Micro Beach

We really don't spend much time at the beach.  That's probably surprising coming from someone who lives on a small island surrounded by beaches.  But it's true. We probably spend fewer hours per year on beaches than someone who comes here for a two week vacation. But we probably do spend a lot more time on boats or in the water. We do like the water here.  And the sunrises lately have been pretty nice out over that water:

It's not that we avoid the beach, really.  I think it's more that the activities that we are attracted to just don't include a lot of time on that land/sea interface known as beach.  We go to the marina to get on a boat and leave the beach behind.  We try to avoid tracking sand around, and would prefer not to be wearing the beach, cleaning the beach off the vehicle, filtering the beach out of the drinking water, and chewing on the beach with one's sandwich.

If you've read much of this blog you already know we do like to visit remote beaches and comb through the huge amounts of neat stuff that washes ashore, but that's really more about the debris than it is about sea and sand.  We don't, for example, take a blanket and cooler along and just sit on the beach during those West Caicos beach combing trips.  We're there on a mission, with a purpose, and 'Diems to Carpe'.

But  sometimes, every now and then, we just decide we need some beach time.   Not a lot of it, and not very often.  But from time to time we just want the feeling of the sand between our toes, and to watch the ocean, with nothing else on the agenda.  I thought I'd post up a few  beach-oriented photos that aren't tied to beach-combing.  For a change.

This time of year we get a lot of windy days.  We follow several online weather forecasting tools here, as you might imagine.  One of our favorites is Wind Guru. On one of our very windy days recently  we were looking at Wind Guru for Providenciales to see just how windy it was going to be.   We noticed that the offshore wave forecast was for 3+ meter waves outside the reef.   We decided to take a trip over to Grace Bay to see if things warranted some photographs for the blog.  These next few photos were taken from the park in the Bight.  That distant line of breakers is about a mile offshore.  This is what Wind Guru was reporting as 10-12 ft. seas.  I believe it.

I had my trusty little Nikon point-and-pray camera and La Gringa took her DSLR Pentax along.   Good thing that she did, because her camera did a much better job on the distant stuff.  She did a better job photographing the near stuff too, come to think of it.  Or perhaps I could just reword that more correctly and admit that she did a better job in general. The distant spray in this photo is probably going 20 ft. into the air.

This might have been a good time for a movie, but neither of us thought to take one.  A movie would probably be better to show you the little daysailor anchored off the park. It was swinging and rocking in the wind. These static photos just don't convey that well.  So this is what a 12 ft. swell breaking over the reef looks like from a mile away:

I couldn't really frame these photos and get these results from the little point-and-shoot.  Trying to line these up in a sun-blanched viewfinder was not very productive.   I was glad I had La Gringa along. But then I always am.

We took a few dozen photos that day, but I'm only picking out some of the more representative ones. A few boats went by during the time we were there.  These guys are about half way between the beach and the reef.

Every time we see breakers like this out on the reef I think about what it would take to surf these.   Titanium body parts come to mind.

There were very few people in the water that day, but I think that was due more to the wind than it was the water.   The waves near shore were not that  bad, but the wind lifted sand was uncomfortable. We didn't spend all day at it.

Then last week we had another good excuse to spend a few more days out on Pine Cay. The winds had died down, and we took several walks along the beaches there.  It's a different place on a normal day.  Calm and peaceful.

I was playing around with different exposure settings on the camera in that photo above.  I was trying to get the contrast in the sand ripples.   I have a hard time just sitting still on a beach.  So I looked around to see what else I could photograph, and the nature of the sand itself caught my eye.    I decided to take a closer look.

This is what the sand here looks like much closer up.  I know I've written about this stuff several times already.  So I won't go into it all over again. This is the crunched up calcium carbonate that makes up the sand in the photo up above.

I was carrying the little Pentax WG-III camera with me on this trip.  Among its other useful features is a really cool macro photography setting.  I thought we'd play around with that a bit, to give you a short break from the aerial photos.  Notice that I said a short break. Yeah, we had the kite with us, too.

This is what the sand of the beaches on Pine Cay would look like if you were the size of an ant.

Quite different from the crystalline structure of quartz-based sand on volcanic islands.   This stuff is soft.

When I was going through these macro photos later I was thinking about how much trouble we have with the sand and salt sticking to the automobiles.  I took the next photo with the lens right up against the rear window of our car. This is a closeup of the structure of the stuff that sticks to the window. The camera settings on this next photo were about the same as in the closeup sand photo.  This is what the wind borne mist looks like after it's stuck and dried on the car windows.   Did I just prep a huge microscope slide using the rear glass of a KIA?

The flakes of fine dust are trapped in a matrix of salt crystals.  And it all sticks to glass, aluminum, steel, sunglasses, feet and eyeballs quite well.

While we were strolling around the beach looking at small things, we did notice a few of the usual big things in the distance. Not the crashing waves on this day, but we got some great photos of the Wharram design catamaran Beluga sailing up and down between us and  the reef. If you ever come down here (or up here, or over here, as the case may be) and you want to charter a boat to just sail, I think this guy does more pure sailing than the rest of the catamaran charters put together.   He's always out there, with the sails up.

We actually pulled a couple of beach chairs down to the shore for this beach trip. This is a rarity for us. We don't usually plan to sit for long. But we were planning to go for a swim and the chairs are nice when one needs a place to regain one's breath and drip dry without sitting on the sand. I wasn't paying that much attention to the terrain when we set the chairs up on a little sand dune overlooking the water.  I plopped down in my chair and took this photo looking out.   See the short truncated line of footprints leading  toward the water that suddenly stop for no apparent reason?

I'd come out of the chair headed for the water, and came to a scrunching halt when I realized there was a five foot drop between me and the next level of beach.    We don't normally have this amount of relief in the dunes here.   This undercutting was the week after the heavy surf in the photos up above. We were at the beach before it had time to recover and level out.  That  almost reads  like a Prozac commercial, doesn't it?

Thinking about those close up photos of the sand granules, boy. That one dune sure is a big number of granules. Then I start thinking about space. My father-in-law recently sent me a link to a comparison of how small we are in the universe.  I started thinking of how many grains of sand there are on this planet.  Then I started thinking about the likelihood that there are more stars than there are grains of sand. Then I got all heebie jeebie and decided to just concentrate on the sand this time.   That's a whole lot easier for my limited intellect than imagining a number with zeros stretching to infinity. Sand, I can get a handle on.

When I was looking at the scene in that photo above, I was seeing lots of small sparkles in the sand.  I tried several times to get a photo showing them, but it was tricky. The angle of the sun was important, and the sparkles that were visible to my semi-naked eye were not showing up in the photos.  So I kept changing camera parameters until eventually I got an image that does show the sparkles in the sand, barely.

I imagine I looked pretty silly, a grown man out there scooting around on his butt in the sand with a camera.  Trying to get the right angle of beach and sun on undisturbed sand with a disturbed Jack Russell Terrierist running around is not all that simple. That photo above was the best of the lot.  

Why was I doing this?  Well, I'll tell you.  I wanted to know what the heck was causing the sparkles.  I had wondered about random crystals getting into the mix.  Or perhaps flakes of mica.  But none of this was making much sense given the makeup of the sand.   Of course the answer is obvious and you're probably already figured it out but hey, I had a camera, a beach, a question, and a blog post to write. Then the real difficulty began. How do you get a close up photo of a sparkle that disappears the moment you move even a foot toward it?   Well, the answer is you just keep taking a lot of photos.   Then in this case, I covered my head and the camera with my t-shirt so I could look at the images on the sun-washed  LCD which were useless in direct sunlight.  So I crawled around on my substantial belly, keeping one eye out for sparkles in the sand and the other one out for wayward harpoons from nearsighted whalers. Finally, I realized what was happening when I saw the few flecks of sparkle in the top left corner of this one.

I felt like such a dummy.  The shiniest bits are just wet shell fragments.  Those sparkles that disappear with the least movement also disappear with a few seconds of sunlight. The longer lasting flares are from the most polished shell fragments. Mystery solved. Dang it.

Why "dang it" you might well ask?   Well, because I am always hoping that the sparkly shiny stuff is worth picking up and hiding away from the authorities, of course.  No such luck this time. I think doubloons are bigger, anyhow. At least the ones Mel Fisher used to wear were bigger.  Mel let me examine a couple of his coins once in Houston some years ago.  Every would-be treasure diver's dream.

While I had the little camera dialed into macro mode we went looking for other  beach related objects to image.   Can you guess what this is?

I would have guessed some old piece of line or other cordage wasting away in the sun.  But that's not it.   Here's another view from a little further out:

And if you guessed a shot of the top of my head back when I had hair.... wrong again.   It was just a closeup of the bashed spot on this coconut.  Those fibers do an impressive job of protecting and transporting that coconut seed across the ocean.

I'm only going to show you one more set of those close-ups. Don't want to overdo it, and you know how I can be when I get focused on playing with cameras. I'm hoping that you're just glad I didn't do another entire post on broken boat parts.

This is what sand looks like trapped in a bit of natural sponge from the ocean.  I thought it looked more like a dozen eggs free falling in a shopping bag, but it's definitely sand and sponge.

Backing off a bit, the image starts to look more like sponge and less like trapped sand.

And then of course backed off completely the image reveals itself to be a strange and distorted birdlike animal with bleached coral for a beak and sponge for a brain.   That last part is starting to sound disturbingly familiar...

We took a lot more photos, of course.  I just don't know what to do with them all.  So I foist them on our readers and hope they're bored enough to continue onward.

Remember a few months ago we were out here at Pine Cay taking aerial photos of Devil's Cut?  Well, since January there have been some changes out there. We took the trusty rusty golf cart out to take a look. And there are changes, indeed. The most notable one is a new footbridge running across that treacherous little bit of water that gave the Cut it's name.

We were just looking for an excuse to put a kite and camera up, and this was as good as any.  If you go look at the earlier photos, you're probably going to see some changes in these.   First off, an aerial of the bridge looking to the west.

The little cay that is now connected to Pine Cay via this new bridge has also been changed. Now there are footpaths cleared all along the perimeter.   Once you come over the bridge and onto the little island, you are faced with a sign post.  I don't know if you can read this from the photo, but the sign to the left says "To The Channel" and the one to the right  says "To The Beach".  Some might call that self explanatory.  I might be one of them.  Meaning I've already said too much about the sign.

This is an aerial photo (says Capt. Obvious) showing the 'beach' section of this part of our program today. I shouldn't spoil it, but that's also the 'channel' in the background.   Hey.  It's a small island.  One lens is enough to cover it.

Dooley the Delirious had to try out the beach part.   He has examined it closely, first hand (paw?) and has made the determination that it is, indeed, a beach.  I suppose we can now claim it's Dooley Authorized.

This photo shows one section of the path that runs from that sign to the left, or 'channel' side.

Here's an image looking back at the entire little no-name cay from the east.  The new bridge is in the background, leading to Pine Cay.

We've been told that there are a lot of plans to further develop this little rock for Pine Cay visitors.  Picnic tables, sun shelters, all still in the works.

La Gringa spotted this goofy looking bird  watching us from the little point sticking out there to the right in that photo above.  When I saw it, I knew that the distinctive long bill was characteristic of one of the Oystercatchers.  I don't know exactly which one. This guy wasn't talking.

This is a photo of the channel that runs out from Pine Cay to the Caicos Bank.  The dark splotch is the shadow of the kite, before anyone gets too excited.  And I think 'splotch' is a scientific term in east Texas.

La Gringa was exploring the new paths on the little island while I was off playing with my kite.   She found numerous fissures running under the rock, some right above the high tide level.   Some of them are big enough to be hazardous footing to an inattentive hiker.  She was trying to get a good photo of one of them. Which can be tricky...

When she had a sidekick who promptly stuck his nose into anything she was interested enough in to photograph.  This was two seconds after the image above:

See what I mean?

It even has some convenient holes to a fishing pole into, if one were so inclined.

The overhanging shoreline is rife with these small holes through the limestone.  And I don't often get the chance to use words like rife.   I guess I should think about that, before using another one.

That one's not big enough to snare a human foot, but I'd sure be nervous about it if I were a certain obnoxious little dog running around paying no attention to my footing while chasing lizards and barking annoyingly at birds

He managed to get through the experience unscathed.  I guess it helps when your weight is distributed over four different  sections.  He can get by just fine on three legs. I don't do so well on just one.

While I'm on the subject of inattentive dogs it occurs to me to use this seque into a shot of what Dooley does best these days while I'm working on the good ship S/V Twisted Sheets.  He likes to nap to recharge for his next bout of insane and pointless barking. Acting like an idiot takes a lot of energy sometimes.  Please don't ask me how I know so much about it.

I was sitting in the cockpit of Twisted Sheets on a cloudy day recently, pondering the mysteries of the Yanmar diesel fuel injector.  Dooley's barking made me look up just as Ralph and Doris respectively from Michigan and Middle Caicos collectively came walking down the dock to say hello.  No kidding.  They had been staying at their vacation home out on Middle and were over on Provo for a grocery and supply run.  They knew about the blog, and decided to detour by the marina just to say hello. I was so surprised I wasn't sure what to say. Thanks for the nice words about the blog, Ralph. And thanks for coming by.

What was I doing during this unexpected pleasure?  Well, nothing noteworthy or exciting.  In fact, I had just dismantled my very first Yanmar injector.  I  was totally relieved to see that diesel injectors are purely mechanical in operation, and really very simple devices.   Much easier than the electro-mechanical things that go into gasoline engines.

 I found out that copper crush washers are common in these engines, and that they deform and need to be replaced each time you remove one.  The copper compresses and stays compressed. Copper gets hard and brittle when it gets fatigued.  Fortunately these expensive imported washers can be reused over and over again by annealing them.    I just heat them up red hot over a gas torch, and then when they cool they're soft and pliable again.  This is one of those simple jobs where it's a still a real good idea to pay attention and not get distracted by things going on elsewhere in the marina. I'm not going to elaborate on that.

Don't worry, you non-DIYers out there. I am not going to let this post fall into another boat repair tome.  In fact it's long enough that I think I'll just stop it right here and keep the rest of these greasy boat photos to myself.  And all I'll say about the boat is that it's getting close to usable.   I was wondering if Dooley was thinking about Mel Fisher's trademark phrase that he uttered every morning for years while searching for the Atocha. Mel used to say "Today's The Day!"   Somehow I think Dooley's thoughts were elsewhere.

We didn't get another sunset photo worth posting this week, but I'm thinking I can slip a great moonrise image in without too many complaints.

Dooley the Distorted

We've been playing around with cameras again, as you well knew we would be. This time we took the dog over to Grace Bay beach to try out a new camera mount idea. This one is very similar to the "Dooley Cam" mount that we've used on his life jacket, but made to fit him without the bulky jacket. I stuck a photo of it in the previous blog post. All we needed was a reasonably good beach day. Not too hard to find around here.

We needed another seawater fix and this was as good an excuse as any to take the dog for a walk at the beach. We drove the rented Fiat across the island to the "new" park at the Bight. I think they dedicated this back a few years ago but it's still referred to as the new park, and we've also heard it referred to as the children's park. It's got a very nice and convenient parking lot right across the road from the Department of Boat Stuff. That's not their official name. I use that to differentiate it from the Department of Road Stuff, who are actually over by the airport. We get the dog quickly through the groups of happy picnic lovers on their blankets with all their lovely fried chicken and peanut butter sandwich filled coolers. We have to keep Dooley on a leash while in the vicinity of small people with food. He will lick the chocolate off a suddenly surprised and wide eyed little face and grab what's left of their lunch in mid air. He's good with surprise attacks. Once we got sufficiently clear of the sandy diaper mob, we unshackled the wee beastie and scooted down the beach a bit to get away from the crowds. See the crowds?

I guess crowded beaches are a relative thing. By our standards, this is mobbed. We've gotten spoiled by being able to boat to so many deserted beaches on other islands that we rarely go to the most popular beaches here on Providenciales any more. This particular stretch of sand wins a spot near the top of every list I ever see of the world's best beaches. It's a combination of beautiful, soft, clean sand and the clear, warm turquoise water. And this beach is generally in the lee of the island so the waves don't knock your teeth out or sweep your feet out from under you. And never at the same time. There's a nice reef offshore to take most of the brunt of the breaking ocean waves, and this protects the entire beach. Also makes for some fine scenery.

I noticed some lines of sea weed from the recent tides. Keep in mind that it's winter here, and current patterns change a little bit from season to season. And I was kidding about it being crowded. We've never seen a time when we couldn't walk for a few minutes and find a stretch of beach all to ourselves. Even here in the heart of the local tourism industry's best spot during spring break.

There are a number of resorts, hotels, condos and villas spread out up and down Grace Bay. I just took a quick look in the local Yellow Pages and found 21 hotels listed along Grace Bay. Yet, it doesn't really look at all congested and there really isn't any particular spot that feels crowded to me. It's not that kind of place. It's not built up like some beach resort communities on some other islands that we could name. There are still private residences on the beaches here, and a fair bit of open space.

Speaking of houses, not far down the beach from that one we spotted this new contemporary construction going in. A very solid looking, steel reinforced concrete structure. There is a big open area in the middle, and big overhead steel doors that close off the two apartments. It doesn't appear to be finished yet. What a great location.

We're known to snap a photo of just about anything that interests us, and we were doing a little of that on this trip. We've already posted photos of the other end of the park, back during a sailing competition. a couple years back. This park gets a lot of use, too. Recently we noticed that someone has been sponsoring a Fish Fry here every Thursday evening. I found some good photos of the fish fry thing on a tourism blog here, written by "insiders". It's not all that easy to find interesting subject matter in your own neighborhood. We have to ask ourselves, 'what would someone in the middle of a town some place a long way from here find interesting?' and it's just not that simple. Sometimes the simplest everyday things that are commonplace to one person might be totally amazing the first time someone else sees it. And of course there are some things one just doesn't write about. Not while one is still living there, anyhow..

The quality of the photos we were taking on this trip was suffering from intermittent cloud cover, too. The little pocket digital cameras do a pretty good job when they have lots of light. Not so good under a gray sky.

That sign is next to an exhibit of a 'reef ball'. These are the poured concrete artificial reef habitats that marine biologists put around the sea floor to produce protective homes for little sea critters. Things that crawl and swim can get into the protected inner area though the large holes in the bottom section. I should have put something there to show you the scale of this, but imagine that you could put both of your fists into one of those large holes in the bottom. Unless you're Andre the Giant, I mean. He'd have to use a separate hole for each fist.

The little penthouse apartment section that makes up the top two floors of the reef ball is for small critters that need protection to develop.

I cropped this part of the sign photo to make it easier to read their description of the reef balls. There is a small map representation of this portion of the park there, also. We wuz here!

We posted some underwater photos of the reef balls over at Smith's Reef in an earlier post.

I wish I had some great Dooley Cam video footage to show you, but alas, the prototype mount still needs some modifications. When I made the similar mount for his life jacket, I had the longitudinal support of that jacket to keep the camera motion dampened in the pitch axis. Well, with this new little saddle type mount, the camera was flopping fore and aft way too much to get anything useful. It did produce some interesting images. And a very tired dog. We finally gave up on the photography stuff and just chilled out in the sand for a while. Dooley likes to come down and check out the lee side of his islands on a regular basis, anyway.

He keeps a good track of whatever is going on around him. And you can tell by the wet fur that he's been swimming. That's actually a redundant statement, now that I think of it. If there's a beach nearby, he's been swimming.

I thought you might get a kick out of some of the random images we got by attaching the GoPro camera to my prototype Dooley Cam mount. We shot some video at 60 fps and I also set the camera up to shoot time lapse on a two second interval, and those shots came out really bizarre. Some of this stuff looks like Salvador Dali's spirit got into the camera during a playful moment.

The dog rarely stops moving, of course, and whenever the camera captured an image the chances were excellent that it came in the middle of some quick maneuver that Dooley was going through. Possibly aerial. These are somewhat indicative of the sudden abrupt changes of motion I am going to have to compensate for with this little camera platform. It's an engineering problem, and it's not going to be easy to come up with any kind of platform stabilization for an unfettered dog of this demeanor. Simply put, without the stiff back of the life jacket the little booger is free to wiggle, and it's not that simple to find a good spot for a camera on a wiggling dog. If I strap something to the dog to keep him from wiggling it creates all kind of personal and ethical dilemmas for me. I know how I'd feel if someone strapped me up to keep me from wiggling. Don't ask.

So here for your amusement are some views from the back of an unfettered dog running around on the beach.

It's either that, or I must finally accept that dogs have two feet in each of a couple of dimensions and one can only find that out by designing a very special camera mount that captures things as the dog sees them. For example, notice the shadow of the dog and camera on the sand in that photo above. Nothing amiss there, right? So, what's Dooley looking at? He's given a new vertical dimension to the view across Grace Bay.

And yet a split fraction of a second later he turns abruptly and it's like a view of an alternate universe. Time and space folded over onto itself by a small exuberant animal chasing the very joy of leaping in the sand on a distant beach? This shot somehow manages to capture the same stretch of beach three times, and inverts and folds it.

Interesting that the digital cameras can do this.

I plan to modify the mount somehow, because I cannot imagine any software that would be able to handle this kind of random distortion. Unless Dr. Leary's back and working for Microsoft. It may be that small dogs and GoPro's are not the best combination. I think I might need either a bigger dog or a smaller camera. I know which of those is the most cost effective.

And through it all of course Dooley the Dangerous is totally in charge of all he sees. Or so he would have you think. These are not shy dogs. He has been showing some evidence of turning into a grumpy old man lately, but then put him on the beach and he's a puppy again.

How many dog ears can you count in this one exposure? Notice they're in different positions? That's a mirror image of the tree, too.

And this next one sort of explains why there are so many uncharted areas around here. You have to go around the bend to even see them. And of course Dooley was beside himself

Okay, I won't continue with those. We ran that camera taking a shot every two seconds for about an hour. Almost all of them look like some variation of those five I just uploaded. When viewed in sequence, it's a strange and somewhat disorienting visual trip. Imagine the view of a small cowboy strapped to the back of a 15 lb bucking bronco with really quick moves. For a lot longer than 8 seconds.

I would have tried some more experiments, but Dooley got tired and I could see that I would have to add a longitudinal brace down his spine to keep this camera from flopping and messing up the photos. I don't really want to do that. It could work a lot better if the center of gravity of that GoPro camera wasn't so high. Have any of you guys experimented with the little cylindrical POV cameras yet? I am thinking that might be the next direction we move in. Less air volume to fog, and I can mount it low to the dog. But for now, I figured he'd earned a break.

We've got a bunch of small DIY projects going on at the moment. Dooley's camera mount is one of them. I'm also working on motorizing a camera slider to take time lapse images. I've been very limited as to what I could find down here for a battery powered electric motor. La Gringa finally located one for me, and I've been making pulleys out of starboard plastic. I needed some drive belts and while big O-rings would have been great, we couldn't find any that were even close

I found out that you can cut a circular piece of tough, flexible rubber from the top edge of a Croc without seriously affecting the usefulness of the shoe much

You don't think much about buying things like inline skate wheels, until you need some and start looking around for them. Even cheap ones would suffice. But nope. Not so far. I haven't gone over to Krazy Bargains yet, and it's possible they might have a set of children's skates or something like that that I could scavenge after shelling out three times their value.. This is a second level priority DIY, anyhow. Maybe even third tier

On other fronts, La Gringa continues her flying lessons. Dooley and I look forward to sitting out at the airport for a peaceful hour with our VHF radio listening to the pilots and air traffic and watching her flying around. This is right after a recent take off last week:

As I'm writing this, we've just returned from another trip over to North Caicos. We went to watch a kite flying contest, of all things, over the Easter holiday weekend. We got a lot of nice photos and I'm pretty sure that unless something exciting happens in the meantime, that will be the subject of our next short-post-but-more-frequently experiment

In the meantime, would you believe it if I were to tell you that this is a sunset? Some of them look remarkably like sunrises, don't they? It would have been a good one