Loose Stuff of Absolutely No Consequence Whatsoever

We have a functioning tow hitch again. Whew.  This is very important to us. We've  attached that magic tow hitch to an automobile and started pulling the Hobie Tandem Island around to various boat ramps. Last weekend we sailed from Leeward to the Pine Cay marina and back. I think the new hitch has come just in the nick of time. This blog is way overdue for some fresh material. We're hoping that adding the kites to the boats for a bunch of new aerial photos will do the trick.  The recent weather pattern here has been seasonally typical for the beginning of the rainy season. It has been what I would call photoantagonistic.    The calm days are unphotogenically overcast and the  clear and cloudless days are clear and cloudless because a stinging wind blew all the moisture over to smash up against the hapless hills of Haiti.  We've been having a tough time getting the weather and the weekends aligned.  Check this out.  A sunrise that actually got darker as it progressed:

That's not a reversed video, it really happened like that and yes, that meant rain and clouds were on the way.   For a change, I think I'll post up a hodge podge of images without a coherent theme.  So Incoherent will do as the operative adjective here.

I installed the new hitch and this is how it looks while pushing the car and pulling the kayak along behind it.

We didn't specifically decide to downsize this setup. It wasn't a  part of any plan.  It does seem to have been a side effect. We've stayed within the same definition of a little AWD and a boat small enough to trailer.  But we've gone from three hundred  horsepower to one jackass, along with La Gringa and a funny looking little dog.  And Dooley contributes to boat propulsion efforts about as much as a wet bag of jumping beans. Let's just say his vectors are omnidirectional and nonlinear. Is a dog still considered dead weight for those moments  that he's momentarily lost contact with the boat? Anyhow, if you compare that photo above, taken last week, with this one from three years ago, I think some of the differences will be obvious.  We've gone from twelve tires to seven, counting the spares.  That's got to have positively affected our carbon tireprint.

We have many fond memories of using that Land Rover to move the Contender around - and not all of  them heart-stopping or dry-mouthed. But it's time for us to move on. We've found good homes for the Defender 90 and the Contender 25.  

And speaking of that beautiful Contender, you might remember that the previous owner wanted to see photos of it cruising around the clear blue water down here.  Well, we can literally hear that 300 HP a mile away, so we know when it's leaving the marina.  It's getting quite a workout  during its third life. We recently spotted it towing a disabled sailboat back into the Caicos Marina and Shipyard. It's often out happily  fishing and family cruising on weekends, and now it's even earning its keep as a local "Sea Tow" equivalent.

The white caps in that photo should give you an idea of our typical weather lately, too.  Those  long deep V hulled boats can handle it just fine, but  our little 18 footers would be getting bounced around pretty well.  We could do it, but we wouldn't enjoy it much.

Thinking about it, I just realized that our previous boats here are all still out there running and making their owners happy.  

I mentioned that we had sailed the kayak over to Pine Cay last week.  This is the first time we've taken it up as far as the marina there. That's about a 13.4 nautical mile round trip, measuring straight line distances. Our GPS says we sailed 21.4 nm. We had to zig zag a lot to get east in the narrow places with the  wind and current against us. 8 miles of zig zagging.  But we did over 8 knots sailing back. I thought I'd better post a photo to prove we were there.  I want to document this in case we ever get into a discussion of who sailed the first Hobie Tandem Island kayak into the Pine Cay marina.  You know these kinds of things sometimes come up after sundown when sailors are standing around bars in places like the Meridian Club, or the South Side Marina, right?  Documentation can be worth a round of drinks.  Sorry for the water spots.  It was a fairly wet trip.  

We took a break while at Pine Cay. The GPS says for 53 minutes. We needed a break. We were ready to get out of the sun for a while. I know that La Gringa would agree that I was  at least half baked. We'd stopped at the Graceway IGA  on the way to the Leeward marina boat ramp and picked up a couple of store-bought sandwiches for lunch. Once on 'the Cay', we wandered up the path to a bench in the shade of a native tree, and ate a leisurely lunch on the cool sand. Very relaxing.

La Gringa mentioned that I anthropomorphize Dooley a bit too much, but she hasn't been dogging me about it.

So, we're finally getting back to sailing. And we've got some pretty substantial sailing plans going forward.  Much more than just the Hobie between  the islands here in the Turks and Caicos. We're within a week or so of re-launching Twisted Sheets, too.  Oh yeah.

We've also continued to work on our aerial photo capabilities.  I know it looks simple... 'just strap a camera to a kite'.  Easy, right?   That's what I thought, too.  Well, go try it.  And then go try it in a place where the wind blows 15 knots most of the time.  Still, it's been fun so far. We've started adding to our collection of  'bird's eye view' images from around the Turks and Caicos.  And we've  added another camera to the mix.   Right away, the differences between a conventional point-and-shoot and the wide angle of the GoPro are apparent. I'll show you a couple of examples of what we're seeing, and some of the tradeoffs.

This photo was taken with a little point-and-shoot waterproof Pentax.  This is the Caicos Marina and Boatyard.  Notice, the resolution is better than our earlier aerials, and there's no fisheye distortion.  That's what we thought we wanted.   I remember telling you that very same thing. I may be changing my mind back in favor of the GoPro though. We still have some experimentation to do.

After taking a few hundred photos with the Pentax we pulled the kite down and strapped the GoPro to it. This next image is from basically the same position as  in the above photo.  It was the same day, same conditions, with the same amount of string out.  Its very hard to get a kite back up into the same position, but we got it as close as we could at the time. By eyeball. I labeled the position of our catamaran in the boatyard for those of you who wonder about such things.

See what I'm talking about here with the cameras? That wide angle fisheye lens gets a lot more information than the narrower field of view of the better camera. This narrow field of view becomes a bit of an issue when trying to get a specific photo. Control of the camera position is almost impossible without getting involved with pan and tilt, batteries, transmitters, etc.  All the complications that I am trying to avoid. What works fine in a ball field in the USA on a calm morning just doesn't cut it in this environment.  We had about 18  knots of wind on that day.  A "standard" KAP setup, with pan and tilt and video telemetry would have been shaken like a rat in Dooley's favorite doggy dream. We've come home from some of these photo trips with bruises from kite flogging.  And the kite wasn't the one getting flogged.  I don't think complicated arrangements of strings and pulleys and batteries and fragile assemblies is the answer here.

As another example, here's a cropped GoPro 5mp photo showing "Sea Weed" and "Sweet Charlotte" beached there in the little scooped out area.  I've been consistently complaining about the resolution of these little cameras for some time now.   Maybe I've been unfair.  That looks pretty crisp to me.

 Because this is the same area, cropped about the same, from an image taken with the 16 mega pixel Pentax. 

I'm not seeing it as being that much better.   They obviously handle the white balance differently, but I think that's adjustable. And the GoPro is a whole lot easier to use.     Oh, if  you were wondering what I meant by "Sea Weed" and "Sweet Charlotte", that's the name of the old landing craft  and the fishing boat in the foreground there.  Or here's a close up from ground level:

And this one shows a little more of "Sweet Charlotte":

We're pretty determined to have this KAP thing figured out  before we take off sailing on Twisted Sheets, so I think we'll continue to experiment. The photos we posted a few weeks back of the South Side Marina from the air got some positive attention from other people interested in that area. We ran into Marta and Barry from the Harbour Club Villas a few nights ago.   We were all at the Tiki Hut over at Turtle Cove. They are interested in more images of their half of the marina. We've promised to put the new camera up at the next opportunity.  The wind coming over that hill to their east makes launching the kite pretty tricky. I need wind for the kite to work, to a point.  I'm just not into flagellation.  I think the answer here is to get the kite up in the air somewhere  in clean air  downwind, then walk it over to where we want it. Another lesson.

This is one of the best images we have so far of the Harbour Club Villa end of the marina. It is somewhat of an unintentional shot, as we were really trying to get South Side at the time. We can do better if we plan it out right. I'm starting to consider adding a better quality GoPro to the mix.  Their next level up is 11 mega pixels. Two levels up is 12 mp, and a sharper lens. This kite hobby is starting to get expensive.

I'm going to stop before I get off onto another of my aerial photo rants. It's still the passion-du-jour, but it's not all we've been up to. We've been out driving around the island quite a bit, and almost always take a camera along. The operator's manual for the new car wants us to log 3000 km before towing anything with it. We don't think the little kayak counts as towing, really, since it's only about 300 lbs trailer and all. But we want  to be able to haul the skiff and it's right at the 2,000 lb. limit of the car.  Theoretically.  Maybe I should say 'published limit' of the car.   And it's not easy to quickly build up 1200 miles of driving on a small island.

We were out aimlessly racking up some mileage a few days back and got these images late in the day.  This one is of the unofficial but much used boat ramp at Heaving Down Rock in Leeward.  In a rare quiet moment.

We also were cruising by Chalk Sound and stopped long enough to snap a few photos.  There are a couple of hand built Caicos Sloops anchored there.

I don't know exactly why I took this next one.  We were zipping along on one of the back roads of Providenciales testing the AWD function and independent suspension setup of the KIA when we saw this project sitting in someone's yard. Something about this car made me smile. I am very familiar with  the concept of a car "sitting up on blocks". But this one is sitting up on rocks. Would you crawl under that and start removing parts with a large wrench? You know, one of those long ratchets that shake the whole car with leverage when you brace your feet and yank on it with both hands?  How about in a high wind?

Well, I guess I'm not quite done with the aerials just yet in this post.   I  was looking through the photos of the last week or so, and found some more I want to show you.  Last Sunday we took one of the kites for a walk along the beach at Leeward, starting up at the very tip of the island at the entrance to Leeward channel. We were experimenting with the new camera again, and it's a good excuse to go to the beach, anyway.  This is looking back across Leeward-Going-Through at Little Water Cay. Which some people refer to as "Iguana Island".

Someone has outlined a large heart shape on the beach near here with shells.  I'm guessing they wanted to be able to spot it from the window of the airplane taking them home.  Or perhaps it was a message to someone on that airplane from someone still on the ground here.  But of course that's pure speculation on my part.

 Or maybe it was just a family of  Peruvians on holiday and homesick for Nazca. Stranger things have happened. Both here and certainly in Nazca.

I'm continuously  impressed by the information the bird's eye view gives us.  We've walked by this pile of rocks on the beach a dozen times.  We even took a few photos of this area from some years back. We'd noticed the loose jumble of rocks on the beach .  You have to pick your way through or around them. We didn't really think much about it.   Then, with the aerials, we see that same scene from a couple hundred feet up.  And I think it tells a little more of the story.

I think that the contractor who built that rock groin on the left dumped a big pile of material there on the right.  It sure looks to me like the scattered rocks on the beach itself were dropped while moving rocks from one pile to another.   Does that make sense?  I never would have realized that without the aerial.  Not that it makes a bit of difference in anything in our lives.  Other than the desire to know things.

This is just a photo of a nice arrangement of beach chairs.  No other reason to post it.

Okay, two more aerials and then I'll stop. I was looking through the several hundred that we took in a three hour stroll down the beach, and this one caught my eye.  Again, it shows so much more that we would ever see standing on the beach.

We knew that the field of view was going to be a limiting factor with this camera after looking at the Boatyard images.  I thought that perhaps one way to improve things would be to just get the camera up higher.  So I let out another long bit of string to see if that helped.  And it did, to some extent.   We can see a lot more real estate with the camera higher.

Of course with greater distance we lose some of the advantage of the higher resolution.   The GoPro would have captured the entire neighborhood from this height.   Perhaps the answer is to put both cameras up at the same time.   I'll be thinking about that as I redesign the mount this week.  I'm trying a new approach. I'm going to try using the wind to stabilize and orient the camera by putting a vane on it.

Okay, this is getting to be too long to be called a short post.  I'll finish it up shortly after posting a joke photo.  What are these two guys watching so intently?

The unusual sight of La Gringa inspecting an internal combustion engine!! She knows how to check the oil and the belt and other related airborne gadgets that make that propeller spin.   It amazes me, actually.  I never thought that I'd see the day when she'd be the one opening up the cowling on an airplane.  But she does.

This is part of the pre-flight inspection she has to do before firing up that little Piper. I'm wondering how she might feel about taking up the time honored occupation of shade-tree mechanics and four wheel drive repairs. I think she's got the makings of a true grease monkey.

 But I'm not going to be the one to suggest that. Nossir. I didn't get to be this old by being that stupid.

And just as we get the tow hitch sorted out, the wheel bearings replaced, the outboard running again, the kite setup ready to test offshore,  a momentarily good forecast for the upcoming weekend.. we wake up to news like this:

Oh yeah.  It's that season, again.  Tropical Storm Chantal, aiming  for our general vicinity.   It's starting to seem like we get these things coming through here just about this time every year.  I'm starting to detect a pattern.  We should be gone by now, headed either far to the north, or far to the south.  Either one would work.  Come back in October.  That seems to be what a lot of the sensible people do.  I guess we don't qualify for that designation.    Not just yet, anyhow.

Got another time lapse of another sunset.  You can see the lights of Provo coming on in the distance.  And one of the neighbors driving home in the dark. Sounds like he hit a rock....  I'm having fun with this stuff.  Sure hope you are, too.

Twisted Sheets Haulout

This won't be one of our tropical scenery posts. I suppose that any scenery photos we post  would be tropical scenery by definition, but what I mean is that this post is not about beach combing, fishing, or conch diving.   This one is about moving the  big sailboat to a safe spot for the rest of storm season.   It's a part of  keeping a sailboat in the middle of a hurricane zone. We have to have the boat hauled out if there's a named storm warning, or if  we're leaving town for more than a few days during the storm season.  That was the case, here.     I'll  start this post with one of La Gringa's sunrise photos.  I used hers instead of one of my own, because ... well.... hers is better.   Again.

This is the one I had been planning to use before she showed me hers.  It's not nearly so pretty.  I was concentrating on trying to catch the image of the early morning conch boat heading out, the wake across the still smooth water, .....while she concentrated on the sunrise.   I think there's a lesson in this here for me somewhere.

We wanted to make another trip on Twisted Sheets before pulling her out of the water.  We ran out of time.    We had a long-planned trip up to the U.S.A.  We were committed, all scheduled with flights, cars, and hotels all booked. We couldn't leave the boat in the water here and just fly away during the peak of hurricane season.  We moved Twisted Sheets from her comfy slip(s) at South Side Marina.  I motored her about six miles over to the hard dry limestone lot at Caicos Marina and Shipyard. This is the first time we've done this.  I admit to being a little apprehensive since I'd be running the boat alone again. You know what a nervous nellie I am.  La Gringa tells me I worry too much. 

We picked a good day with calm weather for the trip.   La Gringa helped push me off  the dock at South Side and  she  waved bye-bye  as I set off into the big, lonely, dangerous ocean all alone on an elderly boat with issues.  Both the boat and I.  Elderly, and with issues, I mean.

She drove ahead to the Shipyard to be there when I arrived.  Takes her about 15 minutes to drive about ten miles.  Will take me about an hour to go six miles.  If everything goes smoothly.   This was only the second time I had moved this boat by myself.  The first time was from Jacksonville Naval Air Station to Jacksonville Landing in the St. Johns River. My first solo, as it were.  This time was a whole lot better.   This time I was in very familiar water, and I have a whole lot more stick time on this catamaran.  No scary shallows.  At least, none I don't already know.  And no trains and railroad bridges, and no current to hold position in waiting for them to open.  No strange concrete docks, and maneuvering in water the color of.... well I won't dwell on the color of the river.  Let's just say it would never be mistaken for sea water in the TCI.    This tiny tropical trip should be a tray of twinkies, by comparison, true? ( I meant piece of cake but had that alliterdiction thing going on)

It was a typical summer day, with the Caicos Bank looking like a big, warm, clear swimming pool.   If you can imagine a 2300 square mile swimming pool. With a population of critters. Most with teeth. It's a magic place when it looks like this. I'm still amazed some times at how clear the ocean water can get here. I made the whole trip under power, by the way.  Well, that might be a bit misleading.  Maybe I should say I got the boat there under interrupted or intermittent power.  This is one of those nagging little problems I keep whining about. Catamarans just handle so much better when both engines are running.  I got spoiled when they both ran all day and night..... that one time.  It hasn't happened before or since, but we now know it's possible.  We have hope.

There was hardly a breath of wind so sailing  was pretty much out of the question if I expected to get there before dark.   And I most certainly  did want to get there long before dark.  This water is clear and easy to read when the sun is high.  It turns dark and mysterious when the light goes out.



This was only a short trip, but still  enough for me to settle into the chair,  and imagind the feeling of being on a 40 ft. sailboat alone on a long trip.   Even though this trip was within swimming distance of land and only took  an hour, it was enough to let me imagine what it would be like to go from shorthanded to singlehanded.   I admire those people who spend months on a boat alone, but I have no desire to become one of them.    I think it's potentially even more isolated than being a hermit in a mountain cabin.  You can walk away from a cabin.  And the distance to the nearest help stays constant.

La Gringa was driving  along the shoreline during the first part of the trip.  She had her camera with her, and managed to get some long distance photos of Twisted Sheets.   

 

We could hardly have picked a smoother day for the move.   We timed it specifically for  a sunny day on a rising tide, when the sun was high overhead.  The sun makes it so much easier to keep an eye on the hundreds of coral heads between me and my destination.    I am heading around the edge of that hill and then turning to the left. There was a time when I would have said turning to port, but I am trying to break myself of the habit.



 I know my keels will clear these things, but there is still a tendency to steer for clear spots.   One of the fun things with a catamaran is that in many cases I can steer directly at a coral head and have the hulls pass to either side of it.

I remember what I was thinking at that point.  I was judging how long it would take me to swim ashore from here, and then that led into thoughts about what would happen after falling overboard while single handed.  Power boats small enough to fall out of typically have a  safety or 'deadman' switch. It's often a little cord or lanyard that you can attach to your clothing. If you fall overboard, it disconnects the ignition.  The motor stops, and you have a chance of being able to swim to the boat.  Even that's not a sure thing.  If there's enough wind, it's entirely possible for a boat to drift faster than you can swim for as long as it would take for you to catch it.  But the thing is the boat stops motoring, and you do have a good chance if you weren't injured.

If you're on a sailboat alone, and fall overboard, I think things are about to take a serious turn for the worse.  There's no deadman switch to stop it.  If you're not tied to the boat, it's going to sail on without you.  Might even pick up a little speed without your weight.  If you are tied to the boat, it's going to drag you though the water at something like 3 to 6 knots.  To get back on the boat, one would have to be able to haul themselves up the tether hand over hand, into a current stronger than most rivers.  Then if one manages to breathe and haul themselves up to the boat, there is still the significant problem of getting back aboard.   It's hard to climb onto a boat from water level. That's probably a good argument for us getting a better swim platform, come to think of it.   These are the kinds of things I think about when left alone for too long.  You can see I'm not cut out for singlehanded, long distance sailing.

Every time I pass a coral head I think of how many lobster might be hanging out around the base of it. They like to hide in jumbles of rock and coral if the conditions are right.   And there's typically an entire established neighborhood of fishies hanging out around these things.  I don't know how many coral heads there are on the Caicos Bank.  It's almost totally uncharted.  I would guess several thousand.

Maybe we should do a post just primarily with underwater photos of coral heads. That would be a fun one to put together.  Nurse sharks sometimes curl up around them and fall asleep.  We haven't taken any shark photos in a while.

As you've probably already guessed, one of the engines stopped as I was about half way through the trip.  It was the same engine we keep having issues with.  I think the vibration of the diesel loosens some of the fuel fittings after a certain number of hours.  This eventually lets some air bubbles get into the fuel system. One thing I've learned this year is that diesel engines are hugely intolerant of air bubbles. I'm nervous about overtightening the fittings, too. I worry about damaging threads in  the soft alloy metal that Yanmar made these filters and pumps out of.  It doesn't rust, but it's easy to damage. 

I continued the trip on one engine.   The boat runs quite happily on one engine, as long as no fancy slow speed maneuvering is required.   The boat turns left or right just fine on one engine as long as it's moving through the water fast enough for the rudders to have some authority.  Slow it to a knot or two and everything changes.  It becomes difficult to turn it toward the functional engine, and the rudders only seem to be useful for holding a position in reverse.  And then you have to turn them completely opposite what's intuitive.   We got quite a bit of experience docking with one engine on the trip down.   We'd been on the boat two weeks before we realized that it's not normal for witnesses to come running to the dock and shake your hand in congratulations on the landing.

What La Gringa saw from where she was waiting for me at the Shipyard, was the boat get almost to the entrance, and then turn and face in the other direction and stop.   Then she saw me drop the anchor.   She pretty much knew what was going on at that point.     Still, it would have been a good time for someone to have remembered to bring his cell phone, eh?     Well, I didn't have anyone in that category with me, at the time.  I can honestly say the whole crew forgot.

If the rest of Twisted Sheets' crew had been aboard, she would have just taken the wheel and ran the boat while I crawled down into the engine room with a flashlight in my teeth and  my sweaty little fistful of wrenches to bleed the fuel lines.  Since I was alone I turned wimpy and elected to drop the anchor.   I didn't want to have to worry about the boat drifting into something hard while I was preoccupied with getting the engine going.   I assumed I knew what the problem was and that it would only take a minute or two. I could have let the boat drift. But if I got hung up somehow, and it took longer, well, it was safer to just drop the anchor.  I wanted to check out the newly re-repaired anchor windlass, anyhow.

There is also the question of physical risk.  When the boat is moving the propeller shafts are also moving.  The Yanmar diesel manual says to put the transmission in neutral when sailing.  So the propeller moving through the water spins the propeller shaft and fittings quite briskly. They are spinning just a couple of inches from me when I am contorted down in the engine rooms bleeding the fuel lines.  I won't even mention which parts of me that all this spinning metal is closest to. Parts that I don't want to part with.     And every time I've ever seen meat against machinery, the machinery won.  When La Gringa is on board and I'm working on something near the engine, I tell her to slam the dead engine into gear  if she hears any horrible screaming noises coming from the engine room.  The screams don't even have to be all that horrible.   She should do it even if she hears pitiful whimpering sounds coming from the engine room.  Putting the transmission in gear stops the propeller from turning the shaft, for the most part.  In most cases.  Of course by the time she'd get it in gear and stopped I imagine any part of me that got caught up in the propeller shaft fittings would have gone around it several times already whether it was still connected to me or not.  Cheery thought.

Finally I got the fuel line bled, both engines started, the anchor back on board, and proceeded into the Shipyard.   You can see why I was keen to have use of my port side engine to get around this turn.  I meant my left engine.  Of course.

Well, I made it.   Another few miles for the log book. Another trip with engine problems.  So far, I think we're batting a thousand on that scenario.

I didn't have a lot of trouble getting the boat into the travel lift slip.   It's pretty easy with no wind and no current and both engines running.

I had to wait about a half an hour or so for the guys at the Shipyard to drive the travel lift over to to the slip.  It's that blue steel frame looking thing on the left in that photo above.  Those things don't move very fast.    That was okay with me.  I could use a short break between anxiety attacks.        One major crisis at a time, that's the way to manage this stress stuff.

Waiting for the lift gave me time to straighten up a few things on the boat.  Coil some lines, secure some fenders.   And watch the activities going on around me at the Shipyard.   It was pretty quiet, but that's usually the case on week days.   I watched one of the guys with the local jet-ski operation towing a jet boat over to the boat ramp.

After a while, JP of the Caicos Marina got the travel lift moved over to the slip where I was waiting.   We had to turn the boat around to fit it into the lift.   With it in bow first, the fore stay and jib were rubbing on the travel lift cross bar.     With it in stern first, we were able to get the two lifting slings down and under the hulls.

Bernard came over from the fuel dock to watch.   This was a pretty nervous moment for me, too.  I'll show you why in a moment.

Once the boat was lifted clear of the water, we walked around making sure that she was ready to move over land.   Both of our back stays were touching the lift cross bar, but they weren't pressing on it hard and we figured it was okay to move it.

This front sling is the reason I mentioned earlier that I was a bit nervous.    I know the angles are such that it's not likely to slip off.   I realize this.   I figured it out for myself.  I also asked JP and Bernard what they thought of it.  JP said it looked to him like it should hold.    Bernard said it was making him nervous and he didn't want to watch.   So it was down to me.   I said "Okay, lets move it."

What the heck.  It's only 18,000 lbs.

The lift is geared way low, and moves along at a crawl.   Two of the wheels are steerable like a shopping cart, so they can put a boat just about anywhere they want it.     I just wanted this one to be in a safe place.   I asked if they had a place next to another multi hull.   You know, something that won't fall over in a hurricane.     JP told me that he had just the spot.

So we were pretty happy when he maneuvered Twisted Sheets right into position alongside Sharon and Jim Shafer's brand new 50 ft. catamaran Pirateboat.    Looks like a Before and After comparison of how far the catamaran industry has come in 26 years.

We spent a few hours getting the boat ready for storage while we are out of the country.  All loose items that might get out of hand in a strong wind got stowed.   The big fenders, the loose lines, anything a hurricane could pick up and hurl into another boat.   We strapped the dinghy down fairly well with extra lines.   We even removed the sails from the main and jib furlers.

Of course I took this opportunity to take a good look at the hulls.  I was curious as to what kind of condition they were in after our thousand mile shakedown cruise.  Even though the boat had been freshly bottom painted by the previous owner just two months earlier, there were signs of barnacle and other marine growth already starting.   This dismayed me a little bit, as we didn't get a choice as to what type of bottom paint was applied.   We normally get at least two years out of the stuff we use.

But what bothers me more than the bottom paint at this point is the condition of the sacrificial zinc anodes bolted to the propeller shafts.    These zincs are used to keep electrolytic corrosion from attacking the steel of the boat.   When an electrical current is present, either due to natural galvanic action between dissimilar metals or an external current being passed through the boats electrical system, the zinc gets eaten away first.     What concerns me here is that this zinc is also only two months old, and is about a quarter gone already.  This tells me we have some grounding issues going on in the boat.   Oh, I already knew that.    But I was surprised at how rapidly the zincs are going.   It's probably a good thing we hauled the boat when we did.   The electrical system just hasn't been the same since the lightning hit us.    Not that it was anything to be proud of before then, either.

I was also curious as to how the hulls had fared after we sat aground for several hours during our trip.  We were happy to see that the only sign of touching the bottom was some easily touched up bottom paint just on the bottom of the keels.    This is one tough hull.  Or I guess I should say, two tough hulls.

I confess to a feeling of relief after getting the boat hauled out of the water and secured safely ashore.  This is the culmination of a process that started over four months ago when we flew up to Florida to take a look at this old catamaran.  It now feels like it was  1.) Find a boat and buy it, and 2.) Somehow get it transported to the TCI.  Step 3 is to get the boat the way we want it for some cruising.

We plan to get a few things fixed before we relaunch her later.  The electrical system is the first priority, but not the only one by any means.    This boat was sitting "on the hard" in Jacksonville when we first saw her, and now four months later, she's once again high and dry two countries south of there.  We felt good about leaving her here, safe from any storms, while we took off on our  little vacation to the Rocky Mountains.   We knew she was in good hands, and in good company among the varied population of other boats waiting out hurricane season at the Caicos Marina and Shipyard.

Now That's a water taxi.

And this.... oh yeah this is my idea of a Sport Fishing boat.    We were curious as to how that one even fits in the travel lift.   But obviously, it does.

That's pretty much the end of the story on this little trip.   We have several things we want to get accomplished before we re-launch Twisted Sheets. Some of it will be things we hire the shipyard to do, and some will be things I do myself.  It's a long list.  

We took our little vacation in the USA and are back on the island now.   I guess I could show you some photos of La Gringa  boogieing up a mountain trail  at around 10,000 ft on an All Terrain Vehicle, or biking over a raging river.  But while those are examples of our own version of a "Tropical Vacation" (a vacation from the tropics) they really don't fit in with the Tropical Life aspect of this blog.   Those mountain trips are so far from life here I don't even try to explain them.  So I thought I'd fill in the blank space until our next local excursion with this 'filler' post.

We have a trip planned to Middle Caicos, and I bet we can find some nice tropical scenery for the next one.