The Beatings Continue...

It's Monday again already?   Wow.  I think that I must have been under some unfounded and mistaken impression that a lot of this Monday syndrome stuff all goes away with a move to a tropical island.   We were wrong about a lot of our ideas on what this past decade would be like.  I think we watched too much television in a previous life.  I was expecting something along the lines of Gilligan doing a Corona commercial.    We've certainly got the backdrop for it.

I'm not sure whether I pictured myself as Gilligan or the Skipper, but it's turned out a lot more like the Professor on a bad day that never seems to end.  Wait a minute, that's Groundhog Day.  Different movie entirely.  But also appropriate.

We do get some great views from this little hillside. I'd love to know how many photos we've snapped from this patio while we've lived here.  It would certainly be thousands by now.   And you guys have seen a fair number of them.

 It's not like we stand out there looking for things to photograph, either.  The typical scenario would be one of us walking through the living room and glancing out the window and spotting something different.  Some splash of color. Or motion.  Or an object where we're accustomed to seeing just ocean.  And it's obvious.  Like this, for example, just a few days ago.  Bland ocean no longer grabs our attention, but just put a 40 ft. speck out there....

In that case, I grabbed a camera and ran back out on the patio and  trotted over to the right side to get a better angle on the sunlight.  Just to see how the photo would look.  Well, it looked like this.

Of course you guys only see the better ones. Sometimes it's a tough call, do I post the prettiest one, or the one with something odd or interesting?  We try for a mix.  Was easier when I saved up photos for six weeks and then picked what I wanted.  This weekly posting is more fun, though.

We've been working extensively on the boat, of course.  Refitting the old dear has apparently somehow become my life's obsession,  And this has happened without any intention on my part to even get involved in such a program.  If that makes any sense.   But it continues.   

I just ripped out the remainder of a parquet tile floor in one of the heads (bathrooms) on the boat. We plan to replace the wooden tiles with vinyl tiles.  We thought we'd run over to Krazy Bargains to see what they might have in stock in vinyl tiles.   I'm showing my age here, but when the proprietor bustled over to assist us I  drew one of my long lasting mental blanks and finally asked him if he had any linoleum flooring. I think that might have been the blankest look I ever got back from an east Indian shop keeper.   Well,  maybe except for that time I finally gave up trying to describe a grommet.  

In this case we finally figured out that I really meant vinyl and yeah, he had some.   Not only did he have some, but the box sitting on top of the pile was exactly the pattern La Gringa had in mind.  And he had one box of 45 tiles in that pattern.  We were amazed and promptly chose to take this as a good omen.  We'd been needing a good omen lately.  I was about to resort to tossing bones and squinting at the sun.  And to walk into the first shop we tried, on Easter Weekend, and find exactly what we wanted... well that just hardly ever happens here in the Land of MakeDo.   We were all giggly.  We bought the box of tiles and scooted out of there before the siren's call of Chinese hardware got its talons into us.  Wow, what a terrible mixed metaphor!  I'm going to leave it here as a bad example for the rest of the class.

Anyhow, as we were leaving the parking lot with our new box of  foreign language tiles giddily secured I noticed a fresh shipment of plywood had arrived and would soon be ready for purchase.  I've been looking for some good plywood, for shelves and such.  This was labeled "Coastal Plywood".  I had to go take a closer look.  This might be just what I need, some new marine grade of plywood I had never heard of before.  And at Krazy Bargain prices, to boot!!  What a lucky day.   So I walked over to take a close look at it. 

Uh... wait a minute.  This is obviously another of those misconceptions that causes me so many issues with some of these distant manufacturers.  See, when I saw the word 'coastal'  I thought that had something to do with the coast, or ocean.   A closer inspection of the plywood itself reveals that coastal must have some other translation that I am not familiar with.  But then English is a second language for me, too.  At least that's what people up in New England thought when I first moved there from Texas.  Anyhow, take a look at this plywood.  Would you buy it for marine applications?

I think it must be meant for something else.   Maybe they are stocking up for hurricane season, in one scenario.  In any case, I decided not to buy it for use on the boat.  I think I need cabinetry grade stuff.  The plywood with a lot more layers in it than five.  Or in this case, 4.8.

While I was trying to evaluate the plywood, La Gringa looked down and saw another omen, but we took this one as more of a warning.   We could tell that the spirits were telling us it was time to move on when   Papa Smurf lost part of his anatomy here.  It was good enough for us.   We took our tiles and left.   We don't mess around when the  day starts turning too thick with omens.

Whatever happened to lucky rabbit's feet? I never understood those either.  Didn't look too lucky for the rabbits. Maybe Papa Smurf has a piece of the action on this one.   And what do you think the chances are  that I'll have to add some contact cement to our new self-adhesive vinyl tiles from the land of coastal plywood?

Dooley the Delinquent has adjusted to our new home-boat-home-boat repeat repeatedly schedule, as he usually does. He's happy if he just knows what's going on.  He likes a schedule, and an agenda, and he hates surprises.  He's got his own little kingdom around him everywhere he goes.   I walked into the bedroom yesterday and heard him muttering about something.   I walked over to take a look.

I thought that he'd finally lost whatever was left of his hairy little mind at first.  Either that or he'd eaten something  new off a springtime blooming cactus plant.  But a closer examination revealed that he was on the hunt.  Patiently trying to figure out some way to get at another lizard.  He considers them vermin, and treats them accordingly. In this instance I refused to let him outside until the lizard was safely away.  We like the lizards. They eat bugs and make no noise whatsoever.  As opposed to, for example, useless little yippity dogs with an addiction to expensive imported dog food and questionable personal habits.  I tried to tell him this but he pretends to be immune to sarcasm. When it suits him.

I know it's hard to see the lizard in that photo.  He's right over past the edge of the sliding door part.  You can just make out the outline.  Just follow the twin brown lasers from that attentively focused little skull in the foreground.

I've mentioned that I was in the market for some decent plywood.  I didn't find any, so far.   I've started making some improvements and  modifications to the boat.  At least I hope they're improvements.  Making things like shelves for hanging lockers to turn them into storage compartments for spare parts.   I'll be attaching that strip of mahogany to the face edge of this plywood.  It'll look good when I'm done.   Really, it will. I'll show you a photo later after  it's installed.

We've been in somewhat of a plywood and fiberglass cycle lately.   And by the way, I wanted to thank a couple of people who read about me mixing up resin in an aluminum can, and recommended a cheap kitchen scale.  This week I bought a digital scale that weighs in grams and allows me to re-zero it to add components.   Thanks for the tip. I'll be trying that out shortly.

Some of the things we're doing are new, like the shelves.  Other jobs involve fixing or upgrading things left by the ghosts of previous boat owners.  Maybe poltergeist is a better word.   Like the shower tub.

One of the things we liked about this boat was the stand-up shower.  Not that common in boats of that era.  And this is the bottom section of that shower. Well-used.  I don't think I would want to hear anything this shower floor might   whisper in a confessional.  Nope.  Our goal at this point is to turn this into a surface that has never known anyone else. Oboy, another project.  I was so hoping another one would come along and help me fill my empty days.

This one started when La Gringa told me that she felt like she needed to wear socks in the shower. That's a pretty strong hint, wouldn't you say?  She's so subtle, sometimes. Anyhow, I picked right up on that one.  And it took me most of an afternoon to get that tub out of the boat. Whomever last installed it used several tubes of a product known as 3M 5200.  This is one of the toughest bedding compounds that I have ever had to work with.

I finally resorted to modifying a tool specifically to cut this loose from the boat. I used a Dremel grinder to put two sharp edges on a putty knife, and then ground a hook into the other side.  That sharpened putty blade had to be pushed down all the way through this glob of stuff to separate it from the shower stall wall.  And then I had to pull it out with a lot of friction, and move it over one inch and do it again.  And wiggle it to cut the strands between the stab wounds.  Each edge took me around an hour to free up, and it held on until the very last fraction of an inch. And the 5200 stayed with the piece I removed. That's about $20 worth just on that one edge alone.  

 
I liked this bedding compound well enough  before this experience, but after spending five hours to remove this tub I've become a true believer.  I wore blisters on my hand and lost skin lifting a little tub that was fastened with nothing else.  Amazingly good stuff. It's a shame I won't be able to use  more of it to re-install this tub.   It is just too hard to remove, and this stall sits over  one of our fresh water tanks.  I  could see that there had been no access or maintenance to this area of the hull since the day this shower was first installed.  Years ago. It  cleared up a small mystery to me, though.  I'd been wondering why the tank gauges for the fresh water system weren't working.  Then I got access to this tank and removed one of the sender units.

And there's really no mystery, now, as to why this gauge isn't working.  I'm pretty sure that a good cleaning alone wouldn't return this puppy to operational.

When La Gringa realized that this had been in the fresh water tank, she  promptly announced that we will be drinking only bottled water on this boat. Can't say that I would argue with that, either.   Of course this might change after I get all four tanks finally cleaned up and ugly little surprises like this gauge eradicated.  And part of preventing this kind of issue going forward will require me to come up with some way to seal that shower stall without hindering access to what's under it.  Oh boy.  A challenge.  Just what I needed.

Some days it feels like two steps forward and one stumble backwards into the trough.

I did discovered something kind of cool this week.  I needed to cut some circular pieces bigger than my biggest 4" hole saw.  So I decided to try one of the circular cutters that has an adjustable carbon blade on the end of an arm.   You know, the ones that scare you by unbalancing a drill press and making it shake like a washing machine full of shoes on spin cycle?

Anyhow, I found out that with this kind of cutter you can control the pressure and cut one continuous strip of plastic out of the Starboard.  No kidding.   That pile of white crepe looking stuff is one long piece of thin ribbon.

I have no idea what possible use it could be.  Would be easy to plait or braid.  I just thought it was cool.  A fifty foot shaving.  Waterproof upholstery stuffing?  I don't have a clue, but it must be good for something.  I also think that when I get down to talking about shop waste I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, blog-wise.  

And speaking of wise, I think I'd be wise to quit at this point.  Oh, wait, I've got two decent sunsets to show you from this week.  This one is unusual in this blog mainly because it was while we were driving home.  A different perspective, looking out over Flamingo Pond.

And of course it was my intention to end the post with that photo.  I thought it was a pretty decent little sunset myself.  Of course I took the photo.  As you might have guessed.

And as you also might have guessed La Gringa promptly whipped out an iPad of all things and took a better one from  South Side Marina.  Somehow, it just looks a little rosier from Bob's Bar.  It's a good place to  go calibrate your sunsets.

Works for me.

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

Sloop sliding away

Several people have written with some interests in the sloop that we talked about in the last post. We have a little more information on that, and a short photographic update. So even though we have not been undergoing anything especially 'newsworthy' this past week I am going to upload a brief post with what little content that we do have.

First, a photo of the Marine Patrol headed out on a morning some time back that I don't think I had posted here before:




I mentioned that because it is a little bit unusual. The typical scenario here is that the Marine Patrol leaves the marina just before dusk every evening, and returns an hour or so after dawn the next day. They patrol all night, mainly looking for Haitian sloops trying to make it to Provo with illegal immigrants. And they catch plenty of them. But in this case, one of their boats was headed out after dawn, not in as usual. This typically means that there is something going on. We have plans to add a VHF marine radio to the house here, so that we can keep better track of what's happening in the ocean around us. Should be good reception up on this hill.

Okay, back to the sloop. If you remember the previous post, we took our boat out to get some photos of this nice looking monohull sailboat that was hard aground on the reef about a mile out. We posted some photos like this:



We got several emails and some comments here on the blog asking specifically about this boat. (You guys DO read the comments at the end of the posts, don't you? It's our major source of feedback!) So, we were making plans to go try to get some photos from inside the reef, when we heard a rumor that it had already been hauled off the reef and taken to Turtle Cove Marina.

Immediately recognizing an excellent excuse for drinks and dinner at the Tiki Hut, we piled in the Land Rover and headed down to Turtle Cove. And we found that the rumors were indeed true. We were a little surprised when we got there, though. I guess I was expecting to see this sloop in a slip with some patches and floatation bags keeping it afloat, with maybe a pump running to keep up with the leaks...

That's not what we found.

This is what we found:




The boat looks to be pretty much sitting with the keel just touching the bottom with flotation bags keeping it upright. I would have had to get in the water to see for sure, as it was another overcast day making the visibility underwater not as good as usual.

Asking around, we did get some minimal information about the boat, but we have no idea whether it is valid or not. Without verification, we heard from a friend that the sloop had been rented, and that it had left Turtle Cove at night. We heard some other stuff, but I am going to limit what I put in print to this. But this is crazy enough, if true. Oh, not the rented boat part. I don't know where you would rent a boat like this, and we have yet to see the name or home port on the stern. There are certainly a lot of yacht charters around Florida, the Bahamas, and south of here in the deep Caribben. No, that part would not be unusual, but the crazy part of that story, to us, would be that someone would try to leave Turtle Cove in the dark.

In ideal conditions, with a full moon, plenty of people on the bow with spotlights, and a good GPS, I MIGHT try it in a familiar boat. Maybe. If I had a real good reason. Actually, it would have to be better than a real good reason. Would have to be a compelling reason, i.e. no choice in the matter.

Here's what this part of the world looks like on Google Earth:



Now that's the Turtle Cove Marina in the lower left of the image, and Sellar's Cut in the upper right. That cut is the way through the reef.

I took a photo of one of our charts for the area. And realizing that a lot of the people reading this blog are not familiar with nautical charts, I drew a series of arrows on the route that a boat of this size absolutely has to take to get out of Turtle Cove and through that cut:



Those numbers along the route, and elsewhere on the chart, are depth soundings in meters and decimeters. You can see that if you stay in the channel, you have six to eight feet of water through most of it. Those little upright red and green marks on the chart are the channel marking buoys. A boat would have the green ones on their starboard, or right side as they leave the marina headed out.

We have made that little passage several times in our smaller, power boats, and it's still tricky dodging the coral heads and reefs. If you stay between the buoys you are okay, but you get outside that channel things start getting bleak in a hurry. If there is any kind of a swell running, it breaks all along the reef there.

Of course we are curious as to what happened too, as any boaters would be. I went back to the photos I had taken while the sloop was still on the reef, and zoomed in as much as possible before it got too fuzzy to make things out. I was looking to see if I could spot any of the channel buoys in our photos. And I could. In this image, you can see what the buoys look like with the image zoomed in. I put little white arrows pointing out two of them:



And then I took the clearest of our photos that showed more of the area, and I looked carefully inside the reef, and marked every buoy I could see :



If you compare that to the chart, you can figure out where the buoys start getting spaced apart like that.

I realize you won't be able to see the buoys in that photo, so you'll just have to trust where I put the arrows. I might have missed a buoy or so, but the ones I marked are there. And, it looks to me like someone just made a left turn before they should have. Pure conjecture on my part. And sad, if true, because if that's the case they very nearly made it.

So now, here she sits, missing the mast, and with a huge part of the hull and bottom ripped off.



Makes me queasy to even look at it. Dooley the Dauntless Dog wonders if we really want a sailboat of our own. And yes, we still do.

We heard some other rumors concerning the damage, and various things, but since they involve liability and big sums of money, I am going to wait until I actually know what happened before spreading them further.

Otherwise, it's been a quiet week. We did spot some flamingos wading around the salina, and I actually made the effort to climb out of the Land Rover to take some photos this time. They were okay with me taking photos as long as I stayed back from the shoreline a bit:




But they showed a little more alertness and started conferring with each other when I got closer.




I should have spooked them and got photos of them flying. They are much more impressive looking in the air. Wading around, they just kind of remind me of South Florida lawn ornaments.

At home the DIY projects just keep coming. I don't even keep track of them all any more. It's plumbing here, windows there, corrosion and rust issues every where. Life in the tropics. And it doesn't help that we live on a windy hillside facing the ocean. Our previous blog post had some photos and explanation about me digging into a hand brake problem on the Land Rover, and in the process finding a bad universal joint. Those are both fixed. AND when I went to test it, I found that the rear brakes has seized up. More Hurricane Hannah leftovers. So now I know a bit about the wheel brakes, too.



And some of those among you who have read this blog in the past might recognize the aluminum drip pan catching the brake fluid in that photo. Yep, that is a gen-u-wine hand made tropical drip pan, fabricated by a disgruntled expat using the remains of a $ 2,000 sat dish that was remodelled senseless by Hurricane Hannah, and then further massaged and fine tuned by the gentle 150 mph breezes of Hurricane Ike. Grrr. But hey, it works. Still looking for ideas on what to do with the rest of that aluminum.

It's not all work, of course. We have been managing to get some kayaking in when it was too rough offshore. We just fling it onto the nearest vehicle that is actually driveable on that day:




And I have found that propelling these Hobie drives is, indeed, excellent leg rehab after knee surgery. Maybe Hobie should peddle these to the physical therapy centers... ('peddle them', nyuk nyuk nyuk...):



We took Dooley the Detrimental and checked out the Southside Marina and some canals, again. We saw the former Sail Provo catamaran "Phoenix" floating while undergoing ongoing repairs. Another Hurricane Hannah casualty that is making another comeback:



I tell you what, the guys down here can definitely fix boats. It's something they do really well, like fishing. Cars and trucks, well, that's a bit more subjective.

We drooled over someone's really, really cool new boat house under construction on the Discovery Bay canals:




And we saw the local version of a "Deadliest Catch" fishing boat tied up back there:





(If you are familiar with that television program, you can probably appreciate that the fishermen here don't have to worry about the ice build up on the pots like they do up in Alaska. Capt. Sig, eat your heart out.)

On a subsequent kayak outing we decided to give the sail another try. This is what the sail looks like rolled up around the mast and secured to the boat:




And this is what a traumatized dog looks like while being coddled an hour later, after learning the horribly loud noises a loose flapping sail makes a foot over your head while a loose length of line whips around you and a big guy with a shaved head screams in your face to "Get your furry shivering little @$$ off the $&^%@!! rudder cables!!"




We will put the sail aside for another, gentler day. Meanwhile, the dog rides up front from now on. By unanimous consent.

That's pretty much been it for this week. Weather has kept us ashore for a lot of it. And we are still finding legacies of the Hurricanes nine months ago. For example, when circuit breakers start tripping and pumps stop working, we now know it's a pretty safe bet that corrosion caused by being pressurewashed with seawater is bad for electrical doo dads:




Sometimes, even I call an expert. Especially in situations where I would prefer to avoid getting electrocuted. Actually the electricity doesn't scare me much, it's really basic. Simpler than brakes. It's more that these guys are just so much faster at finding circuit problems, and they have the tools, meters, connectors, and know-how to do it. Besides, I got brakes or something else to fix that won't zap me.

Oh, before I close out this post, I wanted to mention yesterday. I managed to get the VHF radio and antenna installed at the house, and needed to find a way to power it. I drove to the Do-It Center, Provo Building Supply, Krazy Bargains, Kishco, The Business Center, and finally NAPA before I found a little battery charger for motorcycles and snow(!?)mobiles that puts out 12 VDC. But that brief description really doesn't do this odyssey justice. For example, In Krazy Bargains I met a new salesman. I was trying to find something to get me from 110VAC to 12 VDC, and he was trying, desperately, to sell me a cordless screwdriver.

You see the dichotomy in this, I hope. There was no way I was going to power a VHF radio with a cordless screwdriver, even as outstanding of an opportunity and a bargain as I was repeatedly assured that it was. And there was no way this guy understood that what I was looking for had nothing to do with screwdrivers, although he did get the idea that there was no way he was going to sell me a $ 350 cordless screwdriver , even with the 15% Father's Day Discount thrown in to sweeten the deal.

I think that the only thing we probably had in common thoughout this passionate conversation was the single, broad concept of the loose term "battery charger". I wanted a battery charger. The screwdriver included one. This is about as far as we ever got in the same direction.

I finally gave up and got out of there before he started dragging out AAA NiCds.

And I had no better luck at the new Business Center. They had one that would run a cell phone at 9 volts...oh, and some considerate customers. At least I think it's considerate to tether your goat while shopping for something for your business.




(and a few seconds before I took this photo, the goat was definitely taking care of some business.)

So there's another brief look into the mundane part of everyday life for us here. Nothing exciting lately. But at least the weather is clearing up well enough for some more sunsets: