More Messing Around

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beach Break

We're taking a break from  the string of Providenciales photos that have been posted here lately. For what seems like forever, actually.  I know that you find our tales of South Side Marina to be consistently fascinating.  And that the never ending tedium of grungy old boat work captures your rapt attention in exciting new ways that defy imagination.  We know you're anxiously awaiting yet another blog post with  even more sunset photos from various spots around Bob's Bar, mixed in with aerial shots of it all.  Well, this ain't going to be that post. We needed a change of cay.

We were invited out to one of the other islands for a visit this week.  It was a chance to get away from the increasingly busy marina, the never finished boat, and the island micro-city of Providenciales. To say we leaped at the opportunity would be uncharacteristically understated.    A couple languid days of beach time miles away from the boat was a real treat.   I put  my travelling shoes on specifically for the extreme pleasure of kicking them off again once we arrived on Pine Cay.  Shoes weren't really necessary for the trip over.  It was a symbolic thing.

 I know some of our readers caught up in the grip of winter probably don't want to hear this right now, but the weather was uncharacteristically warm.  Reminded me of June.  It was like summer  with air temperatures well up into the 80's.   Light winds.  No noise not created by nature's wind and waves, no crowds.  Just blissfully peaceful beach and the soothing murmurs of translucent blue tropical water lapping at the sand as a soundtrack.

We don't do much on these trips.  Dooley and I took a walk down the beach for a few hours one afternoon. "Walk" is probably not an accurate description of what Dooley does.  He only has a couple of speeds, and neither of them is really a walk.  He doesn't stop anywhere for long voluntarily.  Or unless he's pretty tired.   He's starting to get up there in dog years, so he's not exactly the same fireball he was ten years ago. But he still loves the ocean and the beach and this special little island in particular.   There are so very many things to look at and sniff, for those of us who are into that kind of thing.   He was so excited to have a beach day that he was frequently overrunning his nose. He had to circle  back to check out things he only caught a whiff of whilst running blithely by on his first pass.

It's a little frustrating for me to try to get photos without dog footprints in them, as I've bemoaned many times before.  The moment I point a camera at something he's all over it.   He wants to know what it is about whatever it is that might be interesting. Getting undisturbed photos with Dooley around takes a technique similar to spear fishing.  It's best to approach the target at an oblique angle, apparently ignoring it while heading toward something else  entirely.  The trick is keeping track of the subject in peripheral vision, disguising the interest, until at the last moment, I turn and quickly shoot the photo.  Before the dog can change direction and ruin it.  

See the doggie prints in that one?   He had already scooped me and was circling for another pass.   I took the photo anyhow.   I think I was seeing something similar to one of the mirror images we sometimes post here.  Except this one used shadows.

 

This desiccated and shattered approximation of a shaved head is what I always heard referred to as a "Norwegian buoy" back in my oceanographic career days.   We used a lot of these bright orange and blue inflatable buoys to mark sub-sea moorings.   They are popular because they are well designed and built very rugged.  I thought they were practically impervious to the elements. A walk along the beach here will put that notion to rest.  Even these tough ocean going floats eventually will succumb to ultraviolet radiation if exposed long enough.

Here's another one.  Same thing.  Totally destroyed by the sun.   It's enough to make one wear a hat down here.  Especially with a bald head that's not nearly as tough as these buoys once were.
 

Not all of the interesting sights on the beach are flotsam.   Dooley used to try to dig out sand crabs when he was younger. Then he ran into a few of the local land crabs that were the approximate diameter of a large dinner plate and a whole lot meaner.  The term armed and dangerous comes to mind. These days, the dog gives them a wide berth.

This is the home of a small one.  Complete with the trash from last night's dinner flung out for the tide to deal with.
 

 

I've given up yelling at the dog about destroying my photographic subject matter.  He's set in his hot 'n trot ways, I suppose.  At least his tracks make it easy to see where he's been, and what he's been up to.  And sometimes it's useful to know which way he was headed when he was last spotted.  He does get caught up in his own little world and disappears from time to time on some trail or other.   Not too hard to follow when his are the only tracks in sight.

 Another shot of untrammeled beach, taken while the dog was off being obnoxious somewhere else.

Which might have been his very purposeful and direct trip over to an upended and broken palm tree that had washed ashore.   He had to make a stop, in that time honored tradition and special relationship that dogs and trees seem to have enjoyed since the beginning.

The only other signs of humanity we saw while on our beach walk were the occasional boats passing by offshore. This is the North Caicos ferry, zipping passengers back and forth between Leeward and Sandy Point.  We've taken this very boat quite a few times ourselves.

As you can tell from the photos, for most of the time on this beach there are no boats passing by for long stretches of time.   It's truly a tropical island lovers version of primeval peace.

At one point I saw these blue bits of polypropylene line sticking out of the sand and went over to take a closer look.   There was something familiar about it.

Oh yeah, now I remember.  I am almost certain that this is a remaining remnant of a large section of fishing net that washed ashore here during a storm back in 2011.  I cut a piece of it out and took it home.  So this net has now been here for five years.  I didn't have the energy nor the time to dig it up and see how much of it is left.  I suspect the piece I cut out is the only attention anyone has given it since then.

I know that this is the same net as the one in that link I posted above.  The background of the photo is that same group of Casuarinas trees in both photos, 2011 and 2016.   We were actually headed for those trees in search of a  spot to take a break.  The sun was fierce and the idea of some cool shade was popular with both of us.

I let Dooley pick the shady spot.   He has his own criteria for these things.   I don't know what those are, but I've learned that sometimes it's just easier to go along with him. Besides, this spot under the trees on a soft bed of Australian Pine needles looked pretty good to me.

So we settled in for a while, to relax and just watch an afternoon at the beach develop.  As you can see, the excitement was minuscule.  The white thing in the middle of the photo on the horizon is a sail.   That's all we really needed for subject matter. Sailboats are good for a nice long observation.   They don't go anywhere very quickly.

It was a good excuse to run the zoom out on the new camera.   Same sailboat  at 20x, taken while I started to slump down into a more comfortable observation position, with my head comfortably against a log.  Judging by the changing angle of that sprig of beach grass.

Dooley got into the spirit of the idea, and he sacked out next to me. I can't be entirely sure, as time moves differently here, but I think we may have dozed off for a few minutes.  It's certainly a good place for it.  It actually might have been more than just a few minutes.  I had needle marks tattooing the backs of my legs and arms from the Casuarinas leaves.  I'm going to assume I must have remained fairly stationary for about an hour.   

And then when somebody's snoring woke me up... I looked around and quickly discovered that absolutely nothing had changed during my unplanned nap. The sun moved a little, the waves were still breaking out on the reef, as a distant murmur, and this could just as easily have been the year 1816. I'm guessing that this view hasn't changed.   This was a languid afternoon experience that I had not had in a very long time. I woke up refreshed and relaxed, and worries seemed to have all stayed behind back on Provo for a few minutes.  When was the last time you took a nap with your dog under a shady tree on a tropical beach? Hmm? Don't you think you're overdue?

Did I mention 1816?  Maybe the distant views on this day were not so different from those of two centuries before after all.  And no, I wasn't hallucinating.  Not this time.

That photo reminds me of another time, much more recent than 1816.  I'm thinking of that day back in 2010 when we caught a distant view of a schooner under sail.  I posted that photo, and several weeks later we got an email from the captain of that boat.   This lead to a meeting with Captain Bob Nichols, who was running supplies to orphanages in the Bahamas and Haiti on the "Star of the Sea".  We got involved in supporting a couple of their trips to Haiti, and this all led to a long term friendship with Bob.  He's no longer running that boat, but we do stay in touch. You might see his comments show up here from time to time.

Meanwhile, back on the island, the dog and I cut through the bushes and intersected one of the major highways on Pine Cay for our walk back. We'd had enough sunshine and knew we could find shady patches all up the island if we stuck to the roads.   As you can see, dodging traffic wasn't much of an issue.

I guess we'd missed the big parade when a large iguana cruised down the middle of the road, apparently without a care in the world. It's probably a good thing Dooley got there well after the iguana had taken his exit from the highway.  Dooley always seems to think those encounters are a lot more fun than the lizards do.  Anyhow, this is what an iguana's track looks like. The little sweeping marks are where the iguanas claws brushed the sand as it walked, and the long furrow is from its tail dragging.  Boy, don't we all know that feeling.

And it continued pretty much all the way up to that next rise in the road.  That's where you can just make out a little spotted dog with his nose to the ground, 50 yards ahead of me.  He's the speck up ahead in the wrong lane.
 

We didn't spend all our time on the beach.  We did go check out some of the Pine Cay things we hadn't seen in a while.   I think it was about a year ago that we'd seen this structure built as an observation platform overlooking the water in the Aquarium.   I could have told them that using steel post anchors was a bad idea.  These posts are now essentially untied from the concrete.  The galvanized lag bolts are a nice touch, but totally useless at their intended purpose with the anchors completely rusted back to elemental iron.
 

Speaking of structures, we managed to make a side trip over to Devil's Cut. I had posted photos of this bridge back when it was new.  We were curious as to whether or not it had survived Hurricane Joachim a couple months ago.

The bridge seems to have survived, and in fact has apparently been shored up a bit at each end from it's original position.   That makes me believe that it may have been repaired.

And if you're interested, we also have plenty of photos of this area before someone decided to make it more accessible.

We were there just a half hour after high tide  as the water on the Caicos Bank was starting to rush by on its shortest path back to mother ocean. We got our feet wet getting from the golf cart to the bridge on this side.  Dooley hated every minute of it.  So much so that he made a half dozen trips through the water just to remind himself of how awful it all was.

The side of the bridge on the little no-name cay now has a paved path over the rougher parts of the ironshore limestone.

We had nothing much to do and all day to do it, so we took a walk around the perimeter of the islet.  Just taking the dog and the cameras for a stroll.  

This is a little disappearing history here.  The black pointy things sticking up through the mangroves are old conch shells, discarded from years ago when conch were still plentiful this close to shore.   They break down slowly, but they do eventually return to the sea.

When we rounded a turn in the trail we could see that someone has put something out on the point of the cay nearest the cut through to the Banks.   We had to go take a look to see what's new out there, as well.   The "pirate" flag did catch our attention, rippling and flapping in the breeze as the easterly trade winds had their way with it.

When we got to the point we could see that there is now an umbrella stand cemented into the rocks,  a bamboo flag pole, and a marker of some kind.   And the pirate flag.   I confess I'm not much of a fan of the cute Disney version of piracy. I think this would be a great spot for the Pine Cay ensign,  but I don't get a vote with those folks.

Looking across the cut I noticed that there have been some changes over on that side, too.  Especially since our friend Preacher Stubbs showed us how he cooks conch, back on a New Year's trip seven years ago.

There is now another one of these marker signs hammered into the shore over on that side, too.

 

 The dining room table that was here in 2009 seems to have survived the years okay.  I didn't have a boat with me to go check it out,  and this isn't the kind of place I would swim across during full ebb.   At least, not on this day.  Once again the new camera let me get closer without getting wet.  You can see some of the tidal current ripping through here.   

 

We liked the pattern that the Oystercatchers make when they stroll around in the sandy spots here.    We didn't see any of them on this visit, but it's probably still a bit early in the season for the birds to be here in force. They start showing up in larger numbers later in the spring during nesting season.   There are obviously a few around now, and they've been here since the last high tide.

We walked around the rest of the little cay.   I don't remember if this section of shoreline had been intact when we were last here.  It illustrates what is slowly happening to all of these islands.  The waves undercut the shore line until the rock ledge breaks and falls into the ocean.   There is less island here every year, as the ocean grinds it very very slowly back to sand.

The broken ledges can form some attractive habit for small fish. I was expecting to see some pilchards here on this trip.  Must have spooked them stomping through the underbrush.   They're skittish things, with good reason.  They're the favorite entrée for many species of marine life.

All good things must come to an end, and we had to get back to our floating home at South Side Marina.  We had a wonderfully relaxing visit to Pine Cay.  I just realized that these were the first nights we'd spent off of the boat this year.

This is a little hut to shelter people from the elements while they wait for their ride at the Pine Cay marina.  I was just walking around snapping photos until the scheduled boat trip to Providenciales was ready.  

And I found a spot where the pilchards are hanging out.   If you look at the water between the dock and the shoreline you can see a large school of them.  This is a larger version of the type of environment  they like.  They seem to like some protection from the open water.  It's similar in layout from the broken rock ledges and the channels between them and the shore.

That's a whole bunch of very good bait right there.  Or one could put them in a can with olive oil and call them sardines, and be entirely accurate.

This is another good place to catch baitfish.   This is the fuel dock at Pine Cay.   It's also a boat ramp.

Or a swimming hole, if one relaxes their standards far enough.  Dooley ain't choosy.  Salt water is good enough.
 

And another half hour after that was taken we were back on a boat to Providenciales, and back to our hectic life refitting an old catamaran at South Side Marina.  With a wet dog on our laps.  And in the car. It's only a seven mile trip. 

We could have timed that  last part a little better.

We were only on Pine Cay for two nights, and didn't get photos of either one of those sunsets.  I guess we were too busy or something.   But hey, we have plenty of nice sunset photos from South Side Marina if we ever run short.

Like this one:

 

I know it might seem strange, but this old boat is starting to feel like home.   If you can imagine a home that moves almost constantly.   Complete with a  soft chorus of creaks and groans  every time the weather changes.   I wonder why that feels so familiar?