For our frozen boating and fishing friends up North..

After having the boat out for several days, we were able to get it launched Saturday morning and we spent about half of both Saturday and Sunday cruising around just enjoying this winter weather. The winds have been reasonable, and the seas down to just a few foot of swell. The skies have been mostly clear, such as at sunrise today:



Jon is having a reasonably good time so far this week. He especially likes hearing that the weather in Massachusetts is 18 deg. F tonight with a high of freezing tomorrow. Meanwhile, in the TCI, he has tied into a couple small Yellowfin Tuna, and a nice little Skipjack tuna.



Of course the old man gets to handle the bloody parts, like standing by with the gaff:



And, of course, actually using the gaff:



I will spare you the details of what became of this feisty little tuna after this photo was taken. Let's just say that it got a little messier before we cleaned it all up. I am SO glad we got the washdown option for the boat. Makes it easy to hose it all off while still out at sea fishing.



Hey, nobody ever said fishing was pretty. It can be pretty good tasting, though.

Marinate in teriki and ginger, then grill it. Nice.

The YFTs are so cute when they're young, aren't they?



(if you need a hint here: I ain't the young one)

Yesterday we decided to try taking the boat into Turtle Cove Marina. This is the first time we have boated into that harbor. We have heard tales of how tricky the cut through the reef is. We have heard of people coming to some grief on the coral along the channel. We hear boats heading for Turtle Cove on the VHF radio quite often requesting assistance from a pilot boat to navigate through. But since we might someday be wanting to come into Turtle Cove to hit the start of a fishing tournament we decided to do it first in bright sun on a calm day. That's opposed to us trying to find it for the first time in the early morning hours. This way, we can have a trail of dots on the GPS to follow next time.

The path even looks a little complicated on the chart for the area:



All those white areas are reef structure. There are also numerous coral heads along the way. Another view of it is from Google Earth, and in this one you can get more of an idea what the area really looks like:



Now that's some serious reef right there.

Some of the buoys are a little confusing from a distance, and there is one spot, in particular, where the navigation is actually pretty tight by any standards, even on a calm day. In this photo, you might be able to see where we need to keep the boat. Which would be between those buoys. And away from that coral:



But of course being the unusually lucky folk that we seem to be, we made it through just fine without needing to call for help. We now have two dotted lines stored on the GPS that should make it a lot easier next time. And that MAY be later this month in another wahoo/fishing tournament. We haven't decided how bad we want to embarass ourselves for those t-shirts, yet.

This is the entrance to Turtle Cove, which is all but completely hidden from view until you come around that last green buoy:



There are some nice properties surrounding the entrance, especially on the narrow spit between the cove and the ocean:



Many of these are available for rent, if anyone is interested in a nice place on the beach for a vacation. Right next to a great protected marina with restaurants and shops.

Once inside the cove, hanging to the right ( we drive on the left here, but most boaters still use the international rules) you have a choice of going left directly into the mooring and dock area, or swinging around Little Diddle Cay straight ahead. The abandoned structures are part of the old Third Turtle Inn, which was, I believe, the first hotel on the island:



Plans have now been approved to build another resort on this site, to be called the New Third Turtle Inn, I think:



Coming around Little Diddle Cay you run right next to the dock where many of the local dive boat operators are based:



Turtle Divers has been around a long time. We have been told that the owner is a Jack Russell Terrier fan, but we have never met him. I am sure the day will come.



Next to Turtle Divers is the Tiki Hut restaurant, which has been detailed in previous posts. But this is the view from the water, don't cha know...



There is a nice paved boat ramp here, which doesn't seem to be too busy at the moment:



and the reason might just be that most of the boats in here this time of year are too freaking BIG to use a boat ramp. You won't be buying a trailer with one of these babies.



Ah, every radio capability known to man, and a stabilized antenna to keep in touch with internet and the latest satellite television. Roughing it doesn't have to be a pup tent and beans, I guess.

There is a good fuel dock near the ramp:



complete with a local version of a Wyland painting.

I don't think it's an actual Wyland Whaling Wall, but you never know. I suppose it's conceivable that he once staggered out of the Tiki Hut and someone handed him a can of paint.....stranger things have happened.

Continuing around the NW area of the cove there are some moorings for sloops, and more private homes:



Nice place. I guess a realtor might use this to stress the old "location, location, location.." adage, with Turtle Cove, Providenciales, TCI being a good set of the three.

And to the right, tied up to what used to be Diddle Cay, are a number of motor boats:



I think it's kind of classy to have the "little" dinghy painted to match the boat:



even has the same name.

And of course just when we think our little 22 footer is a decent fishing boat, somebody has to show us up with a heap like this:



Ouch. THAT is one sweet sportfisherman.

Here is the pointy end of "Barracuda", and their chase boat. We had posted photos of their stern in a previous visit to Turtle Cove from the land side.



That's a pretty sexy boat too. I love the portholes, although of course it's not set up for fishing. I guess with a chase boat like that, it doesn't need to be. Probably not too cost effective to use the big boat trolling...

Different boat, same designer and manufacturer. They do have a creative flair with portholes.



Skipping over photos of boats that I have previously posted on this blog, we come to the end of the marina. This is the entrance side of the Tiki Hut, and another hangout for local fishing charters:



Headed back out and retracing our route we pass more and more decent motor yachts down for the season:



Man, there must be six, maybe seven hundred bucks worth of boat in this marina!!

Cruising back out we pass the Sharkbite restaurant on the right. This is another of our favorite places for lunch when we can sit outside. I don't know if we are dressed for it today, in this mid-February weather:



This is a canal entrance right next to Sharkbite. It does not connect to the ocean through here. The fixed height bridge limits the size of the boats that can go through it, but for a small boat similar to ours it is navigable.



There are canal-side homes and building lots along it past the bridge.

With the frigid gales and blowing snow of mid-February behind us, we decided it was time to head home. Those are condos behind us:



(see, I told you we were not dressed for sitting outside in February weather)

Leaving Turtle Cove we took another pass by the Third Turtle Inn site, and I was very interested in how someone had cut a shelter into the limstone cliff, and cut steps out of the solid stone. It gave me some ideas for a driveway problem we are having at the new house:



On the way out of the marina, we passed another motoryacht "La Vida" coming in behind the pilot boat. They had been approaching the reef when we started our way in through the buoys.



I was interested to see that the pilot boat is a panga design, a 26 ft. version with twin outboards.

We had planned to do some more fishing on the way back to our home marina, but as those last few photos are beginning to show, the afternoon thunderstorms and squalls were threatening, and our guest had enough sun for the day. It's really easy to overdo the sun thing here. The winds keep you cool, and you don't realize the intensity of the solar radiation this close to the equator.

So, I got through another complete post without a photo of the new house. That's two in a row!! But I can't do it 'cold turkey', so here's a photo of one of the falcons sitting on a cactus in our soon-to-be-yard..



That was taken yesterday afternoon.

He ( or she, I didn't get THAT close) let me approach up to about 20 meters before flying off to another cactus across the "street":



and that's not a bad photo with which to end a post.

Getting back on the water

One of the nice aspects of this blog is the number of comments we get from complete strangers, all over the world. Several times now I have posted a photo of something I thought might be interesting, and then get questions about something in the photo totally different from what the subject of the photo was meant to be. Things in our environment that we now take for granted due to our constant exposure, are still new to other people who have not spent time in a place like this. This is good. It helps us, seeing our little part of the world through someone else's eyes. It helps make it new all over again for us. Thank you.

We get the same little lift when someone visits us. My youngest son is now staying with us for a few weeks, and this is really the first time he has spent much time here on Provo. Yesterday, for example, while he is diligently working on helping get the boat ready for the water, he calls me and says "Hey Dad! You gotta come see this really neat bird!!" So I grab the camera and go to look at what got him excited...



And it's a crane. One of the dozens of cranes that hang out around here. Old hat to us, but something new to someone else. And then I stopped for a moment, and really looked at that crane again, and it brought back the memory of when I first watched one of these graceful birds, slowly walking along the grass one slow measured step at a time hunting bugs....it made it fresh for me again. That's a good thing.

Speaking of bugs, when we were at the house a few days ago, Jon was walking around talking with our architect when they spotted a millipede. I did not witness this, but my son was telling me "this thing was HUGE!". I thought something on the order of 'yeah, yeah, a big bug...big deal'. Jon told me H. stomped on this thing to kill it and he got an explanation of how dangerous the bite was. Piqued my interest, but we had already left the site by this time, so it remained of academic interest, this second hand description of a bug.

Then, we went back to the site ( as we do daily) and Jon located the bug and called me over to see it. By this time it had spent two full days in the tropical sun, which basically removed all the moisture from it. All that was left was the dessicated shell. Jon told me this was much less frightening than it was when it was actively wiggling eleventy thousand sets of alien-looking legs and opening some menacing, poisonous mandibles:



It looked like a pretty scary little critter, even when it was just a shadow of it's former self. We are hearing stories of people getting bit on the lip and it then swelling up to the size of a baseball....

Sometimes a visitor's reaction to our day-to-day environment is a little humorous. Like, walking through the grocery store Jon had to point out a common product from the UK that he had never seen on the shelves in the USA:



(Do you think John Kerry knows about this?!?!?)

We finished up the work on the boat yesterday, taking care of several little things I had been wanting to do. Access to the bilge pump and float switch had always been a problem due to the small size of the hatch in the splashwell. So yesterday we cut out the old one and installed a larger hatch:



Gotta love those cordless Dremel tools. Nothing else does what they do, exactly.

We have a larger hatch now, with enough room to get a hand and tool down into the innards of the boat and still have room to see the components. Before, it all had to be done by feel. That is a really frustrating thing when you are trying to bolt or unbolt things like screws or hose clamps and you can only get one hand inside.



We had to trim two spots on the hatch mounting ring to fit in the splashwell, and the Dremel helped with that as well. We also took this opportunity to replace the old gasket around the livewell lid. A year in the tropical sun had turned it basically to dust. UV is just one of the things down here that likes to attack man-made objects as a side hobby. Of course the worst is the oxidation of anything with steel or iron in it. As the old saying goes.."Rust never sleeps".

While rooting around inside the boat working on the non-functional bilge float switch I noticed the fuel/water separator filter was swinging by one loose screw..I took it out and found it level full of grungy water.



This just MIGHT have something to do with my recent problems getting the outboard to run smoothly. So we replaced the filter element and reinstalled it all securely this time.

The bottom is clean, and the trim tabs are re-painted with anti-fouling paint:



The registration numbers are now on the boat, for the first time in the year we have had it:



Wow, registered fishing boat # 453! These waters are getting crowded! Almost five hundred boats that bothered to register.... since the beginning of the boat registration requirement some years ago. Gotta love it.

Today we plan to launch the boat and find our way from Leeward to Turtle Cove Marina. The approach through the reef is semi-famous here for being a bit difficult. We don't want our first time through it to be when we are trying to get to the starting gate for a wahoo tournament early some morning.....possibly coming up in two weeks. We should have enough nice blue-water clear-skies photos by tonight for another post.

And I got all the way through this one without a single image of the house.

Spring cleaning

One of our five sons volunteered to come down to give us a hand moving into the new house. Since he is about six ft. one, young and strong, sounded like a win/win to us. He gets an all expense paid vacation in the tropics, out of New England in February, and we get some imported muscle and technical know-how. His first night in town we took him to the Tiki Hut for dinner. We wanted to see if there were any more fishing tournaments coming up, and the Tiki Hut on Turtle Cove seems to be the center of a lot of this activity.

While we were eating, one of the local residents came up to La Gringa to see if he could panhandle some of her dinner:



She was able to entice him closer by throwing him some bits of shrimp, but he drew the line at what must have been the limit of his comfort zone:



We asked the waitress what kind of bird it was, and she told us it was called a "Gray Bill". I tried looking up a bird called a "graybill", but did not have much luck, so I am thinking that is the local name for it. However I DID manage to find a photo online of what I believe the correct name for this bird, and I am pretty sure its a "Yellow Crowned Night Heron".

I also found a write-up detailing how shy and reclusive these night birds are. Well, stop by the Tiki Hut and offer one some shrimp tails. They get over their shyness. Pretty neat looking bird.

Oh, we did manage to find a poster for the next upcoming fishing tournament, which is later this month:

Although we are still way low on the learning curve on this offshore fishing, and we know we are way under-equipped in regards to fishing tackle and knowledge, we are still toying with the idea of giving this competition a shot. Might be fun. We will be out fishing if the weather is decent, anyhow. Might as well see how we do. We found out that for the $ 200 entry fee, we also get four t-shirts, and a case of Presidente beer. That helps. I am nuts over t-shirts. They constitute about half my total wardrobe. Shorts and flip-flops are the other half.

Yesterday morning we decided to haul the boat out of the water for the first time in almost a year. Despite having some of the best, most toxic bottom paint I could find applied at the factory, since we have moved the boat to the new marina we have noticed a huge increase in the growth of marine life on the hull. I attribute this to the increased nutrient availability in the tidal currents going through Leeward. The bio-fouling had gotten to the point where it was affecting top speed and fuel economy. Plus it looked ugly as hell. So, while we had a young, strong helper staying with us, it seemed a good time to haul, inspect and clean the boat.

We had some advice on the whole procedure from our friend Preacher, who was watching me bring the boat around to the ramp:

We thought about getting Preacher some Crocs for Christmas, but I doubt he would wear shoes except to be polite. What kind of a country is this, where full grown men walk around barefooted all the time??? A really good kind.
This was the first time we have hauled the boat or even used the trailer since we first launched "Cay Lime" in late March last year. Everything went remarkably smoothly. La Gringa backed the trailer down into the water (try that shifting left handed and looking over your left shoulder at the trailer), young son handled the trailer winch, and the whole thing took a few minutes.

I was amazed, actually. No panics, no yelling, no problems.

Well, that's not entirely true. We did have one problem. Personnel at the boatyard had "borrowed" our trailer while we had it stored there. We knew all about this, and they had repaired most of the damage they did to it. However, they neglected to mention to us that in using the trailer to haul someone else's boat, they re-positioned the winch post to fit someone else's boat. Am I being unreasonable to expect that OUR trailer should be adjusted to fit OUR boat? Or that, perhaps, other people should basically not re-configure our boat trailer and use it without our knowledge or permission? (Don't get me started on the boatyard) Well, without going into details, I had to lash the bow down to the trailer to get it home. Otherwise, it wanted to lift the rear end of the Land Rover off the ground. I just took a few wraps between the painter eye and the trailer frame.

I did not have the tools with me to put it back the way it should have been . The lash job got it home. Kind of interesting driving with something trying to lift the rear wheels off the ground. Good thing we have all-wheel drive.

My son was absolutely miserable to be riding around in the tropics in the back of a Land Rover hauling a boat in February. Slight change from being in New England just the day before, shovelling snow and stacking firewood. You can just see the abject misery in his face:

All hooked up and ready to go:

That photo is actually misleading. The ratio of boat:Land Rover looks more like this:

As soon as we got the boat home, we hit the hull with a power washer. Preacher told us it was best to knock the marine life off of it while it was still fresh:

Quite a mess, huh?

Well, that photo explains the new crick in my neck.. I was worried it was because I am old and out of shape. Whew. Want a really strange feeling cheap? Have someone take a photo of the top of your head and then look at it. bizarre. yeah yeah, I know...

Young son climbed all over the boat, pressure washing everything that needed it. It was sure nice to have some imported, enthusiastic, competent help:

We changed the gear oil and spark plugs, hit all the tilt and lift grease fittings, and put a new gasket on the livewell cover. The last chore was to re-paint the trim tabs, which son managed to fit in right before sunset:

(Sure beats shovelling snow in Massachusetts, I hear)

Now the boat is all cleaned up and ready to re-launch. We will be looking for an opportunity to grab a few fishing rods and take it out for a trial run. Or, if the winds keep up, we might just work on the wiring. It's functional ( except the bilge float switch) but ugly.

Oh, and this morning we made a trip out to the house site to meet with the local sat television expert, discussing various programming and dish locations. It's the only way we are going to be able to get television at the new house. La Gringa was going over the options:

(and you thought I might actually get through an entire post without a house photo...)

And it continues...

Yesterday we visited both the boat and the house. Didn't spend much time in either one, unfortunately. Visited the boat to run the motor, check the lines, look in the bilge, all that boaty stuff. I also wanted to see the boat ramp up close. We plan to haul the boat out of the water shortly to try to clean the seaweed farm off the hull, change the gear oil normally this time, new plugs, that sort of thing. First thing we noticed is a new neighbor at the marina, where Preacher was keeping a boat he was working on earlier:



No, that is not our boat. Our's is the second one over. I am actually quite happy to see a shorter boat in that slip. Makes it easier for me to back around and head out. Also harder for me to hit coming in. Especially at night. I like things that are hard to hit when I am in a boat at night.

Spotted this group at the fuel dock, and I just had to take a photo. Sure is a lot of body language going on there.



I couldn't hear the cell phone conversation, but I am willing to bet it had something to do with somebody somewhere being late to catch this boat ride back to North Caicos. Might have mentioned that some people were waiting....

Boats are very much an integral part of people's lives here on a daily basis. It's not like a lot of marinas, where it's basically dead during the week in an off season. Here, boats are commuters. I have not seen a written statistic on how many TCI residents commute by boat to and from work or school every day, but it would be a substantial number. In the thousands.

Over at the boat ramp, a couple guys had been out running this little scooter until they had some problem with the engine cowling. Or "hat" as they called it.



Sure looks like it might just move out right smartly. I don't know if I would take it out in six foot swells trolling all day for wahoo, but then that's not what it's for. It's the maritime equivalent of a hot rod. We see a few of these fun boats around from time to time.

Anyway, the ramp looks entirely usable to me, so then we ran out to the house right before dark. Not much going on there on a Sunday afternoon. The cabinet man had been at work, though. Made a lot of progress. As for the driveway, well, here is the same view, almost, as I started the previous post with. But from the top of the garage this time:



We love the Land Rover, but I think this is about the end of the line in this driveway until they get all the plumbing run and re-buried.

That reminds me, Leo asked a question about the septic. Since several people have written us interested in building houses in similar areas, I thought I would explain it. There is no leech pit here. The ground is pretty much solid rock. It would never pass a 'perc test'. So the septic system is a "Aerobic Treatment Unit" (ATU) which is actually a pretty neat little way to handle this. It's essentially a closed system, in that it mixes and aerates organics using aerobics. What comes out of it is water and carbon dioxide. its got a compressor, a motor, and a float switch. The water that comes out is clean enough to use for spray irrigation systems. It's basically as clean as a normal surface creek, if you live somewhere that has surface creeks. It's clearer than a lot of creeks I know, in fact. So, out of the green machine, the system has a chlorine dispenser that further sanitizes it as it goes into the yellow tank for storage. From there, it will eventually get pumped through a drip irrigation system surrounding the house. So we can grow stuff. Bushes, trees, hedges, that kind of stuff. We will use native vegetation, which would include anything native to the Bahamas, etc. If we give it some water, it should do just fine. I DO want some home-grown tomatoes out of it myself, though.

For those who are looking at this kind of system in more detail, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a writeup on this very specific model. You can find that at:

http://www.epa.gov/ne/assistance/ceitts/wastewater/techs/delta.html

The house is as "green" as we can handle though careful thought while we wait for some technologies to catch up. We tried to design with alternative energy compatibility in mind. We have wind. We have sun. And we have tide. Now if someone will just have a major breakthrough in solar film technology or design a wind generator that doesnt look like the front end of a Piper Cub... Eventually we hope to make our own fresh water to augment the cistern collection system. And we want to be able to irrigate the whole hillside, essentially. The 'trickle-down' effect in practice.

Oh, and the obligatory and now traditional pergola shot to close the post. But this one has La Gringa and Demento the Delusional Dog checking out the new light fixtures that just got installed:



That open end is just begging for a metal gate, or a statue, bird bath, or a Heineken sign or something...

Hey, there's a thought. What about one of those six foot tall ornate birdbath things...maybe shaped like Elvis...

Driveway madness..

Well, as anyone who has read much of this knows, we are all but consumed these days with the house. We are out there every day, sometimes for several hours. This week, we have been watching a driveway go through some changes.

Two weeks ago today, the driveway looked like this:



Ten loads of fill had been brought in, shaped, packed down, we could have driven right into the garage.

Then, on Wednesday, we showed up to see a big honking backhoe digging up the side of it all to install the septic system and graywater tank:



This, of course, wreaked new havoc with the driveway, leaving large piles of rock and dirt ( which here is really just crushed limestone powder).

Then, On Thursday, another machine was there scooping up the debris the big honking backhoe left, and using it to cover up the septic system:



He did a pretty good job, too. We spent the afternoon watching him turn it back into a usable driveway:



So, after getting it all smooth again, we went back out yesterday (Friday) afternoon, and discovered that the backhoe had been back, this time with a vengence. The whole driveway was trenched down about two feet into the rock. There were several of these trenches, leading from the new septic to various drain points on the house. I had to put together a three-photo panorama shot to get this all together:



I guess you could possibly use the driveway now, if you had a good offroad bike and were not afraid of leaping some trenches. Amid mounds of fairly respectable hunks of broken rock.



Those grooves in the bottom of the trench are the backhoe's tooth marks, scraped into solid limestone. After the pipes are run, all the crushed stuff will be used to cover it over again. And then, I suppose, it will all get smoothed over one last time. At least we hope it's the last time for a while. At least we can say that slurry of limestone dust and crushed rock is extremely compacted from all the heavy machinery that has been driving all over it. That should be a good thing. I know I can stand on the very edge of the driveway and it doesn't seem to want to crumble. This limestone dirt is some sticky stuff.

That's basically it for news of the house. Oh, there are still things going on inside. The crew is constantly painting, now working on the second coats. Felix the cabinet man has been here several times, and the cabinet tops are getting fitted. Most of the electrical fixtures are now in. Work progresses on the plumbing.

And in the meantime I have been messing around with garage plans. I think I have settled into some version of this for the basic bench setup:



I put a rolling section in the end, so that I can use it as bench extension, or a rolling cart that will attach to the bench anywhere along its front. Or it can of course be free standing, since it's going to be on locking casters:



This approach lets me standardize on "benchtop" stationary tool. If I need to reposition something, I should be able to put it on the 'cart' section and move it where I want it. It also gives me both a corner, and accessible end on the work bench, should I need them. That's sometimes a good place for a decent bench clamp.

I figure this design works for this garage. It keeps everything( so far) within two feet of that large far wall. Now I can start working on some shelving ideas. Putting this all together in SketchUP is time consuming, but by the time you have thought it through, you have essentially built the project in your head. Now it's just a matter of taking the measurments off the components, cutting them out, and putting them together. Kinda like a "Do-It-Yourself Kit" project, only in this one you also get to design and cut out the parts to make the kit. You can take the detail about as fine as you need to. For example, I have all the support pieces for this bench already worked out, down to the 3" tall casters:



I have almost the entire house on SketchUp now. La Gringa's office is mostly designed. This is a very good way to determine just what you need in materials. Helps minimize cost and waste. This is a very useful little CAD program, and it's free!

We haven't been on the boat the past few days. The Trade Winds continue to blow hard and we presently have nine foot seas where we like to fish. I do, however, see a break in the wind forecast for mid week, meaning a fishing expedition is likely coming up.