfy place weather-wise. Usually. There are some exceptions of course. I think that must be covered in the fine print somewhere.

It's warm, anyhow. No matter what else might be going on with the weather.

We had a nice meal and eventually finished up our shrimp, the quesadillas, and my cracked conch. I always order conch if it's a option. I know for a fact that conch is local and fresh . We usually eat at the bar when it's just the two of us, so service is pretty quick. We finally noticed it was getting dark and left the restaurant. We headed over toward the Land Rover and couldn't help but notice that the sunset was beginning to show some potential. Clear sky at the horizon, scattered clouds.... some nice smooth reflective water..we've come to recognize the ingredients of a good sunset. And in this case they looked just about exactly like this:



You can just see the parts all coming together, can't you? Sun, clouds, clear horizon, smooth shiny water.... all headed for the same spot in the universe at the same time. I know everyone wants to see the elusive green flash but sometimes we just have to settle for a gentle collision of tropical illusions.

We were in no particular hurry to be anywhere specific and we never need much of an excuse to look at boats of any kind. We'll even look at ugly boats. If there is such a thing. We decided to take an after-dinner stroll around the marina. It's probably healthy, and anyhow we really wanted to see what the Great Spirit had planned for this particular palette. I had the little Pentax W80 'point and pray' camera in my pocket, as usual. Not the best lens for low light scenes but with this much sky but I had hopes.

Turning and looking to the east we could see the setting sun reflecting from something across Turtle Cove. The trade wind had just taken that sundown breather thing it does sometimes before it notices itself, and the water got smooth and glossy. For just a few minutes before the wind picked up again everything was reflected with a warm golden glow. The cove was literally a mirror.



I guess if one were hanging upside down for some reason, it would look like this:



No, I don't know why one would hang upside down at the Tiki Hut. Unless one was batty,of course. But I bet it's been done. I was just looking for an excuse to use that inverted photo. That's about as artistic as I get.

There are a lot of empty slips in all of the local marinas this time of year. This is not not unusual. After all, we are now officially in the first week of the 2011 Hurricane Season. Most of the power and sail cruisers have gone way north, or way south for storm safety this time of the year. I think the safest places to be in a boat during hurricane season is actually south of here. Panama, Trinidad, these places seldom get hurricanes. The cyclones almost all curve northward before getting that far west. And we all know there's no place truly safe up the US east coast.

The inclement weather that we've been experiencing lately is all part of a large mass of bad tempered atmosphere that has been lurking just a few hundred miles south of us. It's gearing up to clobber poor Haiti with heavy rain, again. This is still pretty early stuff for storm season. We usually don't start worrying too much until around August.

Ah, but tonight...this was a pretty sweet place for a couple of photo junkies and sunset affectionados to be strolling.



Sunsets and sunrises don't last long in the tropics. The surface of the planet is spinning along at a pretty good clip near the equator. Being on the belly band of the Earth, we have a lot more distance to cover than places in higher latitudes. This means that a sunset can be all finished here in a matter of a few minutes. Standing near the fuel dock at the marina, and looking out to the southwest and toward the entrance to Turtle Cove:



We walked along the dock admiring the visiting boats and admiring the celestial display. This is also called a quay in some places. Which is pronounced the same as cay. Which, of course, is pronounced exactly like key. I just now decided I'm gonna use the word dock, the noun. Dock is pretty straightforward, and is also a descriptive verb. Good enough. Simple clarity. I have also decided to try to break a long habit of using the terms 'port' and 'starboard' when I am on a power boat. It's going to be difficult after 40 years of talking like that professionally. But I've had to realize something in the recreational boating world. When telling someone which side of the boat to immediately throw something critical toward, and having but one brief chance to avoid a sticky situation.... it's not good for them to have to stop to mentally translate what's frantically being screamed . Left and right works amazingly well when time is short and clarity is of utmost importance. I think the old terms will always have a place in sailing lingo. "Right tack" just doesn't work very well.

Oh, in that photo above we were of course drooling over the sailing vessels that were in the Cove on Tuesday. The very next boat at the dock was a surprise to us. The Sara Jane had just come in about an hour before. This is a Gemini 105Mc. This is the very model boat La Gringa and I were planning to buy last year, before the government here raised the import duty from 10 to 40%. Ouch. And now we are hearing rumors it's going to go to 44%. Well, we gave up on the sailboat idea while this golden-goose massacre mentality is in effect. No, thank you. We will most definitely NOT be giving the government of the Turks and Caicos Islands 44% of the value of a cruising sailboat. They shot themselves in the foot with that one. We would have whined about 10% but we would have paid it.

We are still very much interested in these shallow draft catamarans-built-for two. We spoke for awhile with the boat owner. He says the boat is slower than he would like. Well, that's probably predicable. What sailor would NOT want his boat to be faster? But in this case,we noticed that he was sailing with his family, including two teenage girls. We have some experience with the level of support logistics and materiel that two teenagers would require for an extended cruise. That would mean the boat is fairly heavily loaded and Gemini's are not known for speed in the first place. They wouldn't be our first choice for long blue water voyages with two teenagers. But for two old gringos and an obnoxious little dog gunk holing around the TCI and Bahamas, we still think the Gemini is a good choice. Being able to duck up close in the protected lee of an island overcomes a lot of speed deficiencies, in many cases. I am thinking the ability to duck might trump the ability to sprint. Nobody outruns squalls in small sailboats, anyhow. I'd rather be comfortably hiding out someplace protected than nervously trying to out run or out maneuver severe weather.

That's all academic, of course, as long as this import duty is in place. I suspect there's been a drastic reduction in the number of pleasure boats imported here in the past year. But for the cruising sailboats just passing through on their way to someplace else, this is still a very friendly little country to be in. I'm going to post one photo with the stern of the Gemini in it, and then I'm going to shut up about sailboats. For a while. Look at that sunset.



Speaking of sailing vessels, this is a particularly nice one. (That didn't take long, did it.) We've heard the crew talking with Bob Pratt (Southside Marina) on the radio in the mornings. Bob is a big fan of motor sailors, and this one is 70 foot ketch that has come up from Brazil on its way north. If I'm not mistaken, this is a home built boat. Wow. I am pretty sure something like this doesn't come in a big cardboard box as a kit.



There were still a few motor yachts in the marina, too. These guys don't have all that far to go to get home. It was nice to watch the fading sun turn the stainless steel to gold before it all faded to starlight gray.



As mentioned, sunsets don't last long here. Before we could get all the way around for the rest of the boats we started to lose the light. But we did what we could before the little red warning LED started complaining.



And this is going to have to be the final shot in this series. Also my personal favorite for a Tuesday in June between squalls. So far.



This next part of the post is a sort of footnote to the earlier French Cay sequel post. Maybe it's an anecdote? But anyhow, a few days after that happened we ran into our friend Preacher down at Leeward. He told us a little story that's related to the previous post. I wanted to pass it on while it's still fresh news.

A few days after we navigated our way back to Provo using a wristwatch compass, we wanted to make a little boat trip out to Pine Cay and back.



One of the outcomes of the previous trip in the squall line was that we discovered that it becomes difficult to stay inside this skiff while it's being driven over the tops of waves at planing speeds. That blurred photo of Dooley wasn't a joke. We realized that there were not enough places to hold on to on the boat, basically. So I installed some hand hold grab rails and this was enough of an excuse to take the boat out...



even though it was on a day when we didn't particularly need grab rails. I put two rails on the little deck area where the seat is located, and a small one on the console. That one makes a huge difference for a passenger standing up. I'm not done yet. I'm mentally picturing a sort of roll-bar hoop coming up from the deck, high enough for there to be some mounting tabs for a plexiglass windscreen. Attached to the deck and console, I was thinking maybe a tube frame that would have legs and a padded seat in front of the console.

But for now, we have new handles!!



(yes, compass is next on the list)

We needed to pick up something that was left on Pine Cay. This was our other justification for the trip, like it takes much for us to go boating. Easiest way for us was for me to anchor off the beach, and La Gringa and Dooley the DingDong swam ashore and ran our errand on the cay.




But back to the story. When we returned from our little cruise, La Gringa backed the boat trailer down the ramp and I goosed the skiff up onto the trailer and we were about to head away home when we heard a bump and a shout. Our buddy Preacher had just come back from a fishing trip in his brother's skiff.



I was tightening the straps on the boat trailer, so La Gringa grabbed the camera and went down to get caught up with Preacher. We hadn't seen him since his birthday party back in May.

In case anyone cares, this is the view of what I was doing. So I didn't hear all of the first part of this conversation.



Basically, Preacher had been out fishing in a borrowed boat. He had six conch, a Nassau Grouper, a Mutton Snapper, and a crab. The Mutton Snapper is under the anchor..



See? I told you it was under there. Next time, no questioning. Okay?



Oh, and the crab. I got down withing hearing distance just in time to hear Preacher say he was getting too old to catch crabs. Well, we were at his birthday party so I knew what he meant by that remark. But I was so internally tickled about him admitting to being "too old to catch crabs" that I didn't think to ask him why he had a problem catching a one-legged one. I probably misinterpreted the situation. Been known to happen.



Anyhow the whole point of this addendum (yeah! that's the word!) is that we asked him if he'd gone to the South Caicos Regatta on that previous Saturday. He had not. He then started describing various stories of people caught in the storm on Saturday. He told us that the weather was so bad, one boatload of people headed from Leeward to South Caicos got completely disoriented. The captain was something like two thirds of the way to South Caicos when that squall line (the same one we showed you in the last post) blew through this little nation like... like... heck I can't use that metaphor in a family rated blog....... well... it blew through like Wiley Coyote with some ACME Explosives tight up behind him. (How's that?) Preacher says the pilot of this boat "used his dead reckoning" and then demonstrated how he locked his hands on the wheel and held it totally steady, in an attempt to keep on his course to South Caicos until the storm passed. I gather he didn't have a compass or GPS either. A GPS would be very rare on a local boat, but most of these guys have compasses.

But look who's talking here. I should shut up about local boat instrumentation at this point.

As you might recall, we wrote that this squall line went on forever. It was thick. It was blowing. It was raining horizontally. The leading edge of the squall was a rolling electrical storm with lightning bolts hitting the surface of the water followed by booming thunder. Closely followed. That mile or so it took us to break out of the leading edge and get up ahead of the front was kinda tight knuckled on my part. Dooley was beside himself, of course, and that explains why it was like dealing with two of them. We couldn't see anything but dark, wet, blowing gray in every direction but down. That was dark, wet, and gray but at least it was staying below us. (This is a big part of successful boating, by the way. This whole concept of keeping the water below you.)

As we were finally breaking through the leading edge of the squall we were seeing and hearing the electrical storm and lightning bolts were hitting the water all along the front. Once we broke out into some visibility, we decided not to hang around just to see where the next lightning bolt was going to ground. I made a command decision to sacrifice passenger comfort in the interest of rapid progress in our travels over the waves. This is the part of the trip when photography became difficult due to platform motion. This is also the part of the whole trip with the highest pucker factor.

We were moving in the right direction, and we were in it for something around 10 miles. This is based upon us being in it within two miles of leaving French Cay, and coming out of it about four miles off of Provo. Those are just visual estimates, but probably within a mile. Well, the next detail that Preacher related of the South Caicos excursion is that when the storm passed and the visibility finally returned, the captain of that boat was looking at the stranded freighter just south of Leeward.

He started in Leeward. Got 2/3 the way to South Caicos, and came out of the storm within sight of the wrecked freighter, La Familia.

This what I can show you with just that information alone:



I would love to see a GPS plotted track of where he went. I bet he would be amazed, too.

I think his strategy of just holding the course would work in a small squall situation, when the visibility was only closed out for five or ten minutes. This is pretty common here with scattered squalls.

But this big bad booming booger of a squall line lasted a long time. It was miles thick. We were in it for something like an hour, unable to see even fifty yards. Many times, not even fifty feet. And we were going in roughly the same general direction. We never got turned around. With an hour to work on the boat, the wind would have shoved his bow to the side and turned him without him knowing to correct for it.

When we told Preacher we had come back from French Cay in that storm, in this skiff.... he was somewhat amazed. I told him we didn't have a compass or GPS. He was even more amazed. He doesn't use GPS himself, but he knows that I depend upon it heavily. And I gather the other party was in a much larger boat. Twin outboards. That makes sense. He had to have been moving pretty quick to get that far during that storm. I suspect he made some circles on the way. And never knew it. It would be easy to do in a small boat in a storm like that. Looking at that Google Earth image above, I'm glad we didn't let that happen to us. We would have been somewhere between West Caicos and Great Inagua, Bahamas. In an open skiff with no supplies and no radio. Plenty of gas, though. We would have been okay when the visibility returned. We think.

I didn't tell Preacher we drove from French Cay to Southside Marina in that storm using a plastic wristwatch to navigate. I wasn't sure if that might not make him question the rest of the story. And maybe I would rather let him think we did it with pure nautical instinct.

Our 250th blog post coming up next! I can't believe we ever let it get this far out of hand. Maybe we should seek therapy.